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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for nutherguy:

How Do We Know the Nukes Still Work?:

Though the treaty explicitly banning all nuclear weapons tests has not yet entered into force, the United States has not detonated a nuclear weapon since 1992. The American nuclear strategy still relies on the nuclear weapons working, but without full-scale tests, the Department of Energy's National Labs now operate the Stockpile Stewardship program, which relies on theory, simulations, and experiments to deliver annual weapons assessments to the federal government.

[...] "The [Stockpile Stewardship program] has gone through a number of administrations, and the Defense Department hasn't said that we have to go back to testing," Victor "Vic" Reis, former assistant secretary of energy for defense programs at the Department of Energy and one of the program's architects, told Gizmodo. "We understand enough of what's happening with the current stockpile of weapons—they're safe and reliable."

Reis teamed up with senior scientists and military personnel to draft a program that could validate the performance of the weapons and simulate the effects of aging on the weapons and their safety—what he called Science Based Stockpile Stewardship. [...] However, there wasn't nearly enough computing capacity to run all of the required simulations. Fortunately, Reis had previously been the director of DARPA and convinced a manager there to lead what would become the Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative, a program that would significantly increase the computing power available to the weapons labs. Today, the Stockpile Stewardship program operates on a three-pillared approach, combining theory, simulation, and experiment, and runs mainly out of those three labs as well as the Nevada National Security Site.

[...] Understanding how the weapons age is a crucial component to the simulations. "There's a whole aspect of what happens to various materials and how they interact with metals, or with components of the devices themselves, that's all aging. We have no data on what happens when something is 40 years old," Irene Qualters, associate laboratory director for simulation and computation at Los Alamos National Lab, told Gizmodo.

[...] Reis told Gizmodo that he thinks the strategy should last at least another generation. The U.S. has found an effective workaround to true nuclear testing—it's not quite as showy as nuking ships in the Pacific, but scientists each year report to Congress with 100 percent confidence that the nuclear arsenal is reliable.

"But beyond 20 to 25 years, who knows," Reis said. Future politicians will eventually have to decide what to do about the aging nuclear arsenal.

Original Submission