No Testing Allowed

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This article describes various features of Stockpile Stewardship programme meant for testing of nuclear weapons. Simulating the thermodynamics of a nuclear blast requires millions of variables. Although the simulations are challenging, the role of simulations continues to increase significantly in the absence of nuclear testing. Stockpile Stewardship is groundbreaking science in which experiments must comply with the nuclear test moratorium, arms limitation treaties, and budgetary and political realities that go with them. Due to the complexity and uncertainties in simulations, leading engineering organizations such as Los Alamos are changing their approach to simulating large, complicated problems such as the thermodynamics of nuclear explosions. The Department of Energy is encouraging the recognition of verification and validation as a scientific discipline in and of itself. In the Predictive Science Academic Alliance Program, five universities—California Institute of Technology, University of Michigan, Purdue University, Stanford University and the—conduct research to support the National Nuclear Security Administration’s stockpile stewardship mission, which includes training scientists and engineers in the new field of ‘predictive science’.