NNSA releases ‘blueprint’ for nuclear weapons production in post-New-START world with a rising China

The National Nuclear Security Administration on Tuesday published a vision for the U.S. nuclear-weapons production complex that could exist in the decades when the last nuclear-arms-control treaty lapses and China finishes a major military modernization.

The fruit of a year of work, the 40-page Enterprise Blueprint published Tuesday, and provided to the Exchange Monitor under embargo by the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), covers the 25 years spanning 2025 to 2050. In February 2026, the New START nuclear-arms-control treaty between the U.S. and Russia will lapse, leaving each country free to deploy more of its largest nuclear weapons. 

By 2030, the Pentagon estimated in 2023, China will “probably” have more 1,000 nuclear warheads and continue moving toward deployment of a large nuclear triad, with land-, sea-, and air-based weapons. By 2050, the Pentagon said in its report, Beijing aims to field what Xi Jinping, China’s president, called a “‘world class’” military.

“I believe the Enterprise Blueprint sets out a roadmap for a complex that enables us to be proactive rather than reactive in the face of rising mission demands, a more volatile world, and emerging technological opportunities and challenges,” said Jill Hruby, administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration, in a statement. “While there will undoubtedly be unforeseen challenges in the decades ahead, this is a necessary first step towards ensuring we can meet nuclear security needs both now and in the future.”

Much of the information in the Enterprise Blueprint about NNSA’s marquee programs is well-traveled.

Like older documents, including one published during the Donald Trump (R) administration, the Enterprise Blueprint largely centralizes and digests NNSA’s existing long term plans, which otherwise are published only in the much larger annual Stockpile Stewardship and Management Plan or constrained to a five-year outlook known as the future-years nuclear security program that sometimes appears as part of the agency’s annual budget request to Congress.

In the new blueprint, the agency repeats its longstanding plans to annually produce at least 30 fissile cores for nuclear-weapon primary stages at the Los Alamos National Laboratory and, by sometime next decade, make another 50 of these plutonium pits annually at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina. 

NNSA on Oct. 1 certified the first pit made by Los Alamos. According to lab officials who spoke earlier this year, Los Alamos could already have more pits on hand.

The blueprint also describes planned upgrades to the NNSA’s non-nuclear manufacturing complex, spread among research and development centers at the Sandia National Laboratories, headquartered in Albuquerque, N.M., and the expanding manufacturing hub at the Kansas City National Security Campus, which had already publicized some of its growth plans.

The blueprint also discusses the NNSA’s plans to continue verifying the destructive potential of current and planned nuclear-weapons without nuclear-explosive testing. Among other things, the agency plans a follow-on for the National Ignition Facility, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s flagship facility for nuclear-weapons experiments, in the coming decades.

“In the 2040s, a new high-yield capability will be built that leverages the body of knowledge being generated today across a range of platforms,” the blueprint reads. The agency’s latest 

Stockpile Stewardship and Management Plan also makes reference to that next-generation facility, dubbed Future High Energy Density Capability.

The NNSA blueprint also briefly mentions artificial intelligence, the catchall phrase that describes several recent software programs that compute rapidly, without much human direction, and with the ability to learn from both mistakes and successes. 

NNSA said in the report it is creating “collaboration spaces,” some within the agency and some accessible to other parts of DOE and non-government partners. The agency wants both “virtual and physical co-location” for these teamwork projects, which could tackle not only artificial intelligence but also advanced manufacturing, which can include the process called 3D printing, and development of high explosives needed for nuclear weapons.