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

TARA COPP Associated Press KANSAS CITY NATIONAL SECURITY CAMPUS, Mo. — In an ultra-sterile room at a secure factory in Kansas City, U.S. government technicians refurbish the nation's nuclear warheads. The job is exacting: Each warhead has thousands of springs, gears and copper contacts that must work in conjunction to set off a nuclear explosion.

People are also reading… RELATED COVERAGE Business This is what it's like to maintain the US nuclear arsenal It's been almost eight decades since a nuclear weapon has been fired in war. But military leaders warn that such peace may not last. They say the U.S. has entered an uneasy era of global threats that includes a nuclear weapons buildup by China and Russia's repeat threats to use a nuclear bomb in Ukraine.

"They are going to have extreme difficulty meeting these deadlines," said Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, a non-partisan group focused on nuclear and conventional weapons control."And the costs are going to go up." President George H.W. Bush signed an order in the 1990s banning underground nuclear tests, and the U.S. has not detonated pits to update data on their degradation since. When the last tests were performed, they provided data on pits that were at most about two decades old. That generation of pits is now pushing past 50.

In the final production steps, a lone employee in the vault takes the almost-completed pit into both of her gloved hands and shapes it into its final form. Listen now and subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Spotify | RSS Feed | Omny Studio "The United States has not regularly manufactured plutonium pits since 1989," the Government Accountability Office noted in a January 2023 report, adding that the Energy Department's National Nuclear Security Administration has provided"limited assurance that it would be able to produce sufficient numbers of pits.

This factory would be busy even if an overhaul wasn't underway. All warheads have regular maintenance requirements. Their plastics age, and metal gears and wiring are weakened by the years and by exposure to radiation. OLD MISSILES, YOUNG TROOPSThe U.S. nuclear arsenal reveals its age each time troops fix a missile. That can occur as often as twice a week, but only if the equally old tools, or the truck carrying the tools, or the truck needed to transport the missile itself isn't also broken down, which is often.

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