The U.S. military says America’s nuclear arsenal is outdated and unable to keep up with our adversaries’ modern weapons.
To replace it, the country is in the midst of a once-in-a-generation overhaul across 23 states that could exceed $1.7 trillion.
But what future are we buying ourselves? And at what cost?
By W.J. Hennigan
Photographs by An-My Lê Mr. Hennigan writes about national security for Opinion. Ms. Lê is a professor of photography at Bard College.
To understand how America is preparing for its nuclear future, follow Melissa Durkee’s fifth-grade students as they shuffle into Room 38 at Preston Veterans’ Memorial School in Preston, Conn. One by one, the children settle in for a six-week course taught by an atypical educator, the defense contractor General Dynamics.
“Does anyone know why we’re here?” a company representative asks. Adalie, 10, shoots her hand into the air. “Um, because you’re building submarines and you, like, need people, and you’re teaching us about it in case we’re interested in working there when we get older,” she ventures.
Adalie is correct. The U.S. Navy has put in an order for General Dynamics to produce 12 nuclear ballistic missile submarines by 2042 — a job that’s projected to cost $130 billion. The industry is struggling to find the tens of thousands of new workers it needs. For the past 18 months, the company has traveled to elementary schools across New England to educate children in the basics of submarine manufacturing and perhaps inspire a student or two to consider one day joining its shipyards.
A fifth-grade class at Preston Veterans’ Memorial School designs and builds mini-submarines as part of a curriculum created by the defense contractor General Dynamics.
The coursework — on this particular day, welding crackers together with Easy Cheese to create mini-submarines — is one small facet of the much bigger preparations America is making for a historic struggle with its nuclear rivals. With Russia at war, China escalating regional disputes and nations like North Korea and Iran expanding their nuclear programs, the United States is set to spend an estimated $1.7 trillion over 30 years to revamp its own arsenal.
The spending spree, which the government began planning in 2010, is underway in at least 23 states — nearly 50 if you include subcontractors. It follows a decades-long freeze on designing, building or testing new nuclear weapons. Along with the subs, the military is paying for a new fleet of bomber jets, land-based missiles and thermonuclear warheads. Tally all that spending, and the bill comes to almost $57 billion a year, or $108,000 per minute for three decades.
Times Opinion spent six months traveling to cities and towns around the nation to discover how this modern Manhattan Project is coming together, interviewing more than 100 residents, workers, community leaders and federal officials. The portrait that emerged is a country that is being transformed — physically, financially and philosophically — by an unprecedented wave of nuclear revitalization. The effort is as flush with cash as it is rife with problems and delays: At least 20 major projects are already years behind schedule and billions of dollars over budget.
If you don’t live where the submarines are welded or the missile silos are dug, there’s a good chance you wouldn’t know it’s happening. The federal government has said little about the plan in public, outside of congressional hearings and strategy papers, or the vast amount being spent. There has been no significant debate. The billion-dollar programs move under the radar. At a time when funding for politicized issues such as climate change, foreign military aid and border security are under a microscope, this issue miraculously appears to have sidestepped the crossfire.
But each day, more than 110,000 scientists, military personnel and private contractors with high-level security clearances are scanning into facilities, putting on safety gear and piecing together a modern arsenal for a volatile new nuclear age.
We should talk about why Washington is making America nuclear again and what we hope to achieve with one of the most ambitious, far-reaching construction projects in the country’s history. The money is already flowing, assembling weapons everyone hopes will never be used.
12 submarines
are being built over
2,700 companies
at a cost of
$130 billion $130 billion The Submarines
The Submarines
Connecticut
Rhode Island
Virginia
General Dynamics Electric Boat plans to build more submarines by tonnage in the next 30 years than over the course of the Cold War.
The company hired over 5,000 people last year and plans to hire close to another 5,000 this year but still anticipates work force shortages.
General Dynamics Electric Boat may face a labor shortage, but you wouldn’t know it standing inside one of the company’s football-field-size warehouses along Narragansett Bay in Rhode Island.
On a morning in September, roughly 2,000 employees were at work across the sprawling complex, moving among mammoth machinery and the hulls of several submarines sliced into segments like giant sushi rolls. “What you’re seeing is the future of American naval power,” Rear Adm. Todd Weeks, who oversees strategic submarine construction for the U.S. Navy, shouted above the din.
At 560 feet long and 43 feet in diameter, the Columbia-class submarines under construction at the site will be the largest America has ever built when the first boat enters service this decade. They are also the most expensive, at an average of $11 billion per boat. Engineering a nuclear submarine is widely considered to be more challenging than building a spacecraft: The sub needs to carry more than 100 people to crushing ocean depths, along with the nuclear reactor that powers it, and be capable of launching its nuclear-tipped missiles to any location on the planet. Every cut, every weld, every rivet matters.
Submarines are constructed in sections at Quonset Point, R.I., then placed on barges and floated down the Atlantic coast for final assembly in Groton, Conn.
On the factory floor, it is plain to see the dream of nuclear disarmament, once shared by Republican and Democratic presidents alike, is dead. Or, at the very least, on life support. Not so long ago, the consensus among global leaders was that the world needed fewer nukes and means to deliver them, not more. America’s nuclear portfolio was deprioritized after 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed. After spending trillions of dollars over decades, Washington cut back on nearly everything nuclear-related. The prongs of the American military’s so-called triad — nuclear-weapon-carrying submarines, jets and intercontinental ballistic missiles — were maintained, rather than replaced, for years beyond their intended use.
Nuclear ballistic missile submarines — known as boomers by sailors — are arguably the most important part of that ecosystem. They are America’s guarantee that the military can strike back in the event of the country incurring a first attack, even if an adversary manages to turn Washington into radioactive ash. They are constantly deployed around the world, are virtually undetectable under the water and can carry up to 20 long-range missiles loaded with several nuclear warheads apiece.
The 14 boomers now at sea are about 40 years old, on average — ancient in submarine years. The aging boats come with a host of liabilities, including higher maintenance costs and onboard technology that predates the personal computer revolution. With China operating the world’s largest, newest naval force (234 warships to America’s 219), the U.S. Navy says new submarines can’t be produced fast enough. Once U.S. production hits its stride, the plan is to build one boomer and two attack submarines a year. To make that happen, the Quonset Point factory has added six buildings, doubling its floor space, from one million square feet to two million square feet, over the past 10 years.
But four years in, the first boat is hundreds of millions of dollars over budget because of a combination of supply chain issues, design problems and nagging labor shortages. Recent analysis from the Government Accountability Office, the congressional watchdog, calculated cost overruns that are more than six times the company’s estimates.
When the Cold War ended, the demand for subs dropped, and the pipeline of trade specialists trained to work on these highly specialized boats did, too. General Dynamics Electric Boat’s work force sank from around 22,000 to 7,000. The Navy now estimates it needs at least 100,000 new workers to join defense companies to meet production demands.
Skilled tradespeople like welders and machinists are in the highest demand.
Though the new Columbia-class subs are primarily being built in Rhode Island, Connecticut and Virginia, the Navy is going to tremendous lengths to recruit talent across the country. Over the past year, a blitz of ads has appeared at various sports events — including major league baseball games, WNBA games and even atop a NASCAR hood — steering fans to buildsubmarines.com. The website connects job seekers with hiring defense contractors as part of a nearly $1 billion campaign. Some of that money will go toward helping restore the network of companies that can supply the more than three million parts that go into a Columbia sub. Like so much of the nation’s nuclear infrastructure, those supplier numbers have plummeted since the 1990s.
Arms control advocates argue that the U.S. industrial buildup risks igniting another arms race. But to hear Admiral Weeks tell it, the Navy is well beyond such hand-wringing, thanks in part to Russia and China: “As we see the world today, that dip that we had in the late 1990s, early 2000s — we don’t see that happening again.”
5 uranium facilities
are being built over
2,000 workers
at a cost of
$10 billion $10 billion The Uranium
The Y-12 facility in Oak Ridge, Tenn., built to supply uranium to the Manhattan Project, is in the midst of a multibillion-dollar facelift.
The new buildings and cutting-edge machinery will eventually process the uranium needed to make the next generation of American nuclear weapons.
Any passing driver can watch the construction on the industrial park along Bear Creek Road in Oak Ridge, a city in the far eastern corner of Tennessee. Crowds of laborers move among four unfinished buildings, heavy machinery growling at the edges. It looks like any other work site, until you notice the tiers of razor wire, patrols of armed guards around the perimeter and the peculiar fact that none of the structures have any windows.
This construction site, for the Y-12 National Security Complex, is the top-secret centerpiece of America’s plans to rebuild the nation’s nuclear bomb-making complex. When the $10 billion overhaul is done, the revamped site will be solely responsible for processing the highly enriched uranium used in U.S. weapons into the next century. But if you keep driving down the road, it feels as though you’re moving back in time. Row after row of aging brick buildings are scattered across Y-12’s campus, many containing hazardous waste that dates back decades.
Under the cover of the Manhattan Project, Oak Ridge was a high-tech secret city, ringed by security checkpoints and armed guards. The plant employed more than 22,000 people but didn’t appear on any official map.
The equipment at Y-12 separated the radioactive isotope uranium-235 for the first atomic bomb used in warfare, Little Boy, which was dropped on Hiroshima.
The X-10 Graphite Reactor, now decommissioned, produced the plutonium that helped scientists design the second atomic bomb, Fat Man, which was dropped on Nagasaki.
After World War II and the start of the Cold War arms race, manufacturing uranium components for nuclear weapons became the site’s defining mission. Every nuclear weapon in America’s current arsenal of 3,748 nuclear bombs and warheads contains uranium from Y-12.
The Energy Department, which oversees the nuclear stockpile, went through an extensive retrenchment after the U.S.S.R. collapsed, much like the military. The overall number of weapons was cut. The budgets of the labs that designed the weapons were cut. The skilled work force that manufactured and assembled them was cut. The facilities where this work took place, full of modern equipment during the Cold War, were never updated.
Few, if any, sites embody this neglect better than Y-12. Despite all the technological advancements that have unfolded outside Y-12’s barbed wire fences over the past 80 years, America’s nuclear arsenal is still largely put together there by hand, like a Ferrari engine, using machines created decades before their operators were born.
Signs of decay and decrepitude are everywhere. Eric Helms, the deputy director of enriched uranium operations, who has worked at Y-12 for 23 years, leads me through a labyrinth inside the complex of narrow hallways in Building 9212, where workers stand in coveralls. Strips of the ceiling hang overhead like ribbons. Sections of pipe that jut from the hulking machinery are wrapped with duct tape, and paint on the steel doors and walls has chipped away, exposing layers of green, brown and cream underneath. “That’s where we painted over contamination spills,” he says. “Stripping the paint would just create a bigger problem.”
The uranium processing facility project at Y-12 will employ 2,000 construction workers.
Large areas of the floors have also been painted over or feature a patchwork of stainless steel sheeting to cover contaminated concrete below. On the day I visit, the internal 1950s-era vacuum system has been broken for more than a week, so workers can’t suck away scraps of uranium that fell around the furnaces. Mr. Helms says it’s a nagging problem. “We’re looking forward to moving into the new facility,” he says.
Today Y-12 is under the control of the National Nuclear Security Administration, a quasi-independent arm of the Energy Department. Once the new facility is up and running, it will process uranium not only for nuclear weapons but also for the nuclear reactors aboard U.S. Navy ships and nuclear research reactors. Much of the radioactive material will be shipped by truck to the National Nuclear Security Administration’s Pantex plant in Texas, where it will be assembled into different types of nuclear warheads. The surplus will be held in an onsite storage vault nicknamed the Fort Knox of uranium.
For that, Mr. Helms and the rest of the staff will have to wait. Six years into its renovation, construction at Y-12 is years behind schedule and around $4 billion over budget because of a combination of supply chain hiccups and unforced errors. (At one point, a contractor mistakenly designed the roof 13 feet lower than it needed to be in the new uranium-processing building, costing $540 million alone.)
Because of the repeated delays, the earliest that Mr. Helms and his team can move into the new facilities is 2031.
400 missiles
will be installed over
20 years
in underground silos across
$141 billion $141 billion The Missiles
The Missiles
Wyoming
North Dakota
Colorado
Nebraska
Montana
America’s intercontinental ballistic missiles are kept deep underground in silos. The silos and launch centers blend into the landscape.
To update the aging system, contractors will spend decades digging up the missiles, 450 silos and their 45 command hubs scattered across the Great Plains.
Unlike most of the U.S. military’s weapons systems, America’s intercontinental ballistic missiles, which ferry nuclear warheads to their target, aren’t kept on military bases or in warehouses. Currently, 400 Minuteman III missiles are buried 80 feet underground in people’s backyards — or, more specifically, their farm fields — in Wyoming, Nebraska, Colorado, Montana and North Dakota.
For decades, these aging missile systems have been on 24-hour alert, ready to obliterate almost any spot on Earth using the best technology available in the 1970s, when they were installed. The Air Force, which is in charge of the land-based missiles, has been maintaining the missiles for half a century.
The Minuteman III missile silos are located along country roads, inside fenced-off areas.
All year long, in all types of weather, Air Force maintenance teams drive in convoys to fix the weapon parts that have gone bad.
During an install, a towering missile is loaded into a specially modified tractor-trailer that tilts above the silo and then is lowered, inch by inch, underground.
The teams fasten the missile into place and arm it with a nuclear warhead before sealing it inside the silo by sliding on a 110-ton cap made of reinforced concrete.
Now the entire system is set to be replaced. Changing out the missiles, silos, command hubs and roughly 7,500 miles of underground cables snaking under the property of thousands of landowners will be one of the most expensive projects in military history, rivaled only in scale and technical complexity by the operation to build the Interstate System of highways.
For the past two years, representatives of the Air Force have fanned out across the northern Great Plains to talk to residents about the plans. Construction crews have begun work on support buildings at F.E. Warren Air Force Base in Wyoming. The hope is to open new silos through the next two decades — but the project could go well beyond that, given the current delays — and steadily bring the Sentinel system online while maintaining the old Minuteman III system until it’s fully replaced. Up to 3,000 laborers will descend on dozens of small towns to live in temporary camps, potentially doubling or tripling the local populations for however long they need to be there.
Robin Darnall, a county commissioner, wants to ensure that missile construction doesn’t affect roads for farmers during harvest time in Nebraska.
The Air Force does not yet know how or where the workers will be housed, which is a concern for some people living in these missile-hosting towns, many of which have only one or two law enforcement officers. Robin Darnall, a commissioner for Banner County in western Nebraska, says she’s focused on how to balance the influx of workers along with the safety of farming and ranching families, whose forebears, in some cases, arrived there in homesteading days. “I feel like we need to increase our law enforcement in Banner County for this project,” she says. “Our sheriff can’t do that all and satisfy his current responsibilities.”
When the Air Force installed missiles there in the 1960s, locals enthusiastically embraced the idea of providing a home to a critical national security project aimed at defeating the Soviets. The arms race was on, after all. But today, like in most of America, the grave threat of nuclear war barely registers to many residents of the heartland, even if classified work is happening beneath the communities they live in.
Buried 60 to 70 feet under the farmland surrounding Malmstrom Air Force Base near Great Falls, Mont., 15 missile launch-control centers are secured with blast-proof steel and concrete doors.
Inside each center, two Air Force officers sit on 24-hour alert, awaiting the president’s direct order to launch any — or all — of the nuclear-tipped missiles.
The entire Minuteman III system, so named because its missiles can reach nearly any target on Earth in 30 minutes or less, possesses less computational power than a modern smartphone.
In the Great Plains, too, things are taking longer than they should. The missile modernization program, called LGM-35A Sentinel, was first estimated to cost about $96 billion in 2020, when the defense company Northrop Grumman won the initial contract to build the system. The price tag has since skyrocketed, with current costs pegged at around $141 billion, a cost increase so severe that it triggered the Nunn-McCurdy Act, which requires the Pentagon and Congress to evaluate whether to cancel troubled programs. The government is reviewing the details but has already decided to move forward with building the new missiles.
Walter Schweitzer passes a missile silo almost every day on his way to work as president of the Montana Farmers Union. He and his members are military supporters but are increasingly concerned with the lack of information provided by the Air Force. Another point of contention involves restrictions around the silos, such as forbidding wind farms within a two-mile radius. “Unless you’re prepared to reimburse property owners the loss of their rights, then the farmers’ union can’t support that,” Mr. Schweitzer says. “No way. No how.”
80 plutonium pits
per year will be produced by
4,500 workers
in a process estimated to take
$30 billion $30 billion The Plutonium
The Plutonium
New Mexico
South Carolina
The physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer chose a remote plateau in northern New Mexico to build Los Alamos, the lab that made the world’s first nuclear weapon.
Today the lab employs more people than ever to help mass-produce plutonium cores, a critical component of America’s nuclear warheads.
Outside the lab, the scenic town of Los Alamos, N.M., is being renovated with all manner of construction projects to accommodate the new arrivals. Inside the lab, technicians and scientists are busily melting, refining and shaping plutonium into grapefruit-size cores that trigger the explosions in nuclear bombs.
Manufacturing plutonium pits, which is what the nuclear industry calls them, can be a messy and dangerous business. The radioactive metal has to be shaped into hollow spheres. Workers do this by handling it with rubber gloves inside workstations called glove boxes. It takes skill and nearly a year of training to become comfortable working with such perilous material. A tiny shaving of plutonium can kill a person if it is inhaled. Accounting for every bit of it is crucial.
In 2018, Congress directed Los Alamos, which is overseen by the National Nuclear Security Administration, to produce 30 plutonium pits a year by 2026. The agency plans to manufacture an additional 50 pits a year at a larger facility in Savannah River, S.C. The pits will go into the warheads that are affixed to the new Sentinel missiles.
Some progress is being made: On Oct. 1, Los Alamos produced the first pit certified to enter the war reserve. But meeting the full production mark won’t happen until the mid-2030s, at the earliest, the National Nuclear Security Administration says, as the cost estimate has climbed to more than $28 billion. The upside is the delays won’t hurt as much because everything is behind schedule, including the missiles.
The last time the United States was mass-producing plutonium pits, it didn’t go well. The Rocky Flats production site in Colorado was the last place to do it. In 1989 the facility, overseen by the Energy Department, was raided by the F.B.I. and Environmental Protection Agency and later shut down after rampant environmental violations were discovered. It was a rare episode in U.S. history in which one federal agency raided another.
Los Alamos National Lab’s yearly budget has increased to a record high of over $5 billion — a more than 50 percent increase from five years ago.
The output at Rocky Flats, which at one point during the Cold War hit 1,000 pits per year, dwarfs the modern ambitions of Los Alamos. Still, the new production is expected to generate levels of radiological and hazardous waste that the lab has not experienced. This comes on top of the contamination already present, which the government estimates will cost some $7 billion to clean up. “We’re endangering our community for an unnecessary arms race that puts us all at risk,” says Jay Coghlan, the executive director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico, a Santa Fe-based watchdog.
Jay Coghlan stands near an anti-nuclear-weapons sign that his organization erected along a highway that leads to Los Alamos.
Environmental contamination isn’t the only concern that Los Alamos’s neighbors have. The Los Alamos County Council recently passed a $377 million budget for fiscal year 2025 — an eye-popping sum for a population of just 19,400. County officials say their primary focus is housing and amenities. The lab hired 4,000 employees over the past two years, and it’s been a struggle to find homes for them all. A recent study found they have a housing shortfall of at least 1,300 units, which county officials attribute largely to the lab expansion.
Los Alamos’s strategic location, nestled between canyons, poses a vexing challenge. The limited space creates transportation problems in and out of the town, which has led to a spate of auto accidents, including one in September in which a former lab director, Charles McMillan, was killed. To alleviate traffic, money is also going into infrastructure improvements and an expansion of the Atomic City Transit system.
“Our whole community has changed with this new bomb factory,” says Greg Mello, the executive director at the Los Alamos Study Group, a nonprofit watchdog that is critical of the nuclear weapons complex’s expansion. “There’s no telling where it will end.”
A replica of the original Los Alamos site main gate now stands near the entrance of the modern day town.
Last century, the world watched in horror as the number of nuclear weapons around the globe rocketed from approximately 3,000 warheads in 1955 to more than 70,000 by the late 1980s. It took time for nuclear nations to grasp the mutual vulnerability, the financial investment and general insanity of the arms race. Cooler heads prevailed. International treaties were signed. Now there are an estimated 12,000 nuclear weapons in the world.
All of the progress meticulously made over the past 40 years is now at risk. Agreements are being abandoned rather than forged. The future of arms control appears bleak. The United States is considering increasing the number of weapons in its arsenal — not just replacing the old ones — after the New Start Treaty with Russia expires in February 2026. If such a decision is made, foreign adversaries will certainly follow suit.
After all, decisions about an arsenal in one nation trigger rethinking among them all. Since the United States first took concrete steps toward rebuilding its weapons in 2010, the eight other nuclear-armed nations are believed to have expanded or enhanced theirs. Russia has overhauled its nuclear arsenal. China is on track to double the number of its nuclear warheads by the decade’s end and may continue building, according to U.S. intelligence estimates.
It is undeniably true that the world is becoming more contentious, and nuclear weapons do deter our adversaries. But it’s also true that our children will inherit this — the nationwide nuclear complex revitalization, the astronomical bill, the potential for confrontation. Congress decided that America needed new weapons when it first allocated funding to their replacement more than a decade ago. But it’s clear, after I visited these places, that the American people have not. Even in communities where this work is happening, there is too little awareness about what’s occurring, let alone in the rest of the country.
Our next president will have to decide whether America needs these new weapons. Americans deserve to know more about the candidates’ views, how our money is being spent and what’s at stake. After all, the weapons under development using taxpayer dollars are expected to be with us well into the next century. And if any one of them were ever used, it would fundamentally change the course of human history.
So should Americans brace for another arms race? Another Cold War? To put it in perspective: The Manhattan Project cost about $30 billion, adjusted for inflation, over the course of World War II. The United States is on pace to spend nearly double that amount each year for at least 30 years. It’s time to reflect on whether we are on a path toward a brighter future or headed back to a darker past.
W.J. Hennigan writes about national security issues for Opinion from Washington, D.C. He has reported from more than two dozen countries, covering war, the arms trade and the lives of U.S. service members. Additional reporting by Spencer Cohen.
An-My Lê, whose work exploring themes of displacement and war was the subject of a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, is an arts professor at Bard College.
This Times Opinion series is funded through philanthropic grants from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, Outrider Foundation and the Prospect Hill Foundation. Funders have no control over the selection or focus of articles or the editing process and do not review articles before publication. The Times retains full editorial control.
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