If the United States restarts nuclear weapons testing, as President Donald Trump recently announced, the consequences would not only encourage proliferation but also bring devastating health impacts, health workers’ groups have warned.

“As physicians and health professionals, we condemn any and all nuclear weapons testing and destabilizing posturing,” the network International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW) stated last week. “The only result of these tests would be immense human and environmental harm, poisoning generations to come and increasing the risk of nuclear escalation today.”

Sophie Bolt of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) added that “recommencing atmospheric or underground testing would release huge levels of radioactive fallout into the atmosphere and land, threatening us all.”

Burns, cancer, vomiting and hemorrhaging

“The health effects of ionizing radiation are immediate and chronic,” the British organization Medact noted earlier in October. “People suffer hair loss and skin burns soon after exposure. The acute radiation syndrome following high doses is known to cause organ failure and brain edema.” The links between radiation and disease are well established, with increased rates of leukemia, breast, colon, lung, and thyroid cancers, infertility, and hemorrhaging among those affected.

These outcomes are most often associated with images of nuclear attacks such as the US bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, yet nuclear testing has left its own long legacy of illness. Tests conducted in the Marshall Islands – again by the US – caused “vomiting, damage to the mucosal lining of the gastrointestinal tract, and radiation burns on the skin,” according to a 2023 IPPNW Germany and International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons report. Women and children suffered disproportionate harm, including higher rates of miscarriage and some types of cancer.

Read more: 80 years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki: “Human beings and nuclear weapons cannot coexist”

Nuclear testing was also consistently carried out with racist and imperialist bias, as IPPNW Co-President Carlos Umaña described during a recent discussion hosted by the League Against Imperialism Centennial Campaign. Testing sites were chosen for their distance from highly urbanized areas and centers of power, which often meant they overlapped with indigenous and colonized lands. Even when they took place within the borders of colonial powers, like in Nevada, the experiments harmed communities perceived as marginal – in this case, farmers and rural populations. Despite knowing that fallout would contaminate the milk supply in parts of the country, authorities failed to inform producers and the public at the time. “Milk producers were given no information to help protect the country’s milk supply,” the IPPNW report states.

Every stage of building nuclear weapons is deadly

Although follow-up statements on Trump’s announcement have suggested that testing might be confined to underground operations, at least for now, experts warn that this offers little reassurance. Every stage of nuclear weapons production, testing, and maintenance comes with very tangible risks. “The mining and processing of uranium that provides the fuel for nuclear weapons has serious and long-lasting health consequences for workers, local communities and their environment,” IPPNW noted almost a decade ago. “Workers at nuclear weapons facilities have sustained severe and debilitating damage to their health as a result of occupational exposure to fissile materials and toxic chemicals involved in the production and maintenance of nuclear weapons.”

Not only has underground testing resulted in millions of cases of cancer and other chronic illnesses, it has caused widespread environmental devastation as well. Considering that a US resumption of testing would certainly trigger other nuclear-armed states to follow, Trump’s announcement has further amplified fears of scenarios of nuclear winter and nuclear famine. These concerns can only grow further in the context of the ongoing arms race in Europe, also encouraged by the current US administration.

Watch: Imperialist attacks make nuclear proliferation a necessity

In response, health workers argue that this is the moment for broad mobilization against both nuclear proliferation and militarization in general. As Umaña emphasized during the discussion, the goal of such mobilization cannot be limited to upholding existing treaties on non-proliferation: it must push for the total abolition of nuclear weapons.

“As physicians, we understand that we must prevent what we cannot cure,” IPPNW concluded in its 2025 World Congress Nagasaki Declaration. “And nuclear war is a catastrophe from which there will be no recovery.”

People’s Health Dispatch is a fortnightly bulletin published by the People’s Health Movement and Peoples Dispatch*. For more articles and to subscribe to People’s Health Dispatch, click* here.

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