NO to Nuclear Weapons Testing
In 1954, the United States detonated a hydrogen bomb at Bikini Atoll that created a blast hotter than the surface of the sun. Afterwards, fine, white ash rained down on the people of neighboring Rongelap Atoll. Children played in it, not knowing it would cause their skin to burn and their hair to fall out. Later, residents of Rongelap and nearby atolls developed cancer and struggled with pregnancies complicated by radiation-related birth defects.
Between 1946 and 1958, the United States conducted 67 nuclear tests in the Marshall Islands. Entire communities were uprooted; places that had been home for generations vanished under mushroom clouds. Today, Marshallese in the Pacific and in the United States as well as the American service members who helped carry out and clean up after the tests carry the scars—social, political, and physical—of wounds that have never fully healed.
And so I urge the President not to repeat one of our country’s worst mistakes.
For most Americans, this history remains distant. Every March 1 in the Marshall Islands, however, on Remembrance Day, Marshallese people recall what America has forgotten. Still, the consequences stretch far beyond Marshallese atolls. Radioactive fallout drifted across the globe and the legacies of secrecy, neglect, and broken promises continue, including in the US: one of the Trump Administration’s first actions in January of this year was to suspend the review boards responsible for evaluating the medical claims of over 700,000 former US government employees who worked during the Cold War in US nuclear facilities.
The President’s recent calls to resume testing threaten to drag us back into a dangerous era—a time when spectacle trumped responsibility and the supposed needs of national security justified incalculable human and environmental costs. There is no scientific or strategic need to resume testing.
Renewed US nuclear testing in 2025 would send our country backward—damaging alliances, undermining nonproliferation treaties, inviting an arms race, and above all dishonoring the lessons written into the experiences and sacrifices of those impacted by our past actions.
Some will argue that testing is necessary for deterrence or modernization, but the science and the Pentagon’s own experts tell us that simulation, stewardship, and other practices have long rendered live testing unnecessary.
To test again would be to say to the Marshallese, our allies, and our own citizens, including the “downwinders” of past tests, that their suffering was for nothing and that their lives remain subordinate to the logic of Cold War power.
Resuming nuclear testing would betray these responsibilities, increase global instability, and further tarnish American leadership on nuclear nonproliferation. There is no need, and there is no excuse.
Energy Secretary Chris Wright’s explanation on Fox News on Sunday that the US would not test nuclear weapons and would instead focus on “the other parts of nuclear weapons”—despite President Trump’s order on Thursday that the US “start testing nuclear weapons”—is no reason to exhale.
We currently have a system where the Commander in Chief has sole control over the US nuclear arsenal—yes, President Trump can decide to launch a nuclear weapon without any approval from anyone else—so no other Administration official’s statement can give us the assurance we need.
I am running for Congress because I believe we must be better stewards of our history, which includes awareness of the human and environmental costs of nuclear “credibility.” We should not—and must not—resume nuclear testing. Real leadership means reducing global nuclear dangers through domestic policy and diplomacy, not escalating them for political bravado. If we mean to lead in a world shadowed by nuclear threats, let it be by example. We owe it to the Marshallese, to our citizens, and to future generations.
-Carleigh
