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US President Donald Trump (sixth from left) and Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi (seventh from left) arrive at the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier USS George Washington (CVN-73) in Yokosuka City, Kanagawa Prefecture, Japan, on October 28, 2025.
Bombs away: Are we entering a new nuclear arms race?
Last Thursday, US President Donald Trump announced that Washington will restart nuclear-weapons testing, raising fears that it could end a 33-year moratorium on nuclear-warhead testing.
“Because of other countries (sic) testing programs,” Trump said, “I have instructed the Department of War to start testing our Nuclear Weapons on an equal basis. That process will begin immediately.”
What is nuclear testing? Nuclear powers – including the US, Russia, and others – test missiles and other delivery systems regularly. Russia has recently been developing new cruise missiles and underwater drones that are nuclear capable. However, no nation other than North Korea has been confirmed to test a nuclear warhead in over three decades. In an interview aired Sunday on CBS, Trump claimed, “Russia’s testing, and China’s testing, but they don’t talk about it.” Both countries deny the allegation. International agreements from the 1960s ban nuclear testing.
What tests will the US actually conduct? On Sunday, Energy Secretary Chris Wright told Fox News, “I think the tests we’re talking about right now are systems tests... These are not nuclear explosions. These are what we call noncritical explosions.”
Why announce testing now? Trump made the announcement just prior to meeting Chinese President Xi Jinping in South Korea last Thursday. In the past five years, Beijing has doubled its nuclear arsenal to 600 weapons, and the Pentagon estimates that China will have more than 1,000 by 2030. According to the Federation of American Scientists, the US and Russia are still the top two nuclear powers with 5177 and 5459 respectively.
Vice President JD Vance said all three countries have a large nuclear arsenal and that “sometimes you’ve got to test it to make sure it’s functioning and working properly.”
The move comes amidst a disintegrating arms control regime. In the 1970s and 80s the US and the USSR sought to limit the growth of their nuclear arsenals through the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) I and II and the INF treaty, which reduced total warhead count and eliminated the development of ground-launched nuclear missiles with ranges of 500 to 5,500 kilometers. In the 1990s and 2000s, the US and Russia concluded three Strategic Arms Reduction Treaties (START) Treaties, ultimately capping the number of deployed strategic warheads at 1,550 each.
But in recent years arms control has been unravelling. In 2019, the US withdrew from a treaty that outlawed intermediate range nuclear missiles, because it said Russia had been violating the pact. Four years later, Moscow suspended its participation in START II and resumed testing nuclear weapons delivery systems.
What risks lie ahead? Trump wants to conduct as many tests as Russia and China “within five years,” which could spur both nations to increase their testing to remain competitive. Daryl Kimball, director of the Arms Control Association, warned that Trump's announcement could “trigger a chain reaction of nuclear testing by U.S. adversaries, and blow apart the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.”
Ending the “testing taboo” could also encourage smaller nuclear nations like North Korea, Pakistan and India, and aspiring nuclear powers like Iran, to engage in testing as well.
And even if testing is confined to new delivery systems alone, the race to develop new, stealthier and more destructive nuclear missiles, rockets, and drones is likely to accelerate.
All of this has scientists considering advancing the hands of the so-called “doomsday clock.” Currently, they sit at 89 seconds to midnight – the closest they have ever been.
US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping talk as they leave after a bilateral meeting at Gimhae International Airport, on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit, in Busan, South Korea, on October 30, 2025.
The gaps in the Trump-Xi trade truce
After months of escalating tensions, US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping reached a trade truce at their meeting in South Korea on Thursday.
What was agreed? The two sides each delayed imposing further tariffs, with Trump reducing the overall US tariff rate on China to 45%. China agreed to drop its rare earth export ban, while the US may allow China to purchase advanced semiconductors again. That’s not all: the two countries suspended port fees, China pledged to started buying American soybeans again, good news for American soy farmers who have lost market share to Brazil.
What didn’t the meeting resolve? There was no update on terms for the sale of TikTok to American buyers, and the two sides also didn’t discuss Chinese access to the most powerful US-made microchips. More broadly, Trump and Xi didn’t appear to come to any resolution on Washington’s longer-term issues, such as the US trade deficit with China, concerns about Chinese theft of US intellectual property, or the defense of Taiwan – which the US still supports against Beijing’s claims of sovereignty.
Nuclear tensions start to simmer. The US commander-in-chief announced on Thursday that he had ordered the Pentagon to start testing nuclear weapons “on an equal basis” with Russia and China. The US hasn’t tested a nuke since 1992, and is party to a 1996 treaty with Moscow and Beijing that bars such actions. Testing is unlikely to start soon, in part because of safety concerns but also because most National Nuclear Security Administration are furloughed right now due to the government shutdown.
What about Ukraine? Trump said that Ukraine “came up very strongly” during the meeting with Xi, but did not elaborate, and gave no indication that the two men had discussed the impact of recent US sanctions on Russia’s two largest oil producers. Chinese refineries – the largest buyers of Russian crude – have reportedly begun to explore alternative sources (read more here).
Scoring the showdown: who won?? “Nobody has the upper hand,” said Eurasia Group’s Practice Head for China David Meale. “What both sides have instead is an understanding that each is capable of triggering the other’s intolerable pain points – and therefore a path must be struck between them.”
But, Meale added, “China must feel more satisfied than the US about where it is compared to the beginning of 2025,” in part because Beijing has stood up to Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs and identified a “potent leverage tool through rare earths export controls.”
Overall assessment of the meeting? Trump couldn’t have been more pleased, saying, “On a scale of 1 to 10, the meeting with Xi was 12.”
Meale was a little more equivocal.
“I would put it at a seven out of 10.”
India vs. Pakistan: Rising tensions in South Asia
Could tensions between India and Pakistan boil back over into military conflict? Last May, India launched a wave of missile attacks into Pakistan and Pakistan-administered Kashmir, claiming it was targeting terrorist infrastructure. After four days of dangerous escalation, both sides accepted a ceasefire, putting an end to the most serious military crisis in decades between the two rival nuclear states. On GZERO World, former Pakistani Foreign Minister Hina Khar joins Ian Bremmer to discuss Pakistan’s perspective and where the conflict stands now.
Khar argues India didn’t provide credible evidence to justify the attacks and that Pakistan’s response challenged the narrative of India’s conventional military superiority. She sees China as a stabilizing force in the region and says it’s important for Pakistan to maintain broader strategic relationships within southeast Asia and the West, including the United States. Though the conflict has cooled, nerves are still on edge in Delhi and Islamabad. Now, more than ever, Khar says, it’s crucial for Pakistan to continue to strengthen its military capabilities, including nuclear deterrence, to defend its sovereignty.
“The India-Pakistan region is home to one fifth of humanity, and to put them at stake because of political engineering happening in your own country is very callous,” Khar says, “The moment one nuclear state decides to attack another, you do not know how quickly you go up the escalation ladder.”
GZERO World with Ian Bremmer, the award-winning weekly global affairs series, airs nationwide on US public television stations (check local listings).
New digital episodes of GZERO World are released every Monday on YouTube.Don't miss an episode: subscribe to GZERO's YouTube channel and turn on notifications (🔔). GZERO World with Ian Bremmer airs on US public television weekly - check local listings.
Pakistan needs to stand up to India, says former Foreign Minister Hina Khar
After nearly eight decades of on-again-off-again conflict, India and Pakistan neared the brink of all-out war last spring. The intense, four-day conflict was an unsettling reminder of the dangers of military escalation between two nuclear-armed adversaries. Though the ceasefire was reached and both sides claimed victory, Delhi and Islamabad are still on edge and tensions remain high. On the GZERO World Podcast, former Pakistani Foreign Minister Hina Khar joins Ian Bremmer to discuss Pakistan’s response to India’s strikes, which she believes were unjustified, and why Pakistan needs to defend itself from further aggression.
One fifth of the world’s population lives on the Indian subcontinent, and Khar says putting them at stake because of a political conflict is dangerous because “you do not know how quickly you can go up the escalation ladder.” Bremmer and Khar also discuss the US role in mediating the conflict with India, Pakistan’s domestic and economic challenges, its strategic partnership with China, and the dangers for global security if the world abandons a rules-based international order.
“As someone who was representing this country as foreign minister, I used to wonder, why were we reduced to eating grass to become a nuclear power?” Khar says, “And now, that is the only thing providing deterrence and security against a country which feels it can attack us anytime, any day.”
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Why India and Pakistan can't get along
When–and why–did India and Pakistan become bitter rivals? The Indian subcontinent is home to some 1.5 billion people who share deep cultural, linguistic and historical ties, but for nearly eight decades, the Indian-Pakistan relationship has been marked by tension, violence, and sometimes all-out war. On Ian Explains, Ian Bremmer breaks down the complicated history of the India-Pakistan conflict to understand why tensions are once again rising after a military clash between the two countries in May 2025.
There are many complex reasons that India and Pakistan have become such bitter rivals. Bremmer unpacks four key issues: the partition after nearly two-centuries of British colonial rule, contested claims over the Kashmir region, the development of nuclear weapons, and leaders stoking nationalist and religious tensions for political gain. A terrorist attack in Kashmir last spring led to an exchange of military strikes and showed the world just how dangerous escalation between two nuclear powers can be. Watch Ian Explains to understand the roots of the conflict and why decades of tensions and war probably won’t be resolved any time soon.
GZERO World with Ian Bremmer, the award-winning weekly global affairs series, airs nationwide on US public television stations (check local listings).
New digital episodes of GZERO World are released every Monday on YouTube. Don't miss an episode: subscribe to GZERO's YouTube channel and turn on notifications (🔔). GZERO World with Ian Bremmer airs on US public television weekly - check local listings.
Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei speaks during a meeting with Judiciary Officials in Tehran, Iran, on July 16, 2025.
Iran’s next act?
– By Willis Sparks
Iran’s government is in big trouble.
Twelve days of war earlier this summer demonstrated that Iran has little capacity to defend its cities or its nuclear facilities from Israeli and US strikes.
Meanwhile, its most potent proxies — Hamas, Hezbollah, and Yemen’s Houthi rebels — have taken bad beatings over the past year. Former Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, Iran’s principal state ally in the Middle East, now lives in Moscow rather than Damascus.
And within Iran, no one knows exactly what will happen when the ailing 86-year-old supreme leader makes his final exit. Everyone in a position of power in Iran must wonder how a succession, which the country hasn’t experienced in 36 years, will affect his influence, power, and access to wealth. And simmering beneath all of that, the risk of civil unrest inside Iran is always present – it can be triggered by a single incident on the street or inside a police station.
But the regime still has a not-so-secret weapon, and it’s precisely the one that Israel and the United States attacked in June.
Despite those airstrikes, Iran still appears to have a nuclear program, though how much of one remains a matter of dispute. Just after the attacks, President Donald Trump called the US strikes “a spectacular military success” that had “completely and totally obliterated” Iran’s most important enrichment facilities. A US intelligence report published on July 17 asserted that 12 bunker-busting bombs dropped from US B-2 bombers had severely degraded Iran’s enrichment facility at Fordo and inflicted significant damage on other sites.
But other damage assessments have raised doubts about these conclusions. The Center for Strategic and International Studies, a think tank, said at the beginning of July that it was “highly speculative” to estimate Iran’s new breakout time (the time needed to produce enough highly enriched uranium to make one nuclear weapon), and assessed that, while “Iran has lost centrifuges at the three facilities that suffered damage, it also likely has an undeclared stockpile of centrifuges.”
The bottom-line: Iran still has options. If its leaders want to try for a bomb, they almost certainly can. And Iran’s wounded and humiliated regime now has every reason to race to build the only weapon that can guarantee its security.
If they do, that could force a big decision on Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu: whether to take down the Iranian government itself. In the closing hours of the operation in June, Israeli fighter jets struck the headquarters of the paramilitary militia of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, killing hundreds of its members. That’s a direct attack on the core of the regime — and a reminder of what’s possible if Iran’s leaders try to rebuild the nuclear program.
Whether the next Iran-related emergency involves an even more destructive and direct US-Israeli attack on Iran, or a surge of destabilizing unrest inside the country, or both, we may remember June’s “12-day war” as the opening act of a much more consequential drama.
But one thing is nearly certain: the catastrophic events of the past two years have likely made a nuclear weapons program more valuable for Iran’s leaders, not less.
US President Donald Trump and Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba participate in a news conference at the White House in Washington, D.C., USA, on February 7, 2025.
Enemies to allies: The US and Japan 80 years after Hiroshima
Eighty years ago this week, the US dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing more than 200,000 people, mostly civilians. It was the first and, so far, only use of nuclear weapons in war.
In Japan, remembrance ceremonies honor the victims and amplify the calls for peace from the hibakusha, the Japanese term for the 100,000 remaining survivors of the attacks.
In the US, by contrast, there is no official federal government commemoration. Former President Barack Obama remains the only sitting US leader to visit the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Ceremony. President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance declined invitations to attend this year’s ceremony. The US public has mixed views on the bombings – 35% of Americans believe they were justified in order to bring a swift end to the Pacific phase of World War II, 31% say they were not, and the rest are unsure.
But after the war, the US and Japan moved, slowly and often uneasily, towards one of the strongest bilateral partnerships in the world. After Japan’s surrender in 1945, the US occupied the country, rewriting its constitution, demilitarizing its forces, and rebuilding its economy to keep it from falling under Soviet influence. The Cold War transformed former enemies into partners: Japan hosted US military bases, while Washington extended security guarantees under the 1951 US-Japan Security Treaty.
In recent years, that alliance has taken on renewed urgency. Faced with the increasing assertiveness of its longtime regional rival China, Tokyo has begun to edge away from strict pacifism toward what Eurasia Group’s Japan Director David Boling calls “a more realistic approach to defense.” In 2022, Japan announced a $287.1 billion re-militarization strategy over five years, doubling its defence budget to about 2% of GDP. In 2025, it passed a record-breaking $55 billion defense budget, and aims to eventually double its annual military spending, which would make it the world’s third biggest military spender after the United States and China.
For the US, Japan is not just a crucial counterweight to Beijing’s military ambitions, says Boling, it is an “unsinkable aircraft carrier” in the Pacific and a trusted diplomatic bridge to Southeast Asia, where many countries are wary of being forced to choose sides and are more receptive to messaging from Tokyo than Washington.
And yet there are also fresh tensions in the relationship, as Trump has questioned the value of a US-Japan alliance in which the US is the overwhelming military power, and has targeted Japan with higher tariffs in order to rebalance their trade relationship.
Still, as Boling points out, divergences of opinion are only likely to go so far while both countries share a common concern:
“If the United States is going to have a successful approach to China on national security and on trade,” he says, “it needs Japan in its corner.”
China's stockpiling nukes. Should we be worried?
China is growing its stockpile of nuclear weapons faster than any country in the world and very soon, its total number of warheads will match that of the US and Russia. How will that change the global balance of power? On GZERO World, Admiral James Stavridis, former Supreme Allied Commander of NATO, joins Ian Bremmer for a sober assessment of the current nuclear threat, and warns that China’s nuclear ambitions are his top concern.
The Chinese have dramatically ramped up their strategic nuclear weapons program, with a stated goal of 1,500 deployable nuclear warheads, likely within the next five years. The US will soon be facing a second nuclear superpower for the first time, but Stavridis says the US still has time to modernize, shore up alliances, and avoid losing the nuclear race.
“China is going from a pretty modest inventory of around 300 to a stated goal of 1,500 deployable nuclear warheads,” Stavridis says, “There is a whole new structure we have never encountered. We’ve never had a three-handed triangle of major nuclear powers.”
GZERO World with Ian Bremmer, the award-winning weekly global affairs series, airs nationwide on US public television stations (check local listings).
New digital episodes of GZERO World are released every Monday on YouTube. Don't miss an episode: subscribe to GZERO's YouTube channel and turn on notifications (🔔).