“Nothing about this program was guaranteed to succeed. There was nothing off the shelf about this,” Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz declared in kicking off a conference commemorating the 20th anniversary of the Department of Energy’s ambitious plan to keep the US nuclear weapons stockpile reliable and safe without underground testing. Known as the Stockpile Stewardship Program (SSP), the combination of increasingly powerful high-performance computing assets and one-of-a-kind experimental facilities was put in place by President Bill Clinton in 1995, nearly three years into a US moratorium on tests that continues today.
At the 21 October commemoration and at a Capitol Hill show of technologies developed at DOE’s three nuclear weapons labs, Moniz joined the directors of Los Alamos, Lawrence Livermore, and Sandia National Laboratories and former senior government officials in reminiscing on the origins of the SSP. The original vision was that nuclear testing would be supplanted by more...
