Nuclear security

Why America must resume nuclear testing

...In short, America must break out of our nuclear freeze and bring science back into the forefront of our nuclear enterprise. The Department of Energy’s three nuclear weapons labs must resume underground nuclear testing in the science of nuclear weapons design.

The Department of Defense has a much tougher challenge. The DOD had only one nuclear weapons lab, the Defense Nuclear Agency, which was shut down in 1997. The DNA had led the DOD into a deep understanding of the military science of nuclear weapons effects.

The DNA must be re-created. It must resume underground nuclear testing in nuclear weapon effects, and — further — it must rebuild a team of thousands of nuclear weapons specialists who, deployed to nuclear units worldwide, will train our military how to fight and win on a nuclear battlefield.

Fortunately, vital help has just arrived. Two distinguished senior nuclear weapons scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory have just written the first scientific paper to point out exactly why we cannot have confidence that the nuclear weapons in America’s stockpile will detonate if called upon. These two nuclear scientists have spent their lifetimes designing and testing nukes.