The United States has manufactured its first plutonium core since 1989. The objective: to renew all its nuclear warheads

Most of the 5,044 nuclear warheads that the United States has in its arsenal were manufactured during the Cold War. The US Department of Energy had not produced a core for nuclear weapons since 1989. Until now.

Ready for military use. On October 1, the United States National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) completed, for the first time in 35 years, the manufacture of a plutonium “pit”a hollow sphere that acts as an explosive core in nuclear weapons.

The pit was marked as a “war reserve” and is ready for deployment to the United States nuclear arsenal. The Department of Defense plans incorporate it into the W87-1 warheadwhich will replace the aging W87 in the Air Force’s Sentinel ICBM.

Improved technology. When a chemical charge is detonated around these spheres, the plutonium is rapidly compressed, triggering a fission reaction. This reaction releases a huge amount of energy in the form of a nuclear explosion.

The NNSA worked for eight years to develop and perfect manufacturing processes for new pits, improving equipment and facilities to make production more reliable and consistent than in the 1980s.

80 cores per year. The NNSA’s goal is to achieve production of at least 80 pits of plutonium annually by the mid-2030s: 30 at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, where the atomic bomb was invented, and 50 at the Facility Savannah River Plutonium Processing Plant in South Carolina.

The United States manufactured hundreds of plutonium cores a year during the Cold War. Production stopped in 1989 with the closure of the former Rocky Flats plantin Colorado, after its workers were convicted of a series of environmental crimes.

Deterrence strategy. Resumption of plutonium production to make weapons of mass destruction is, paradoxically, part of the United States’ nuclear deterrence strategy.

The Pentagon’s plan is to replace all nuclear warheads in the national arsenal with modern versions that enable effective deterrence against old and new opponents, such as Russia, North Korea, Iran and China.

Image | United States Department of Defense

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