Developing nuclear fusion and modernizing the US nuclear arsenal will require substantial collaboration with the private enterprise.

President Donald Trump’s announcement of the possibility of resumed nuclear testing highlights the importance of maintaining the readiness and credibility of the US nuclear deterrent. The world is more dangerous than it was in the president’s first term. Russia has threatened a nuclear first strike, and China is expanding its own nuclear arsenal at an alarming pace. 

To deter our adversaries and ensure the United States is not surpassed strategically, we must leverage the private sector to rapidly build advanced radiation testing facilities that mimic the conditions of a nuclear blast without having to detonate warheads themselves. Having such a capability would complement the administration’s agenda of nuclear modernization and provide a powerful card to play in the strategic competition with Beijing and Moscow.

Trump’s comments point to a strategic reckoning, shaped by two peer nuclear-capable competitors who have to be deterred differently. China has completed a triad, constructed expansive missile fields, unveiled its arsenal of hypersonic weapons, and invested in pulsed-power and radiation-effects complexes designed to accelerate weapons science. Russia has nearly completed modernizing every leg of its arsenal while experimenting with exotic nuclear-enabled delivery systems, like the Poseidon nuclear-propelled torpedo.

Deterrence in this unprecedented global nuclear environment requires that US weapons work in a crisis under the most degraded and disruptive wartime environments imaginable. Demonstrating that high-altitude EMPs or other disruptive nuclear options are incapable of significantly damaging US systems reduces an adversary’s incentives for seeking a first strike advantage. The credibility of the American nuclear triad and its arsenal of warheads rests on its perceived and actual resilience.

China and Russia are pursuing systems designed to blind, jam, and fracture American command-and-control. In any scenario involving limited nuclear use, adversaries may employ weapons specifically to disrupt US operations with the hope that a narrow attack would not trigger a full-scale nuclear exchange. That means conventional forces, space architectures, sensor networks, and broad communications systems must be able to function in radiation-stressed environments without inviting an attack.

If these systems are perceived as liable to fail, even a reliable nuclear arsenal will lack deterrent credibility. Ensuring American systems and platforms can operate through radiation and electromagnetic disruption is essential to credible deterrence.

The United States requires testing infrastructure that produces empirical data and enables rapid iteration necessary to continuously harden, adapt, and modernize its command and control and nuclear arsenal. Engineers and strategists need reliable data on how weapons platforms and associated systems respond in high-radiation environments. Demonstrating survivability increases deterrent power.

The national laboratories remain the intellectual and scientific heart of the nuclear enterprise. Yet the current lab infrastructure cannot meet the timelines demanded by geopolitical competition. Large-scale national capabilities take decades to deploy under today’s procurement processes. Meanwhile, adversaries compress timelines and expand their capacity at an alarming speed.

For three decades, the United States has relied on detailed records and research from previous above and below-ground nuclear tests, along with smaller experiments and powerful computer simulations to stay current. The Z Machine at Sandia and the National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore Lab can simulate crucial elements of nuclear environments and allow weapons designers to validate their resilience against the conditions most likely to challenge the arsenal.

The government is building the Combined Radiation Environments for Survivability Testing facility at Sandia, and Sandia lab director Laura McGill, in August 2025, projected that its cost now stands at roughly $2.2 billion. Construction is not expected to begin until FY 2029 or 2030. Completion will not come until FY 2034. The program took three years and more than 14,000 pages of documentation merely to clear conceptual design—the result: roughly 80 percent cost escalation and a six-year delay before concrete is poured.

Unfortunately, our adversaries do not have the same constraints. Beijing’s investment in pulsed-power and fusion-scale facilities at Mianyang (facilities that reproduce the same physical regimes relevant to weapons-effects work) proceeds in a lightning-fast manner compared to the sclerotic pace of the US bureaucracy.

In recent years, non-traditional defense companies have transformed autonomous systems, data analysis, and space launch. Yet no company has yet emerged to modernize the nuclear arsenal, the only weapons that are used every day of the year through their mere existence to deter our adversaries.

A hybrid public-private model, with the national laboratories retaining their scientific leadership and oversight role, could mobilize private capital, industrial engineering expertise, and rapid build cycles to deliver effects-testing infrastructure within commercially relevant timeframes. NASA’s Commercial Orbital Transportation Services model showed how government stewardship and private-sector execution can accelerate complex national missions without sacrificing oversight.

American innovation excels when the government defines strategic imperatives, and industry mobilizes to meet them. The Trump administration should partner with the private sector to build an advanced radiation testing facility to complement the nuclear modernization mission and compete with China and Russia.

This facility would deliver effects-testing infrastructure within commercially relevant timelines, which is a national security imperative. Such a facility would not only secure the empirical backbone of deterrence but also accelerate foundational breakthroughs in fusion energy, a parallel domain in which technological leadership will define long-term geopolitical and economic power.

The United States has the talent, the scientific base, and the industrial depth to lead this effort to secure our nuclear arsenal and ensure America leads the fusion energy revolution. The administration should partner with the private sector to move in Trump time.