The Dr. Strangelove’s are at it again. As if there wasn’t enough to worry about with the possibility of Donald Trump resuming the presidency of the U.S., some of his former allies are proposing that, should he be elected, the United States restart the underground testing of nuclear weapons. Robert C. O’Brien, a former national security adviser to Trump, is leading the charge.

According to O’Brien, testing would help the United States “maintain technical and numerical superiority to the combined Chinese and Russian nuclear stockpiles.” What the gentleman is suggesting sounds suspiciously like an arms race.

The U.S. gave up the explosive testing of nuclear arms in 1992 as the Cold War ended, and the other atomic powers followed. The U.S. now does its testing with supercomputers, the world’s most powerful X-ray machine and a laser system the size of a football stadium. O’Brien pooh-poohs such work as just computer modelling.

None of the nuclear powers are behaving themselves. The five major nuclear powers—the U.S., China, Russia, Britain and France—are signatories of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons and obligated under Article VI to pursue negotiations to end the nuclear arms race and achieve nuclear disarmament. Neither they nor the non-signatories—India, Israel, Pakistan and North Korea—are doing anything of the kind.

To the contrary, all are upgrading their arsenals. Furthermore, satellite images reveal that China, Russia and the U.S. are actively expanding their nuclear testing facilities. China and Russia have said little about construction at their sites, but the Americans insist that they are simply modernizing facilities for testing components and will not involve chain reactions. Furthermore, the Biden administration has proposed to Russia and China that they install radiation detection equipment near one another’s subcritical experiments to ensure an atomic chain reaction does not occur.

So would that change under a Trump administration? During his last term, his administration considered conducting an underground test in hopes of coercing Russia and China into arms control talks. And apparently there’s increasing interest from members of Congress, the military and U.S. weapons laboratories to resume full-scale explosive tests. Trump’s campaign managers, while not directly addressing his position on nuclear testing said O’Brien and others were “misguided, speaking prematurely, and may well be entirely wrong.” Given Trump’s impulsive nature, who knows what that “may” actually means.

Nuclear experts say that ending testing has actually given the U.S. an edge because it has limited other powers from making their arsenals even more diverse and deadly. Siegfried Hecker, a former director of the Los Alamos weapons lab in New Mexico, where the atomic bomb was first tested, states “China has much more to gain from resuming testing than we do.”

He goes on to say, “It would open the door for others to test and reignite an arms race to the peril of the entire world. We shouldn’t go there.” Amen to that, Siegfried.