Inside the delicate art of maintaining America's aging nuclear weapons

and Russia’s repeat threats to use a nuclear bomb in Ukraine. They say that America’s aged weapons need to be replaced to ensure they work.

He cautioned that the sweeping upgrades could also have the undesired effect of pushing Russia and China to improve and expand their arsenals.The core of every nuclear warhead is a hollow, globe-shaped plutonium pit made by engineers at the, New Mexico, birthplace of the atom bomb. Many of the current pits in use come from the 1970s and 80s. That can be problematic, because there’s a lot about plutonium’s aging process that scientists still don’t understand.

That uncertainty has pushed the department to restart pit production. The U.S. no longer produces man-made plutonium. Instead, old plutonium is essentially refurbished into new pits. For about the last 10 years technicians have been practicing on “test” pits that aren’t ready for the stockpile. The U.S. is planning to fully recycle its first weapon-ready pit next year — and quickly increase annual production to as many as 80 new pits.

Completed pits are protected and detonated by an outer warhead layer that is built at the Energy Department’s Kansas City National Security Campus. Inside that three-story windowless factory, workers restore and test those warhead parts, work that asaid required “a great deal of precision manufacturing to exacting specifications.”

“There’s a huge modernization effort going on,” said Eric Wollerman, who manages the Kansas City complex for the Department of Energy through its federal contract with Honeywell. “​​If you’re going to update the delivery systems, you would also then update the warheads in the missiles and the bombs that are with them.”

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Inside the delicate art of maintaining America's aging nuclear weaponsThe U.S. will spend more than $750 billion over the next decade to overhaul nearly every part of its nuclear defenses and replace systems that in some cases are more than 50 years old.
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Inside the delicate art of maintaining America's aging nuclear weaponsThe U.S. will spend more than $750 billion over the next decade to overhaul nearly every part of its nuclear defenses and replace systems that in some cases are more than 50 years old.
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