Dylan Spaulding: The US Nuclear Paradigm Shift: Pit Production, Nuclear Testing, and the fate of Stockpile Stewardship

This talk will feature Dylan Spaulding, Senior Scientist, Union of Concerned Scientists, in conversation with BRSL Senior Research Scholar Dr. Cameron Tracy. The US nuclear weapons complex is undergoing its biggest transformation since the end of the Cold War. Increasingly sophisticated experimental, computational, and manufacturing techniques that emerged to support a strategy of science-based stockpile stewardship are now being applied as tools for vertical proliferation as emphasis shifts from ‘stewardship’ to production. The evolution of laboratory tools for weapons development comes with both challenges and opportunities for verification, nonproliferation, and disarmament. This talk will address the paradigm shift underway in the US and its implications for new plutonium pit production and the potential resumption of nuclear testing.