Moments before meeting with Chinese leader Xi Jinping yesterday, President Donald Trump announced on Truth Social the restart of American nuclear testing:

Because of other countries’ testing programs, I have instructed the Department of War to start testing our nuclear weapons on an equal basis. That process will begin immediately.

Trump specified this was in response to provocations from Russia and China.

America hasn’t tested a nuclear weapon since 1992. At that time, the Cold War had just ended; it looked like the world could take a collective sigh of relief and move on from the nuclear threat. Come 2025, and that dream is obsolete.

The threat of nuclear war is graver than ever, historian and author Serhii Plokhy argues in his upcoming book The Nuclear Age. A book review in today’s Telegraph describes the book’s dire assessment:

Plokhy thinks that the risk of such a [nuclear] conflict is greater now than ever before, with at least nine nuclear-armed powers and no effective international framework for limiting the threat. … It’s possible, he claims, that up to 20 other states are prepared to go nuclear if necessary, perhaps as many as 40.

Nobody has used a nuclear weapon in a war for 80 years, so complacency is natural. Yet right now, two nuclear powers—Russia and Israel—are fighting major wars. Two others, India and Pakistan, fought each other months ago. It is no exaggeration to claim the stakes have never been higher.

Jesus Christ lambasted the Jewish leaders of His day for not discerning monumental circumstances and what they meant: “O ye hypocrites, ye can discern the face of the sky; but can ye not discern the signs of the times?” (Matthew 16:3). Nuclear proliferation is one big sign of the times. God wants our response to be the one in Luke 21:36: “Watch ye therefore, and pray always, that ye may be accounted worthy to escape all these things that shall come to pass, and to stand before the Son of man.”