The United States’ sole nuclear warhead plutonium pit production facility, Los Alamos National Laboratory “currently has no pit production capacity at all, beyond making developmental pits.” LNAL has also been failing to meet pit production quotas since at least 2007, as out of 30 pits produced between 2007 and 2012, only 21 were delivered to the War Reserve stockpile.

LNAL has been suffering from staffing shortages and staff retention issues since at least 2011, when a majority of the facility’s safety engineers quit in protest following an incident in 2011 where a supervisor committed a grave safety violation by ordering a technician to move to plutonium rods that were dangerously close together further apart to avoid a criticality incident, while a more senior lab official decided that others in the same room should continue working. LNAL has been making pits at a “technology sustainment level” since 1996, and was supposed to make a single pit for the War Reserve in 2023, with plans to scale up to 30 pits per year minimum by 2026. It is currently unknown if LNAL has been able to meet any of these quotas.

Nuclear missile production, therefore, may be severely hampered.

Source: Los Alamos Study Group, Science.org