On Nov. 19, 2025, Christopher Yeaw, nominated to be Assistant Secretary of State for Arms Control, Nonproliferation, and Stability, speaks at his confirmation hearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
[People News] A senior U.S. official on Tuesday (Feb. 17) disclosed new details regarding the Chinese Communist Party’s suspected underground nuclear test in 2020. Previously, U.S. officials had alleged that the CCP conducted a nuclear explosive test in June 2020, but China’s Foreign Ministry denied the claim, saying it had no factual basis.
According to Voice of America, Christopher Yeaw, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Arms Control and Nonproliferation, said in a speech at the Washington think tank Hudson Institute that on June 22, 2020, a remote seismic monitoring station in Kazakhstan detected a suspected explosive seismic signal near China’s Lop Nur nuclear test site in Xinjiang.
Yeaw stated that the seismic activity registered a magnitude of 2.75 and was about 720 kilometers from the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO) monitoring network’s PS23 station. He said that based on subsequent data analysis, “it could not have been anything else—it could only have been an explosion, an explosion.”
Yeaw holds a Ph.D. in nuclear engineering and previously served as an intelligence analyst. He added that the explosion data were inconsistent with mine blasting or natural earthquakes. “It … matches the characteristics of a nuclear explosive test.”
Yeaw also mentioned that the CCP may have used so-called “decoupling” technology—detonating a device inside a large underground cavity to weaken the seismic signal, thereby concealing the explosive yield.
However, the CTBTO said its monitoring station recorded two weak seismic events 12 seconds apart, but the signal strength was far below the threshold typically associated with nuclear explosions exceeding 500 tons of TNT equivalent. The organization stated that based on the currently available data, it could not determine the nature of the event.
On Feb. 5, U.S. Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security Thomas G. DiNanno said at the UN Conference on Disarmament in Geneva that the CCP had conducted a nuclear test in June 2020, violating the ban on nuclear tests that produce explosive yield. China’s Foreign Ministry subsequently denied the U.S. allegation, saying it had no factual basis.
The CCP’s last publicly acknowledged nuclear test was in 1996. Like the United States, China has signed the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT) but has not ratified it. The treaty has not formally entered into force, though major nuclear powers generally observe a voluntary moratorium on nuclear testing.
The administration of President Donald Trump is pushing for China to join future strategic arms limitation talks with the United States and Russia. The New START treaty between the U.S. and Russia expired earlier this month.
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio wrote in an article on Feb. 6 that the United States seeks to reach a trilateral arms control agreement with Russia and China. He noted that since the New START treaty took effect, the CCP has rapidly expanded its nuclear arsenal, “rendering the old arms control model based on U.S.-Russia bilateral agreements obsolete.”
The top U.S. diplomat wrote, “First, arms control is no longer a bilateral issue between the United States and Russia. As the president has made clear, other nations also have a responsibility to help ensure strategic stability, and China’s responsibility is paramount.”
The CCP has refused to join trilateral arms control negotiations, arguing that its nuclear arsenal is far smaller than those of the U.S. and Russia. However, the Pentagon estimates that China currently has more than 600 deployable nuclear warheads and may increase that number to over 1,000 by 2030.
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