42: Nuclear Testing and Proliferation Concerns Guest: Henry Sokolski Henry Sokolski discusses President Trump's comments on resuming nuclear testing, suggesting Trump may favor a full yield test, last conducted in 1992, over current subcritical testing protoc

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John Batchelor

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🗓️ 1 November 2025

⏱️ 5 minutes

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Summary

Nuclear Testing and Proliferation Concerns Guest: Henry Sokolski Henry Sokolski discusses President Trump's comments on resuming nuclear testing, suggesting Trump may favor a full yield test, last conducted in 1992, over current subcritical testing protocols. The United States maintains a formal moratorium on explosive nuclear testing. Sokolski also addresses proliferation risks associated with the United States potentially helping South Korea build nuclear-powered submarines and enabling South Korea to manufacture its own nuclear fuel. Such action would place Korea weeks away from building nuclear weapons, a development likely to provoke a strong response from Japan and destabilize the region

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0:00.0	I'm John Batchel with my colleague Henry Sikolsky of the Nonpter Liberation Policy Education Center.
0:10.2	More questions to be answered in future or not.
0:13.8	Henry, my understanding is the president spoke with the new president of South Korea about nuclear-powered submarines. Is this a reproduction of the
0:24.0	August Agreement, something new? And what are that? There's something to do with building a
0:28.2	nuclear-powered submarine in America by Korea? Yes. South Korea has long wanted to get nuclear weapons and has been caught by us,
0:41.4	cheating on their pledges to us, cheating on their NPT pledges,
0:46.1	not to move in the direction of having covert nuclear activities that are related to nuclear weapons.
0:55.0	More recently, they have been very keen about changing our nuclear cooperative agreement that we struck with them in, I believe it was 2015,
1:05.8	which does not green light them to enrich uranium or recycle plutonium having to do with American facilities or materials.
1:19.1	They want to change that, and they have constantly argued in favor of that.
1:23.0	They recently had their president visit the White House and make exactly that demand.
1:28.6	The president said, I don't know, let's study it.
1:32.7	Then he took this trip where he said, well, you want nuclear submarines.
1:39.5	Come build them.
1:40.6	You own a shipyard in Philadelphia.
1:42.6	You can build them there.
1:44.3	And he offered to fuel them with American enriched uranium.
1:49.5	The question left is, will the study that we've embarked on with them to consider revising the Atomic Energy Act, but not the act, the atomic, not the nuclear cooperative
2:05.1	agreement, will that change the term so that they start enriching uranium and recycling
2:13.8	plutonium?
2:14.6	If they do, you can count on them getting within weeks of getting a bomb
2:19.0	just like Iran. This will set off an enormous reaction literally and figuratively in Japan.
	...

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