In the Cold War arms race, scientists rushed to build thousands of warheads to counter the Soviet Union. Today, those scientists are racing once again, but this time to rebuild an aging nuclear stockpile.
Scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico are locked in an intense competition with rivals at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the Bay Area to design the nation's first new nuclear bomb in two decades.
The two labs have fiercely competed in the bomb trade with technologies as disparate as Microsoft's and Apple's.
The new weapon, under development for about a year, is designed to ensure long-term reliability of the nation's inventory of bombs. Program backers say that with greater confidence in the quality of its weapons, the nation could draw down its stockpile, estimated at about 6,000 warheads.
Scientists also intend for the new weapons to be less vulnerable to accidental detonation and to be so secure that any stolen or lost weapon would be unusable.
By law, the new weapons would pack the same explosive power as existing warheads and be suitable only for the same kinds of military targets as those of the weapons they replace. Unlike past proposals for new atomic weapons, the project has captured bipartisan support in Congress.
But some veterans of nuclear arms development are strongly opposed, contending that building new weapons could trigger another arms race with Russia and China, as well as undermine arguments to stop nuclear developments in Iran, North Korea and elsewhere.
And, the critics say, It would eventually increase pressure to resume underground nuclear testing, which the U.S. halted 14 years ago.
Inside the labs, however, emotions and enthusiasm for the new designs are running high.
"I have had people working nights and weekends," said Joseph Martz, head of the Los Alamos design team. "I have to tell them to go home. I can't keep them out of the office. This is a chance to exercise skills that we have not had a chance to use for 20 years."
A thousand miles away at Livermore, Bruce Goodwin, associate director for nuclear weapons, described a similar picture: The lab is running supercomputer simulations around the clock, and teams of scientific experts working on all phases of the project "are extremely excited."
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