There will not be a new director at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory for another few months at least, a spokesperson for the younger of the two U.S. nuclear-weapon design labs said Tuesday.
“We are not expecting a new director to be named until February at the earliest,” the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) spokesperson said in an email.
Current director William Goldstein, the 12th director in the lab’s history, announced in July that he would retire after six years in the top spot and more than three decades at LLNL. The lab said then that it was conducting a nationwide search for his replacement and that Goldstein would remain in the saddle until the lab’s board of directors picks a successor.
Linda Bauer is Goldstein’s deputy.
If Goldstein departs before November, he’ll have taken LLNL’s first major post-Cold War nuclear-weapon modernization to the cusp of mass production. The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) says that the W80-4 air-launched cruise-missile warhead refurb will turn out its first production unit in 2025.
The weapon will tip the Long Range Standoff Weapons Raytheon is designing to replace the 1980s-vintage Air Launched Cruise Missile made by Boeing. The replacement missile is supposed to be deployed on B52-H bombers starting around 2030 or so.
The next weapon-refurb in Livermore’s pipeline is the W87-1 warhead: a rebuild of the W78 design used today aboard Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missiles. The W87-1 is designed to use brand new plutonium pits that are scheduled to be cast at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico starting in 2024.
Editor’s note, 12/17/2020, 5:06 p.m. Eastern. The story was changed to include the correct W80-4 first-production date.
