China’s Foreign Ministry responded on Monday to President Trump’s assertion that Beijing has conducted clandestine nuclear weapons testing with a flat denial.
“China’s testing ’em too,” Mr. Trump told CBS News correspondent Norah O’Donnell in an interview for 60 Minutes. “You just don’t know about it.”
“Russia’s testing, and China’s testing, but they don’t talk about it. You know, we’re a open society. We’re different. We talk about it. We have to talk about it, because otherwise you people are going to report — they don’t have reporters that going to be writing about it. We do.”
Mr. Trump made the claim in the interview with O’Donnell that aired just days after the president’s own nominee to lead STRATCOM — the U.S. military command in charge of nuclear weapons — told lawmakers on Capitol Hill that neither China nor Russia were conducting nuclear explosive tests.
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North Korea is the only nation known to have conducted a nuclear detonation since the 1990s. China’s last known nuclear explosive test was in 1996.
“They don’t go and tell you about it,” continued Mr. Trump. “You know, as powerful as they are, this is a big world. You don’t necessarily know where they’re testing. They — they test way under- underground where people don’t know exactly what’s happening with the test.
You feel a little bit of a vibration. They test and we don’t test. We have to test. And Russia did make a little bit of a threat the other day when they said they were gonna do certain forms of a different level of testing. But Russia tests, China- and China does test, and we’re gonna test also.”
Asked about Mr. Trump’s claims on Monday, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning told reporters during a press briefing that as a “responsible nuclear-weapons state, China has always … upheld a self-defense nuclear strategy and abided by its commitment to suspend nuclear testing.”
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She said China hoped the U.S. would “take concrete actions to safeguard the international nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation regime and maintain global strategic balance and stability.”
What does Trump mean by U.S. resuming nuclear tests?
President Trump has not been clear about whether his stated plans to have the U.S. military test its nuclear arsenal include conducting actual atomic explosions, or just expanded testing of the weapons systems used to deliver nuclear warheads.
U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright, who was appointed by Mr. Trump, downplayed the notion on Sunday that the U.S. was about to start setting off nuclear explosions.
“I think the tests we’re talking about right now are system tests. These are not nuclear explosions,” Wright told Fox News. “These are what we call ‘non-critical explosions,’ so you’re testing all the other parts of a nuclear weapon to make sure they deliver the appropriate geometry and they set up the nuclear explosion.”
Senior Airman Daniel Brosam/U.S. Air Force/AP 
The U.S. is among almost 180 nations that have signed the international Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty, which bans all atomic test explosions.
Along with China and several other nuclear powers, however, the U.S. has never ratified the treaty, a situation that President Vladimir Putin highlighted two years ago when he decided to revoke Moscow’s ratification.
While Russia has stepped up its own tests of nuclear-capable weapons systems, it has not said it will resume nuclear detonations.
