“The US government’s dangerous rush to produce new plutonium pits”
>> article by Dr. Dylan Spaulding, Union of Concerned Scientists, and Curtis T. Asplund, assistant professor in the Department of Physics & Astronomy at San José State University, in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, October 22, 2026: https://thebulletin.org/2026/10/the-us-governments-dangerous-rush-to-produce-new-plutonium-pits/
“As the National Nuclear Security Administration pushes to dramatically accelerate plutonium pit production, it is cutting safety corners, bypassing fiscal oversight, and risking nuclear instability—all to fix a problem that elite scientists say doesn’t exist.”
This summer, the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) reversed its initial decision to withhold an unclassified summary of a study on the aging of plutonium in US nuclear weapons by JASON, a group of elite scientists advising the Pentagon. Far from revelatory, the brief JASON study is more notable for its consistency with earlier assessments that found the US stockpile’s plutonium is aging slowly, but not at a level that calls into question present weapons performance.
This latest assessment stands in contrast to the NNSA’s ambitions for accelerating US efforts to revive plutonium pit production—the cores of thermonuclear weapons. Recent developments indicate that the NNSA is pursuing a variety of means to speed up the program and demonstrate ambitious production capabilities. These calls come amid a lack of transparent requirements, before the project has demonstrated mature performance, and without integrated cost and schedule estimates. At the same time, congressional and independent oversight show troubling signs of erosion.
Accelerating a program that was already facing steep challenges comes with immense risks that must be weighed against actual national security needs. Rushing toward production threatens worker and community safety and increases costs. It is also likely to prove strategically destabilizing. The United States doesn’t need to build new warheads to maintain its land-based nuclear force, unless it dangerously seeks to load more warheads into its ballistic missiles.
If plutonium aging is not an imminent threat to the present stockpile—and by extension to US nuclear deterrence—accelerated pit production therefore signals that the United States is dangerously hurtling toward renewed nuclear competition in contravention of its legal obligations as a state party to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
It doesn’t have to be that way: Viable alternatives exist that would reduce strain on the US nuclear complex and reduce the risks and costs of the program itself. These alternatives would be more conducive to future arms control and nonproliferation efforts. But they have only one potentially elusive requirement: Restraint.
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Full article: https://thebulletin.org/2026/10/the-us-governments-dangerous-rush-to-produce-new-plutonium-pits/
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Photo of Fat Man, model of nuclear weapon – with plutonium “pit” (trigger) – dropped on Nagasaki, by Tom Clements, at Los Alamos, New Mexico nuclear weapons museum, July 2023