On a recent Wednesday, ten students filed into a classroom at Northern New Mexico College, in the town of Española, to learn about the dangers of nuclear radiation. The students ranged in age from nineteen to forty-four. Most of them were in a program designed to train radiation-control technicians to work at Los Alamos National Laboratory, the birthplace of the atomic bomb, which is once again rapidly expanding to supply the nation with nuclear weapons.
Los Alamos was built in secret during the Second World War—J. Robert Oppenheimer directed the lab there as part of the Manhattan Project. The town hovers high above the Española valley, on a handsome mesa called the Pajarito Plateau. Originally, the only way to access the enclave was through two gates. Today, it accepts visitors but remains a company town, housing many of the lab’s scientists and high-level staffers. The community has a population of about thirteen thousand, and boasts one of the nation’s densest concentrations of millionaires. In New Mexico, such wealth is rare. Española, which sits on the Rio Grande and is a twenty-five-minute drive away, has a median household income of fifty thousand dollars, a poverty rate approaching twenty per cent, and an entrenched fentanyl crisis.
Northern’s small campus, where cottonwood trees front adobe-colored buildings, is usually quiet, since many of its students commute or study online. The school offers both a trades program and what it calls the most affordable bachelor’s degree in the Southwest. Many students are studying for a career in social work, to combat the ravages of drugs, or hoping to secure a job at the lab. An Air Force veteran named Scott Braley teaches all of the school’s radiation-safety courses. He often wears a T-shirt that reads “Radiate Positivity.”
When I visited, Braley and his students were midway through an introductory safety course. The lecture focussed not on Chernobyl or Fukushima but on less catastrophic accidents, including an incident at an Iranian oil refinery in which a janitor accidentally picked up radioactive equipment, and a medical-exposure case involving breast-cancer patients. “This is the scale of event I worry about,” Braley said. If a wildfire overtook the lab, or Russia launched an attack on New Mexico, which represents the nexus of America’s nuclear-weapons complex, there would not be much for a lab technician to do. Braley wanted students to consider quotidian risks that they could prevent themselves. “We’ve had fatalities at Los Alamos,” he told them. News articles highlighting lapses at the lab were pinned on a bulletin board outside his office. Next to one story, about a Los Alamos worker who took a radioactive swipe home, he had scrawled, “Don’t do that!”
In recent years, Los Alamos has been essential to a sweeping 1.7-trillion-dollar update of the country’s nuclear arsenal, which comes as China expands its atomic-weapons program and Russia assumes a newly confrontational stance. The U.S. government has nearly five thousand nuclear warheads, close to two thousand of which are deployed inside submarines, bombs, and intercontinental ballistic missiles. It also has thousands of plutonium pits—the fissionable cores of those warheads—in storage. But the plutonium in the stockpile is aging. Despite statements from groups such as the Union of Concerned Scientists, which argue that the arsenal remains sufficiently deadly to serve as deterrence, the government insists that it needs new warheads.
The nuclear-weapons overhaul involves facilities spread out across the United States. Its projects include fabricating new missiles, installing thousands of miles of fibre-optic transmission lines, building new computer centers at Air Force bases, and refurbishing the underground chambers where missileers control weapons. But Los Alamos is the only lab that is capable of actually producing the plutonium pits. (A second facility, in South Carolina, hopes to begin producing pits by 2032, but it is still under construction.) In the past two years, the lab has hired two thousand and seven hundred new employees. Traffic often clogs the road winding from Española, past the Pueblo de San Ildefonso and up the Pajarito Plateau. The private contractors who run the lab—Triad, which develops warheads, and N3B, which cleans up old waste from the Manhattan Project—have urgently recruited radiation technicians, electricians, welders, and even writers for its communications team. (Its staff includes former journalists from Outside magazine, which moved from Santa Fe to Boulder a few years ago.)
To support the boom, Los Alamos has invested millions of dollars in vocational pipeline programs at local colleges. Some of these programs teach transferrable skills—welding, electrical work. Others, like the radiation-tech program at Northern, are more likely to keep graduates tethered to Los Alamos. Radiation technicians at the lab use Geiger counters to make sure that scientists’ radiation levels are within a healthy range. They also monitor the rooms where workers move radioactive materials into secure containers. Salaries range from sixty-six thousand dollars to nearly twice that amount. On Española’s outskirts, near signs warning about fentanyl, billboards advertise the pipeline program with patriotic verve: “Support our community, serve our nation.”
New Mexico’s state budget is just above ten billion dollars. The federal government spends about as much money on just two laboratories: Sandia, in Albuquerque, which designs weapon components such as detonators, and Los Alamos. Kirtland Air Force Base, which stores nuclear weapons, has a budget of nearly two billion dollars. An underground nuclear-waste repository in New Mexico’s southern desert also receives federal funding; after a fire and an unrelated radiological release at the facility, ten years ago, the Department of Energy spent nearly five hundred million dollars on an update to its safety infrastructure. “It’s gone from being a company town to being a company state,” Zia Mian, the co-director of a program on science and global security at Princeton, said.
The interns in Braley’s class were already training with Triad and N3B. “They recruit us, send us to school, and pay for our school,” a student named Stevannah Marquez, who had grown up in the nearby village of Chimayó, said. Marquez, who is twenty-five, wore a Care Bears T-shirt and a necklace adorned with a cross. She had a job as a dialysis technician, but it paid less than what she expected to earn at Los Alamos. “An opportunity is given by God,” she said.
America’s rearmament is rooted in a deal that Barack Obama struck with Congress in 2010. Obama was strongly aligned with the philosophy of nuclear non-proliferation, which had driven a steady reduction in the U.S. stockpile since the end of the Cold War. His soaring rhetoric about a world free of nuclear weapons had helped win him the Nobel Peace Prize, and his views had bipartisan support. But, in many states, weapons production meant jobs. When Obama was working to secure congressional support for a nuclear-coöperation agreement with Moscow, Republican senators asked, in return, that he sign off on modernizing the country’s arsenal. He agreed.
At that point, nuclear-weapons development in Los Alamos was only one part of the lab’s remit. Its scientists had also carried out advanced research into nuclear energy, hydraulic fracturing, hydrogen storage, fuel-cell development, and carbon capture and sequestration. But, in 2015, Congress instructed the National Nuclear Security Administration to prepare to build new warheads, and Los Alamos refocussed its mission. A scientist there told me, “The center of mass has shifted from ‘We are a multipurpose lab’ to ‘We are an honest-to-goodness weapons laboratory, and that’s what’s going to dominate.’ ” He likened it to a factory.
The lab is supposed to be building the capacity to produce thirty war-ready plutonium pits per year. So far, it has created just one, even as the budget has tripled. Mounting international tensions have only increased the pressure. According to the Defense Department, China has developed more than six hundred operational nuclear warheads, and it could have twice as many by 2030. The treaty that Obama signed with Russia in 2010 expires next year, and it is not expected to be renewed. Last June, in an address recorded for the annual meeting of the Arms Control Association, António Guterres, the Secretary-General of the United Nations, warned of the creeping threat of nuclear war. “Humanity is on a knife’s edge,” he said. In 2023, Russia de-ratified a landmark nuclear-testing-ban treaty, and in November, following Ukraine’s use of long-range American missiles, Vladimir Putin lowered his country’s threshold for the use of nuclear weapons.
Donald Trump’s stance on nuclear weapons has been one of obsessive and reckless bombast. During his first term, Trump reportedly said, “If nuclear war happens, we won’t be second in line pressing the button.” He used social media to brag about the size of the U.S. arsenal and taunted Kim Jong Un, the leader of North Korea. His Administration also signalled interest in reviving America’s defunct underground weapons-testing program. In preparation for his second term, he has adopted Ronald Reagan’s old motto—“Peace through strength.” But his military aims have been difficult to pin down, and the views of his presumptive cabinet are scattershot. Sharon Weiner, a professor of foreign policy and global security at American University, said that Trump’s nominees appear “willing to violate norms and rules that have been in place for a long time.”
