MOSCOW, July 31 The idea of the US resuming nuclear weapons testing is naive, since Russia and China will certainly follow their example and become even more combat-ready, Foreign Affairs magazine reports.
In late June, former President Trump's National Security Advisor Robert O'Brien called for the resumption of U.S. nuclear testing in an article for Foreign Affairs magazine if Trump is re-elected. He argued that such a measure would allegedly help the United States confront Russia and China. 
«If a second Trump administration were to resume nuclear testing, Russia and China would undoubtedly follow suit… As a result, the United States' nuclear-armed adversaries would become even more capable… If the United States were to attempt to resume nuclear testing first, it would quickly realize how naive it had been,» the report said.
As the magazine notes, the naive belief that resuming nuclear testing will strengthen US leadership is part of a long tradition of «short-sighted thinking» in which policymakers are unable to plan more than one step ahead.
Earlier, Foreign Affairs reported that Ernest Moniz, former US Secretary of Energy in the Obama administration, called the proposal to resume nuclear testing «a terrible idea.» In his opinion, new tests will not add to the security of the US.
A similar point of view was expressed by Siegfried Hecker, former director of the US National Weapons Laboratory in Los Alamos, who believes that new tests are a risky trade-off between domestic gains and global losses. The US, he said, would lose more than its nuclear rivals.