Billion dollar brains

Once known only as ‘Site Y’, Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico was first established as part of the Manhattan Project as the Allies began secret development of the world’s first nuclear weapon.

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Fifty years on, one of the laboratory’s primary purposes is to run the US nuclear stockpile stewardship programme. While this demanding task no longer involves nuclear testing, it requires a small army of engineers and researchers who run tests on the US’s ageing arsenal of nuclear weapons.

One of the key elements of this programme is the running of complex simulations on room-sized supercomputers to understand the dynamic properties of ageing nuclear materials and model how the weapon’s various components might fare over time. The somewhat more sinister flip side of this programme is ensuring that as well as being safe, the weapons are also ready for use.