Officials from the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) and its national laboratories highlighted yesterday the role of recruitment and retention of scientists and engineers as critical components of the Stockpile Stewardship Program, the NNSA’s initiative to maintain the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile without full-scale nuclear testing. The U.S. nuclear enterprise has “one of the most talented, highly motivated workforces assembled anywhere, anytime,” NNSA administrator Frank Klotz said at an anniversary event celebrating 20 years since the program’s inception. “They are the stewards in stockpile stewardship.” To address future challenges related to aging nuclear weapon components and materials, Klotz said the Department of Energy (DOE) is taking steps that include recapitalizing its critical infrastructure and “developing the next generation of leaders, scientists, and nuclear policy professions.”
NNSA lab directors also emphasized the need to continue recruiting and retaining top talent. Sandia National Laboratories (SNL) director Jill Hruby said SNL has addressed the issue by encouraging young technical talent to participate in a wide variety of national security programs, not only for the NNSA but also with other government agencies. “By doing this, what we have found is a very interesting ability to stay at the state of the art, translate it into the high reliability applications of nuclear weapons, and go back around again,” she said, adding that SNL has hired a third of its workforce in just the past five years. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory director Bill Goldstein highlighted “professional fulfillment” as a key component to incentivize the younger generation of engineering talent to join and remain at the labs, while Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) director Charles McMillan recalled that “the passion that I have seen in [LANL’s workforce] to the mission of the laboratory is what gives me confidence” in the success of stockpile stewardship. “It’s important to maintain that sense of purpose,” he said.
Klotz noted the stockpile stewardship program was initially met with skepticism because of “many unanswered technical and policy questions: could non-explosive experiments yield the right kind of data needed to certify the stockpile? Would the nation be willing to make the necessary resource commitments over an extended period of time?” The answer, he said, is yes: “today we can simulate every aspect of a nuclear weapon, from the physics that drive its detonation to the character of its explosive yield and output. In fact we now have more detailed knowledge about how nuclear weapons work and how nuclear weapons age than was possible to learn through nuclear explosive testing.”