The key radioactive atom in the plutonium pit has a half life of 24,000 years, which is the amount of time it would take roughly half of the radioactive atoms present to decay. That can be problematic, because there's a lot about plutonium's aging process that scientists still don't understand. Many of the current pits in use come from the 1970s and 80s. The core of every nuclear warhead is a hollow, globe-shaped plutonium pit made by engineers at the Energy Department's lab in Los Alamos, New Mexico, birthplace of the atom bomb. He cautioned that the sweeping upgrades could also have the undesired effect of pushing Russia and China to improve and expand their arsenals. "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. Upgrading it will also be expensive, they say. The program has also drawn criticism from non-proliferation advocates and experts who say the current arsenal, though timeworn, is sufficient to meet U.S. The project is so ambitious that watchdogs warn that the government may not meet its goals. At the same time, technicians, scientists and military missile crews must ensure the older weapons keep running until the new ones are installed. maintains 1,550 active nuclear warheads, and the government plans to modernize them all. "Nothing in our toolbox really works to deter aggressors unless we have that foundation of the nuclear deterrent."īy treaty the U.S. "What we want to do is preserve our way of life without fighting major wars," said Marvin Adams, director of weapons programs for the Department of Energy. They say that America's aged weapons need to be replaced to ensure they work. 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. But military leaders warn that such peace may not last. It's been almost eight decades since a nuclear weapon has been fired in war. Warren Air Force Base in Wyoming demonstrates how they train new missile maintainers to look for scratches on the top of a nuclear warhead. Brandon Mendola, left, with the 90th munitions squadron at F.E. will spend more than $750 billion over the next 10 years replacing almost every component of its nuclear defenses, including new stealth bombers, submarines and ground-based intercontinental ballistic missiles in the country's most ambitious nuclear weapons effort since the Manhattan Project. Those workers are about to get a lot busier. The Associated Press was granted rare access to key parts of the highly classified nuclear supply chain and got to watch technicians and engineers tackle the difficult job of maintaining an aging nuclear arsenal. A hairline scratch on a warhead's polished black cone could send the bomb off course. Wearing radiation monitors, safety goggles and seven layers of gloves, they practice shaping new warhead plutonium cores - by hand.Īnd at nuclear weapons bases across the country, troops as young as 17 keep 50-year-old warheads working until replacements are ready. 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.Ībout 1,300 kilometers (800 miles) away in New Mexico, workers in a steel-walled vault have an equally delicate task. government technicians refurbish the nation's nuclear warheads. In an ultra-sterile room at a secure factory in Kansas City, U.S. KANSAS CITY NATIONAL SECURITY CAMPUS, Mo.
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