Is the U.S. Getting Enough Bang From Los Alamos Tests?

摘要

Experts inside and outside the U.S. government agree that researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) are not blowing up stuff often enough. For decades, scientists at the Department of Energy's (DOE's) nuclear weapons facility have filmed imploding simulated nuclear bomb parts to study how weapons perform. After the United States halted nuclear testing in 1992, these so-called hydrodynamic tests, or hydrotests, became a central duty for Los Alamos scientists, providing crucial clues about the readiness of aging weapons. The lab conducts the tests at its Dual Axis Radi-ographic Hydrodynamic Test Facility (DARHT), a half-hectare-sized machine that uses a pair of linear accelerators to create x-ray beams fired at right angles through the test site. The resulting x-ray movies, trained on explosions up to the equivalent of 68 kilograms of TNT, give scientists a glimpse of the inside of a nuclear weapon.