An interview with Dr. Charles F. McMillan, 10th Director of Los Alamos National Laboratory

A: The phrase that we often use is “safe, secure, and reliable.” It’s a mantra. Maybe a little background would help clarify the related challenges.

The United States developed its nuclear stockpile during a period when we were doing active underground nuclear testing, as well as active development of new systems. All of that stopped, in terms of the way we had historically done things, with the last underground nuclear test – called Divider – being conducted in 1992. An outgrowth of this was asking ourselves, “How do we continue to care for the nation’s nuclear deterrent, in a world where we aren’t doing additional testing, and where those weapons systems are aging far beyond what we had anticipated when they entered into service?” Historically, such systems would have been in service for maybe a decade before a new system would have replaced them. But that hasn’t been happening since 1992.