![]() Underneath its cement and steel cover was a 70,000-pound (31,750-kilogram) nuclear missile the missile’s warhead tip needed to be lifted out and trucked to base for work.Įxcept the blast door wouldn’t budge. Marrs, 21, and other airmen used a tow and wrenches the size of human femurs to dislodge silo Bravo-9’s 110-ton blast door. That is why Airman 1st Class Jonathan Marrs was dragging a second 225-pound (102-kilogram) aluminum tow behind him toward a concrete silo in the midst of vast Montana farmland on a recent hot afternoon. That can occur as often as twice a week, but only if the equally old tools, or the truck carrying the tools, or the truck needed to transport the missile itself isn’t also broken down, which is often. nuclear arsenal reveals its age each time troops fix a missile. Watchdog: Nuclear states modernize their weapons, Chinese arsenal is growing OLD MISSILES, YOUNG TROOPS The Los Alamos lab has added more than 4,000 employees in that same time frame. The Kansas City plant has 6,700 employees, a 40% jump since 2018, with plans to add several hundred more. To meet the demand for both maintenance and modernization, the facilities have gone on a hiring spree. “If you’re going to update the delivery systems, you would also then update the warheads in the missiles and the bombs that are with them.” “There’s a huge modernization effort going on,” said Eric Wollerman, who manages the Kansas City complex for the Department of Energy through its federal contract with Honeywell. The factory is also working on warheads for the B-21 Raider, a futuristic stealth bomber, while also supporting the Sentinel, a new intercontinental ballistic missile and on warheads for a new class of submarines. Their plastics age, and metal gears and wiring are weakened by the years and by exposure to radiation. All warheads have regular maintenance requirements. This factory would be busy even if an overhaul wasn’t underway. ![]() (Kansas City National Security Campus via AP) In this photo provided by Kansas City National Security Campus, an employee works on a mechanical wristwatch at the National Nuclear Security Administration’s Kansas City facility in Kansas City, Mo., May 23, 2023. Either the watch works or it doesn’t work.” “Everything is done under a microscope with tweezers,” said Molly Hadfield, a spokeswoman for the Kansas City plant. That’s why technicians go through a skills assessment that includes disassembling and assembling a mechanical wristwatch. There are thousands of tiny parts inside each warhead, so steady hands are key. Inside that three-story windowless factory, workers restore and test those warhead parts, work that a government watchdog said required “a great deal of precision manufacturing to exacting specifications.” “We just have to be able to do that.” THE WARHEAD AND THE WRISTWATCHĬompleted pits are protected and detonated by an outer warhead layer that is built at the Energy Department’s Kansas City National Security Campus. “We need our nation to be back making pits,” Webster said. Los Alamos scientists are having intense discussions about weapon design - how much each can weigh, its explosive punch, how far it must travel. The lab is starting to feel a bit like it did in the 1980s, during the Cold War, he said. He could have retired years ago, but has remained to shepherd the first new plutonium pits through to production. Webster has been at Los Alamos since Ronald Reagan was president. “The United States has not regularly manufactured plutonium pits since 1989,” the Government Accountability Office noted in a January 2023 report, adding that the Energy Department’s National Nuclear Security Administration has provided “limited assurance that it would be able to produce sufficient numbers of pits.” Air Force, Air Force security forces provide armed escort for a nuclear warhead that has just been removed from the silo Bravo-9 on Aug. That generation of pits is now pushing past 50. When the last tests were performed, they provided data on pits that were at most about two decades old. has not detonated pits to update data on their degradation since. Bush signed an order in the 1990s banning underground nuclear tests, and the U.S. ![]() But the plutonium decay is still enough to cause concern that it could affect how a pit explodes. That would suggest the weapons should be viable for years to come. 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.
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