Nuclear testing has long been depicted as mushroom clouds emerging and rising above remote desert landscapes or the ground slowly collapsing like a sinkhole as an underground detonation goes off. But those days are long gone, decades away in fact, from how the United States maintains its nuclear weapons in 2025.
The U.S. nuclear stockpile is arguably the most important part of the country’s national security, but the government stopped testing nuclear weapons here in 1992.
Instead, it has put its faith in a handful of top-notch science facilities like Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) that maintain the nuclear stockpile and test it — without explosions.
Scripps News was granted access to the California lab, where world-renowned physicists use supercomputers to perform complex laser experiments in the lab's National Ignition Facility (NIF), mimicking the conditions of a nuclear bomb going off. Alongside the most advanced computer in the world, El Capitan, the facility also possesses the world’s most energetic laser.
The purpose of NIF, according to Mark Herrmann, associate Director for Weapon Physics and Design, is to “recreate the environments that are found in operating nuclear weapons.”
National security mission
Kim Budil, a physicist by training and the director of this laboratory, balances the scientific and security guarantees that this facility provides the country.
“We're kind of living in a tenuous moment geopolitically throughout the world,” Scripps News national security correspondent Liz Landers said to Budil. “The possibility of nuclear war has been broached by Putin in Russia a few times recently. How does that make you think about maintaining the nuclear stockpile?"
“The world changed in ways over the last decade that we did not anticipate, in spectacular ways,” said Budil. “China's entry onto the scene as not just an economic player, but really a strategic challenge, has really complicated matters. And this emerging axis of cooperation between Russia, China, Iran, North Korea is a very interesting geopolitical mix I didn't anticipate.”
“We need to be much fleeter afoot,” Budil added. “We need to be able to adapt and change as rapidly as the environment is changing and we need to be more anticipatory. So, part of our job is not to just wait and see what the government's need is based on today's geopolitical environment. It's to lay the foundations that will allow us to respond to what the government needs ten years hence.”
Building blocks for big experiments
Part of tackling those national security challenges that Budil says are a decade away involves conducting supercharged, complex experiments today. The first crucial building block in that scientific process is assembly of the target that all the laser energy is focused on — the point of the reaction.
Michael Stadermann oversees the target assembly process, which requires a hyper-clean work environment.
Scripps News weaved through the spotless lab, following Stadermann as he pointed out and explained the work at each station.
"Much of the assembly is done under microscopes to be able to place the components with good accuracy," he said.
Even a human hair landing on the target could upend their whole experiment. The target itself — the size of a peppercorn — gets a leak and temperature test, and X-ray images are taken of it to ensure there are no minute issues.
This overall production of a target can take up to eight months.
In another building nearby, Tayyab Suratwala oversees another team of more than a hundred people focused on complementary work: repairing the optics, which are large, carefully designed crystal and glass squares. To the average person, they might look like thick windowpanes. Some of the optics are curved in specific ways, giving a warped effect. Ultimately, they help channel and concentrate laser energy onto the tiny point in the fusion target during experiments.
Scripps News’ reporting team suited up again to enter this equally clean laboratory space: everything from hair to shoes to eyes needed to be covered to avoid dropping a speck of dust onto one of the optics, an event that could be catastrophic come experiment time. Simply put, the National Ignition Facility can’t function without these optics.
Tayyab and his team clean, polish, grind and coat these conductors of energy in a repair process that he described as unique: “What we're doing is we're making our optical components more damage resistance with a lot of R&D.” It was a theme at Lawrence Livermore lab: inventing new parts of the scientific process – some of which have had commercial applications outside the lab.
National Ignition Facility
These two highly complex processes - target fabrication and optics repair - come together in Lawrence Livermore’s vast National Ignition Facility.
This enormous building — three football fields in length — uses 192 lasers to beam energy at incredibly high speeds and temperatures into that tiny, peppercorn-sized target. The result is a controlled thermonuclear reaction.
Herrmann says that their designation as a national security laboratory drives them to be at the “forefront in science and technology in many different areas,” noting that it may not seem like it, but lasers contribute to the national defense.
Budil adds, “We can test components or systems that might go into space or into critical military systems and understand how they respond to radiation environments. We can develop new materials that are required for very harsh environments and test them in those exact conditions here. We're also pushing the frontiers of science here.”
Making History
All the hard work in this lab over the course of decades came to fruition in the middle of the night in December 2022 when the facility achieved ignition — the moment when a fusion reaction creates or releases more energy than is put into it. It was the first time in human history that this occurred in a lab.
“That sent an enormous signal into the world, not just the scientific community, but into the security community about what the capabilities of the United States really are in this realm,” said Budil. “And I think it's important for us to remember the role that we play in showing, visibly demonstrating that scientific and technological might that the U.S. brings to bear when we come together as a country.”
Navigating the Road Ahead
Budil is also advocating for her facility, which has a $3 billion annual budget, during a moment when the Trump administration is reportedly firing and offering buyouts to experts at the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA). That agency, while semiautonomous under the Department of Energy, does own the physical infrastructure of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and acts as a sort of landlord. NNSA is also in charge of securing nuclear waste sites and transporting nuclear weapons, among other critical tasks.
When asked what it would mean for her laboratory — and their maintenance of the nuclear stockpile — if budgets or programs were slashed at LLNL, Budil expressed concern at the prospect.
“We're doing work here today for which I predict ten years from now, we'll find unique uses that we don't imagine, and that's part of the reason you want this long-term commitment. So that is very concerning to me,” said Budil.
She gave the example of how biomedical research, a similar area where the United States has great capabilities, has led to breakthroughs in the way we think about human health.
“Support for the research enterprise, for me, is a critical element of what has made the United States a leading nation and a great nation over time, and it would be tragic to lose those underpinnings.”
