Step inside the secret lab where America tests its nukes

Step inside the secret lab where America tests its nukes toggle caption National Nuclear Security Administration/Nevada National Security Site FRENCHMAN FLAT, Nev. — In the middle of a dry lakebed northwest of Las Vegas sits a lone section of a bridge, its steel girders bent like spaghetti. toggle caption NNSS/NNSA "You didn't need to do nuclear tests to do what you needed to do for the foreseeable future, which is to make sure the nuclear weapons you had worked," he says. The stockpile stewardship program broadly consists of two arms — supercomputers at the nation's major nuclear weapons labs are used to conduct large-scale digital simulations of nuclear weapons from "button to boom." Last fall, Russia's Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov told the state-run Tass news agency that the test site was "fully prepared for a resumption of nuclear tests." In the July issue of Foreign Affairs, Trump's former national security adviser, Robert O'Brien, wrote that to keep up with China and Russia, "Washington must test new nuclear weapons for reliability and safety in the real world for the first time since 1992 — not just by using computer models."