Brandon Williams, the nominee to lead the National Nuclear Security Administration, said he would recommend reliance on “scientific information” rather than a restart of explosive testing.
Brandon Williams, President Trump’s pick to become the keeper of the nation’s nuclear arsenal, testified on Tuesday that he would not recommend that Mr. Trump restart explosive testing of the deadly weapons.
His statement, during a confirmation hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee, was unexpected. Other advisers to the administration had proposed that the president resume the test detonations for the sake of national security. The last such explosion in the United States was in 1992.
Mr. Trump nominated Mr. Williams, a former Navy officer and one-term congressman from upstate New York, in January to serve as administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration, which runs the nation’s atomic weapons complex. It is a semiautonomous agency under the umbrella of the Energy Department.
The most prominent ally of Mr. Trump to call for a testing restart is Robert C. O’Brien, who served as his national security adviser from 2019 to 2021. Last summer in Foreign Affairs magazine, he urged that Mr. Trump, if elected to a new term, resume the detonations, arguing that such a move would help the United States “maintain technical and numerical superiority to the combined Chinese and Russian nuclear stockpiles.”
On Tuesday during Mr. Williams’s confirmation hearing, Senator Jacky Rosen, Democrat of Nevada, argued pointedly against a restart, noting that her state hosted nearly 1,000 nuclear weapon tests, most of them underground, during the Cold War.
She characterized her state as “ground zero” for such tests and said that “millions of people and acres of land were contaminated by radiation” during the Cold War, adding that “we must not ever return” to such risky practices.