To help maintain the skills of US nuclear weapons designers, the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) should have Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories compete to develop new warhead designs, build components, and assemble prototype weapons, says a new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. Once a mainstay of the US weapons design process, full-scale competitions have not been held since 1992, when a moratorium on nuclear testing began. According to the report, the lack of competitions has meant that the labs have not engineered or fabricated components and systems and thus designers have been unable to exercise their complete skill sets.
The congressionally mandated report, Peer Review and Design Competition in the NNSA National Security Laboratories, emphasizes that the competitions should be done with the understanding that final prototypes would not result in new warheads entering the stockpile. But if...