In addition to trade, tariffs, Venezuela, Iran, and everything else, President Trump may have nuclear bombs on his mind when he meets with Chinese dictator Xi Jinping in late March and early April. (Assuming the meeting happens. The Chinese are being coy about it. Also, judging by rumors and signs of political tension in Beijing, tension that escalated after Xi’s takedown of General Zhang Youxia several weeks ago, Xi’s hold on power isn’t necessarily rock-solid.)
In 2026, U.S. officials are accusing the People’s Republic of China of conducting a secret underground nuclear detonation in 2020, U.S. knowledge of which is being revealed now apparently in order to increase U.S. leverage in international dealings about nukes and testing (NBC News, February 23, 2026).
A U.S. official focusing on arms control on Monday provided what he called new, declassified details of a Chinese underground nuclear test nearly six years ago and urged countries to press China and Russia to do more on nuclear disarmament.
Christopher Yeaw, assistant secretary of state for the bureau of arms control and nonproliferation, spoke to a U.N.-backed body after the last nuclear arms pact between the United States and Russia expired this month. That has ended limits on the arsenals of the world’s biggest nuclear powers and raised concerns about a possible new arms race.
Yeaw called for greater transparency from China and pointed to some shortcomings of the New START treaty, such as that it didn’t address Russia’s large arsenal of nonstrategic nuclear weapons—which counts up to 2,000 warheads.
Yeaw says that perhaps the greatest flaw of the treaty is that it “did not account for the unprecedented, deliberate, rapid and opaque nuclear weapons buildup by China.” The PRC is not open to restrictions on its buildup or any international monitoring of its testing activities and even denies that the June 22, 2020 detonation at its Lop Nur underground testing site in Xinjiang ever took place.
Yeaw is confident that a nuclear explosion occurred there on that date based on data provided by a monitoring station in Kazakhstan. “It was a probable explosion based upon comparisons between historic explosions and earthquakes. The seismic signals were indicative of a single fire explosion, not typical of mining explosions.”
A Chinese Ambassador attending the same conference, Jian Shen, says, “The U.S. accusation that China conducted a nuclear explosion test is completely unfounded and is merely a pretext for resuming its own nuclear testing. The U.S.’s practice of smearing other countries to evade…,” etc.
President Trump suggested last October that the U.S. would resume nuclear testing; but, reports NBC News, “Energy Secretary Chris Wright later said such tests would not include nuclear explosions.”
