Peer Review and Design Competition in the NNSA National Security Laboratories (2015) / Chapter Skim
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2 The Past: Before the 1992 Nuclear Explosion Testing Moratorium
2 The Past: Before the 1992 Nuclear Explosion Testing Moratorium
Pages 17-23
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From page 17... ...
The Z Division of Los Alamos Laboratory was created in 1945 to provide military liaison, ordnance engineering, and surveillance in storage sites and to manage non-nuclear testing. This organization was physically located on Sandia Base near Albuquerque, New Mexico, to facilitate better interactions with the military.
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From page 18... ...
It provided intellectually stimulating and productive competition, which expanded the potential design space for nuclear weapons. The Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, in California, was chartered to work on designs that were deliberately different from, but competitive with, the designs being pursued at Los Alamos.
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From page 19... ...
,1 from 1945 to 1992, the United States carried out 1,032 nuclear explosion tests, 815 of which took place underground, primarily at the Nevada Test Site.2 The tests generally involved the NEP but not the entire warhead as an integrated system. In many cases, it is probably more accurate to call those tests "nuclear explosion experiments," since many new design concepts were explored, and a number did not perform as expected when actually tested.
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From page 20... ...
In the 1990s, Sandia relied on the independence between its New Mexico and California sites for effective independent technical peer review. Although the two sites were nominally part of the same laboratory, independence was gained through an organizational structure that separated nuclear weapons work at each site and geographically separated the nuclear weapons teams.3 Historically, Sandia has had a close relationship with the commercial electronics industry, which has stimulated intellectual cross-fertilization and also provided a kind of informal peer review of Sandia concepts and products.
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From page 21... ...
In the later years of the Cold War, safety and security systems also benefited significantly from the differences in approaches that resulted from design competition, such as the development of a new, insensitive high-explosive system. Sandia National Laboratories During this era, the nation had two distinctly separate and competing nuclear weapon design capabilities: the Los Alamos/Sandia Albuquerque (LANL/SNLA)
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From page 22... ...
This work enabled the United States to meet the constantly evolving national security threat effectively throughout the Cold War era. Based on discussions with laboratory experts at its meetings and on the accumulated experience of its members, the committee concluded that the following were key elements of the nuclear weapon design activities during the period of nuclear explosion testing (1945-1992)
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From page 23... ...
• Nuclear explosive testing, which provided definitive validation and feedback to the weapons designers and engineers. While the last of these elements is not a viable option today, the others are largely available as contributors to the nuclear deterrent.
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