Energy Secretary Says Nuclear Tests Won’t Involve Explosions

“I think the tests we’re talking about right now are systems tests,” Mr. Wright said in an interview on the Fox News show “The Sunday Briefing.” “These are not nuclear explosions. These are what we call noncritical explosions.”

Mr. Wright said Americans in places like Nevada, where the United States has a nuclear test site bigger than the state of Rhode Island, should not expect to see a mushroom cloud.

On Wednesday — minutes before he met with President Xi Jinping of China in South Korea — Mr. Trump said in a social media post that he was ordering the Pentagon to step up testing of nuclear weapons.

“We’ve halted it years — many years — ago,” Mr. Trump later told reporters, referring to the last U.S. explosive test of a nuclear weapon in 1992. “But with others doing testing, I think it is appropriate that we do also.”

But detonation tests are not common anymore: The only nation that has been regularly doing nuclear tests in the past quarter-century is North Korea, and its last explosive test was in September 2017.

China has rapidly expanded its nuclear stockpile and deploying missiles in new silos but it has not tested a nuclear weapon since 1996. Russia has not conducted a confirmed test since 1990, although it did recently declare that it had tested two exotic delivery vehicles for nuclear weapons: a nuclear-powered cruise missile and an undersea torpedo, called Poseidon, that could cross the Pacific to the West Coast of the United States. (The United States itself routinely tests unarmed missiles.)

In 1993, the Clinton administration announced plans for a treaty in which nations would forgo nuclear blasts. Although the 1996 test-ban treaty never officially went into force, it created a global norm of not testing the destructive bombs.

Washington is currently undergoing an effort to replace its warheads with updated versions. The overall cost of the sprawling program over three decades is estimated at $1.7 trillion.

Mr. Wright on Sunday said that testing was underway on the new nuclear systems.

“And again, these will be nonnuclear explosions,” Mr. Wright said. “These are just developing sophisticated systems so that our replacement nuclear weapons are even better than the ones they were before.”

He was placed on leave Friday pending the outcome of an investigation by the inspector general for the Department of Health and Human Services. On Sunday, he said that he believed the inquiry was a form of retaliation and that he had offered his resignation.

Dr. Tidmarsh also said that he did not want to work in a toxic environment that he attributed to Dr. Vinay Prasad, the agency’s chief medical and scientific officer, who also oversees vaccines and gene therapies. Dr. Prasad was ousted from the agency in July but brought back. A health department spokesman did not immediately respond to questions.

The tumult at the F.D.A. is just the latest in a series of ousters, firings and high-profile disagreements under the nation’s health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Several of his top staff members were pushed out or resigned in recent months.

The most high-profile so far was the firing of Susan Monarez after she had served only a month as director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. She told senators that she was fired after she had refused to sign off on recommendations from Mr. Kennedy’s vaccine advisory panel, which he has filled with mainly vaccine skeptics.

Dr. Tidmarsh said his concerns stemmed from the F.D.A.’s announcement in mid-October that it would approve a slate of drugs in record time. The program was meant to convey quick authorizations to drugs that reflected the administration’s priorities, which included addressing unmet medical needs or supporting lower pricing. Candidates for the program included a drug meant to help people break their addiction to vaping and another meant to help children who were born deaf.

“The effort was going to basically change the entire paradigm of the legal underpinnings of drug approvals that have for decades supported the actions on the safety and effectiveness of drugs,” Dr. Tidmarsh said. “There was insufficient legal support for what they wanted to do, and so I didn’t agree.”

Dr. Tidmarsh said the issue came to a head last week when officials met to make the agency’s first official approval decision. The process typically takes months, and involves extensive review and formal opportunities for dissent among agency scientists. But it was expected to be completed in a day.

“I didn’t know the legal underpinnings so all I did is say ‘I don’t think this is a decision,’” he said. “‘I see this as practice run,’ because no one had given anything about the process, the legality of it.”

After the meeting, he said he was told that he had been placed on leave because of an investigation into a LinkedIn post he wrote — and later deleted — about drug approval standards.

Dr. Tidmarsh’s post outlined his concerns about so-called surrogate endpoints, or measures the F.D.A. sometimes uses in drug approval decisions. One such endpoint would be to determine whether a cancer drug shrunk a tumor. However, evidence of a higher certainty for the effectiveness of a cancer drug would include extending a person’s survival or measurably improving quality of life.

In September, Mr. al-Shara visited New York and became the first Syrian president to address the United Nations General Assembly in 58 years.

The U.S. special envoy for Syria, Thomas J. Barrack Jr., said on Saturday that Mr. al-Shara will be in Washington to “hopefully” sign an agreement to join 88 other countries in the global coalition to defeat the Islamic State. He was speaking at the Manama Dialogue, an annual security conference in the Gulf nation of Bahrain.

Speaking at the same conference, Foreign Minister Asaad Hassan al-Shaibani of Syria confirmed on Sunday that Mr. al-Shara would visit the U.S. capital in November and said the reconstruction of Syria would be among the topics to be discussed, according to Syrian state media.

Mr. al-Shara led the rebel offensive almost a year ago that ended more than five decades of dictatorship under the Assad family. A former Islamist rebel once linked to Al Qaeda, Mr. al-Shara has since redefined himself as a statesman and expanded Syria’s foreign relations in a bid to help his country rebuild after a brutal and destructive civil war that lasted nearly 14 years.

In December, the U.S. government dropped the $10 million bounty on Mr. al-Shara’s head. In July, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced the revocation of the terrorist designation for Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the rebel group that Mr. al-Shara led before he overthrew President Bashar al-Assad.

Mr. al-Shara founded the Syrian branch of Al Qaeda before breaking ties with the terrorist group in 2016.

Now he and his government appear set to join the U.S. and dozens of other countries in fighting another terrorist group.

Though the Islamic State lost its last territorial foothold in Syria in 2019, it continues to have a presence in the country, especially in the vast desert region in the center, and carries out occasional attacks.

As Syria goes through a rocky political and security transition after the war, there are fears that the terrorist group could re-emerge and try to free thousands of its former fighters who are held in Syrian prisons guarded by U.S.-backed Syrian Kurdish forces.

Ismaeel Naar and Zolan Kanno-Youngs contributed reporting.

The latest attack raised the toll of the campaign to about 65 people killed, including a man who is presumed dead after a search by the Mexican Navy failed to find someone whom the United States described as surviving an attack on Oct. 27 in the eastern Pacific Ocean.

A wide range of specialists in laws governing the use of force have decried the killings as illegal because the military is not allowed to deliberately target civilians who pose no threat of imminent violence, even criminal suspects.

The administration says the strikes are lawful because President Trump determined that the United States is in a formal armed conflict with drug cartels. The Pentagon has about 10,000 U.S. troops ashore and afloat in the region, and another 5,000 are on their way aboard the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Gerald R. Ford and its accompanying warships.

Later on Saturday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth responded to the president’s post with: “Yes sir.” The Pentagon, he said, was “preparing for action.”

“The killing of innocent Christians in Nigeria — and anywhere — must end immediately,” he said, adding, “Either the Nigerian Government protects Christians, or we will kill the Islamic Terrorists who are committing these horrible atrocities.”

The announcements came a day after Mr. Trump said he would designate Nigeria a country of particular concern, a label given by the government for nations “engaged in severe violations of religious freedom.” He claimed on social media on Friday that “Christianity is facing an existential threat in Nigeria,” adding that thousands of Christians were facing targeted violence — a claim made by some evangelical groups and U.S. lawmakers.

Nigeria has denied the accusations, and its president, Bola Ahmed Tinubu, on Saturday defended the country’s protection of religious groups, before Mr. Trump’s threat.

The characterization of Nigeria “as religiously intolerant does not reflect our national reality, nor does it take into consideration the consistent and sincere efforts of the government to safeguard freedom of religion and beliefs for all Nigerians,” he said in a statement, responding to Mr. Trump’s announcement on Friday.

Mr. Trump’s threat of military action faces major challenges. The United States withdrew its forces last year from Niger, to Nigeria’s north, and airstrikes would most likely seek to target small groups scattered across a large area. Effective military action against these groups, analysts say, is likely to require assistance from the Nigerian military and government — which Mr. Trump also threatened to cut off from assistance.

Around 220 million people live in Nigeria, and parts of the country have long suffered violence at the hands of extremist groups, including Boko Haram, an Islamist terror group that has attacked Christians and Muslims it does not consider faithful enough.

But there are also secessionists in the south, criminal groups known for kidnappings in the northwest and other violent groups with their own motives.

Extremist violence in the country “affects large numbers of Christians and Muslims in several states across Nigeria,” the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom found in 2024.

Mr. Trump has already targeted American aid work around the world, working to dismantle the U.S. Agency for International Development, which has long been central to distributing foreign aid. Nigeria has been a major recipient of U.S. global health funding, relying on it for about 21 percent of its national health budget.

Ruth Maclean, Eric Schmitt and Helene Cooper contributed reporting.

A spokeswoman for the White House budget office did not respond to a request for comment. Late Friday, President Trump predicted that food stamp aid would “unfortunately be delayed” in November, and warned that the payments would not begin until he received “appropriate legal direction” from the court.

The legal saga began earlier that day, when Judge McConnell told the Trump administration that it must tap an existing, emergency reserve in order to pay for SNAP starting Saturday, when its typical budget was set to run out. Absent that intervention, the administration’s actions would have cut off assistance to the roughly one in eight Americans who are enrolled in the program.

But the thrust of the judge’s order raised logistical questions. The SNAP reserve totals about $5 billion, less than the roughly $8 billion needed to pay full SNAP benefits each month. Even if they used the money, officials at the Agriculture Department had also warned they might have to slash benefits by more than half, and that it could take weeks to pay them out because of technical constraints.

So, on Saturday, Judge McConnell clarified his ruling, citing the president’s request, and offered the Trump administration a timeline.

He said the government “must make” a partial payment by Wednesday, but he also encouraged federal officials to explore the use of a second source of money that might allow it to pay SNAP benefits more quickly and in full. He pointed specifically to a pot of funds at the Agriculture Department largely composed of tariff revenue, which the government had used earlier in the shutdown to preserve another federal nutrition program.

The judge said that the two funding sources, combined, could reduce any delay in delivering SNAP benefits, and alleviate “irreparable harm” facing families — and he ordered the administration to make those full payments by Monday.

It remained unclear how the Trump administration might proceed — or, potentially, if it might appeal the ruling. The Justice Department appeared to signal the mere possibility in a late Friday filing with the court, hinting that it was “considering whether any emergency relief is required.”

A spokesman for the agency did not respond to a request for comment.