WASHINGTON — The plutonium in nuclear warheads seems to be much sturdier than previously thought, with a reliable life span of as much as 100 years. Scientists who studied all of the ...

Plutonium pits are the cores of modern nuclear weapons. Since 1989, when the Rocky Flats Colorado pit production plant was shut down, the United States has not been able to produce plutonium pits ...

“Pits” are the form of the plutonium in the fission trigger “primaries” of US two-stage nuclear warheads. The primary motivation for this move is lack of confidence in the pit-production capacity at ...

America’s nuclear arsenal is aging—and is ill-fit for today’s challenges. Even once the nuclear modernization program ...

Los Alamos National Laboratory was to produce 30 plutonium pits per year, the trigger of nuclear bombs, in an effort to modernize the U.S. arsenal.

New pits would first go into the new W87-1 warhead for a new missile, the Ground Based Strategic Deterrent (GBSD), meant to replace the U.S.’s current ICBMs. Second in the queue is a submarine ...

Reviving plutonium pit production and redesigning new nuclear warheads that use these pits cannot fulfill the U.S. obligation to reduce and eliminate its nuclear arsenal.

WASHINGTON -- Resting atop the Trident II missile, the W88 warhead is among the mainstays of the country's submarine-based nuclear arsenal. For years, however, testing the warhead's components to ...

Expanding nuclear warhead production capabilities and targeting a 700% increase in plutonium pit production could reignite a nuclear arms race between the United States and its potential ...

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. Many of the ...