As the Los Alamos physicist Herbert Anderson later recalled<\/a>, \u201cFor the first two days the two teams were neck and neck \u2014 the hand-calculators were very good. But it turned out that they tired and couldn\u2019t keep up their fast pace. The punched-card machines didn\u2019t tire, and in the next day or two they forged ahead. Finally everyone had to concede that the new system was an improvement.\u201d<\/p>\n Today, at Los Alamos, a similar dynamic is taking place, as scientists at the lab increasingly rely on artificial intelligence tools for their most ambitious research. Like their punch-card ancestors, today\u2019s AI models have a leg up on human researchers simply by virtue of not having to eat, sleep, or take breaks. Scientists say they\u2019re also approaching tough problems in entirely new and unexpected ways, changing how research is conducted at one of America\u2019s largest scientific institutions.<\/p>\n In recent weeks, in the wake of the feud<\/a> between the Pentagon and Anthropic, as well as the reported use of AI software for targeting<\/a> during the war in Iran, the partnership between the US military and leading AI companies has become a highly charged political topic. Less discussed has been the already extensive cooperation between these firms and the country\u2019s nuclear weapons complex, under the supervision of the Department of Energy.<\/p>\n Last year, the Los Alamos National Lab (LANL) entered a partnership with OpenAI allowing it to install<\/a> the company\u2019s popular ChatGPT AI system on Venado, one of the world\u2019s most powerful supercomputers. As of August, Venado was placed on a classified network, meaning that the AI chatbot now has access to some of the country\u2019s most sensitive scientific data on nuclear weapons.<\/p>\n Supercomputers at Los Alamos\u2019s high-performance computing center. Provided by Los Alamos National Laboratory\/Joey Montoya, photographer<\/p>\n Supercomputers at Los Alamos\u2019s high-performance computing center. Provided by Los Alamos National Laboratory\/Joey Montoya, photographer<\/p>\n Supercomputers at Los Alamos\u2019s high-performance computing center. Provided by Los Alamos National Laboratory\/Joey Montoya, photographer<\/p>\n That wasn\u2019t all. Later last year, the Department of Energy, which oversees Los Alamos and the country\u2019s 16 other national laboratories, announced a $320 million initiative<\/a> known as the Genesis Mission<\/a>, which aims to \u201charness the current AI and advanced computing revolution to double the productivity and impact of American science and engineering within a decade.\u201d<\/p>\n Few people are in a better position to think about the upsides and downsides of revolutionary new technologies than the people who today populate the mesa once occupied by Robert Oppenheimer, Feynman, and the other pioneers of the nuclear age. But when I visited the lab in January, I found that the researchers there were remarkably sanguine about the more existential risks that often come up in conversation about AI, even as they worked on the production of the world\u2019s most dangerous weapons.<\/p>\n \u201cThey think we\u2019re building Skynet; that\u2019s not what\u2019s going on here at all,\u201d LANL\u2019s deputy director of weapons, Bob Webster, said, referring to the superintelligent system from the Terminator movies. Geoff Fairchild, deputy director for the National Security AI Office, volunteered that he does not have a \u201cp(doom)<\/a>,\u201d the Silicon Valley shorthand for how likely one believes it is that AI will lead to globally catastrophic outcomes, and doesn\u2019t believe most of his colleagues do either. \u201cWe don\u2019t talk about it. I don\u2019t think I\u2019ve ever had that conversation,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n For Alex Scheinker, a physicist who uses AI for the maintenance and operation of LANL\u2019s massive particle accelerator, AI is an extraordinarily useful tool, but a tool nonetheless. \u201cIt\u2019s just more math,\u201d he said. \u201cI don\u2019t like to think about it like it\u2019s magic.\u201d<\/p>\n Still, the nuclear-AI comparison is unavoidable. Given the technology\u2019s transformative potential, the dangers it could pose to humanity, and the potential for an innovation \u201carms race\u201d between the United States and its international rivals, the current state of AI has frequently been compared to the early days of the nuclear age. And how people feel about the Manhattan Project \u2014 a triumphant union between the national security state and scientific visionaries? Or humanity opening Pandora\u2019s box? \u2014 likely has a lot to do with how they view their work now.<\/p>\n Those making the comparison include OpenAI CEO Sam Altman who is fond of quoting Oppenheimer<\/a>, and expressed disappointment<\/a> that the 2023 biopic of the Los Alamos founder wasn\u2019t the kind of movie that \u201cwould inspire a generation of kids to be physicists.\u201d One of the film\u2019s central conflicts is how a guilt-stricken Oppenheimer spent much of the second half of his life in an unsuccessful quest to control the spread of his creation. (Disclosure: Vox Media is one of several publishers that have signed partnership agreements with OpenAI. Our reporting remains editorially independent.)<\/p>\n The Trump administration has been explicit about the comparison. In the executive order announcing the mission, the White House invoked<\/a> the creation of the atomic bomb, writing, \u201cIn this pivotal moment, the challenges we face require a historic national effort, comparable in urgency and ambition to the Manhattan Project that was instrumental to our victory in World War II.\u201d<\/p>\n But if we really are in a new \u201cManhattan Project\u201d moment, you wouldn\u2019t know it in the place where the original Manhattan Project took place.<\/p>\n \u201cThe world\u2019s nuclear information is right in there. You\u2019re looking at it,\u201d LANL\u2019s director for high performance computing, Gary Grider, told me during my visit to Los Alamos in January.<\/p>\n We were staring through a glass window at a densely packed shelf of magnetic tapes, each of which could be accessed and read via a robotic system that resembled a high-end vending machine more than a hyperintelligent doomsday computer. The machine we were staring into contained nuclear data so sensitive it\u2019s kept on physical drives rather than an accessible network, not that any of the data stored in the room I was standing in is exactly open source.<\/p>\n Magnetic tapes containing nuclear testing information at Los Alamos\u2019s high-performance computing center. Provided by Los Alamos National Laboratory\/Joey Montoya, photographer<\/p>\n I was in Los Alamos\u2019s high-performance computing complex, a vast, brightly lit, 44,000-square-foot room in a building named for Nicholas Metropolis<\/a>, containing six supercomputers with space cleared out for two more. The first thing that strikes visitors to the computing center, the refrigerator-like temperature and the roar of the overhead fans, both evidence of the gargantuan effort, in money and megawatts, that it takes to keep these machines cool. \u201cGoing into high-performance computing, I never thought that I\u2019d be spending this much of my time thinking about power and water,\u201d Grider told me. Computing at Los Alamos is an insatiable beast: The average lifespan of a supercomputer, the cost of which can run into the hundreds of millions of dollars, was once around five to six years. Now it\u2019s around three to five.<\/p>\n Cutting-edge computing<\/a> has been intertwined with the American nuclear enterprise from the beginning. Los Alamos scientists used the world\u2019s first digital computer, ENIAC, to test the feasibility of a thermonuclear weapon. The lab got its own purpose-built cutting-edge computer, MANIAC, in the early \u201950s. In addition to playing a role in the development of the hydrogen bomb, MANIAC was the first computer to beat a human at chess<\/a>\u2026sort of. It played on a 6×6 board without bishops and took around 20 minutes to make a move. In 1976, the Cray-1<\/a>, one of the earliest supercomputers, was installed at Los Alamos. Weighing more than 10,000 pounds, it was the fastest and most powerful computer in the world at the time, though it would be no match for a modern iPhone.<\/p>\n Signatures of lab officials and executives, including Nvidia\u2019s Jensen Huang, on the Venado Supercomputer. Provided by Los Alamos National Laboratory\/Joey Montoya, photographer<\/p>\n I had visited Los Alamos to see MANIAC and Cray\u2019s descendant, Venado, comprised of dozens of quietly humming 8-foot tall cabinets. Currently ranked as the 22nd most powerful computer<\/a> in the world, Venado was built in collaboration with the supercomputer builder HPE Cray and chip giant Nvidia, which provided some 3,480 of its superchips for the system. It is capable of around 10 exaflops of computing \u2014 about 10 quintillion calculations per second. The signatures of executives, including Nvidia\u2019s Jensen Huang, adorn one of the cabinets.<\/p>\n Last May, OpenAI representative, accompanied by armed security, arrived at Los Alamos bearing locked metal briefcases containing the \u201cmodel weights\u201d \u2014 the parameters used by AI systems to process training data \u2014 for its ChatGPT 03 model, for installation on Venado. It was the first time this type of reasoning model had been applied to national security problems on a system of this kind.<\/p>\n LANL\u2019s computers are a closed system not connected to the wider internet, but the OpenAI software installed on Venado brings with it learning it has acquired since the company started developing it. Officials at the lab were not about to let a visiting reporter start asking the AI itself questions, but from all accounts, its users interface with it from their desktop computers essentially the same way the rest of us have learned to talk to ChatGPT or other chatbots when we\u2019re generating memes or brainstorming weeknight recipes.<\/p>\n Those users include scientists at LANL itself as well as the country\u2019s other main nuclear labs \u2014 Sandia, in nearby Albuquerque, and Lawrence Livermore, near San Francisco. Grider says demand for the new tool was immediately overwhelming. \u201cI was surprised how fast people became dependent on it,\u201d he told me.<\/p>\n Initially, the system was used for a wide array of scientific research, but in August, Venado was moved onto a secure network so it could be used on weapons research, in the hope that it can become an invaluable part of the effort to maintain America\u2019s nuclear arsenal.<\/p>\n Whatever your attitude toward nuclear weapons, Los Alamos researchers argue that as long as we have them, we want to make sure they work.<\/p>\n Since the 1990s, the United States \u2014 along with every other country other than North Korea, has been out of the live nuclear testing business<\/a>, notwithstanding Trump\u2019s recent social media posts on the subject. But between the original Trinity detonation in 1945 and the most recent blast in an underground site in 1992, the United States conducted more than 1,000 nuclear tests, acquiring vast stores of information in the process. That information is now training data for artificial intelligence that can help the lab ensure that America\u2019s nukes work without actually blowing one up.<\/p>\n Venado is effectively a massive simulation machine to test how a weapon would respond to being put under unique forms of stress in real-world conditions. We can \u201ctake a weapon and give it the disease that we want and then blow it up 1000 different ways,\u201d as Grider puts it.<\/p>\n In some ways this fulfills the vision of Los Alamos\u2019s founder Robert Oppenheimer, who opposed further nuclear tests after Hiroshima<\/a> and Nagasaki on the grounds that we already knew these weapons worked and any other questions could be answered by \u201csimple laboratory methods.\u201d<\/p>\n Those methods are not so simple today. When Webster, the LANL deputy director of weapons, first got involved in nuclear testing in the 1980s, the \u201cstate of computing that we had was extremely primitive,\u201d he said, and not a viable substitute for gathering new data. Today, he says, \u201cwe\u2019re doing calculations I could only dream of doing\u201d before.<\/p>\n Mike Lang, director of the lab\u2019s National Security AI Office, suggested that using AI tools to analyze the data kept \u201cbehind the fence\u201d could not only ensure the weapons work, but also improve them. \u201cWe\u2019re using [the same] materials that we\u2019ve been using for a very long time,\u201d he said. \u201cCould we make a new high explosive that is less reactive, so you can drop it, and nothing happens? [Or] that\u2019s not made with toxic chemicals, so people handling it would be safer from exposures? We can go through and look at some of the components of our nuclear deterrence, and see how we can make it cheaper to manufacture, easier to manufacture, safer to manufacture.\u201d<\/p>\n Whatever your attitude toward nuclear weapons, Los Alamos researchers argue that as long as we have them, we want to make sure they work.<\/p>\n \u201cWe don\u2019t build the weapons to do something stupid,\u201d Webster said. \u201cWe build them not to do something stupid.\u201d<\/p>\n The Los Alamos lab\u2019s mesa location, an oasis of pines in the midst of a stark desert landscape, is known to locals as \u201cthe Hill.\u201d About 45 minutes north of Santa Fe (on today\u2019s roads, that is), it was chosen during World War II for its remoteness, defensibility, and natural beauty. Oppenheimer, who had traveled in the region since his youth, had long expressed a desire to combine his two main loves, \u201cphysics and desert country.\u201d<\/p>\n Eight decades after the days of Oppenheimer, the sprawling fenced-off Los Alamos campus feels a bit like a university town without the young people. Los Alamos County is the wealthiest in New Mexico and has the highest number of PhDs per capita in the country. The lab has around 18,000 employees and the population has boomed since the lab resumed production of plutonium pits<\/a> \u2014 the explosive cores of nuclear weapons \u2014 as part of America\u2019s ongoing $1.7 trillion nuclear modernization program. Federal officials recently adopted a plan for a significant expansion of the lab<\/a>, including an additional supercomputing complex, which critics say fails to take account of the environmental impact of the facility\u2019s electricity and water use as well as the hazardous waste caused by pit production.<\/p>\n \u201cGun site, the facility when the \u201cLittle Boy\u201d bomb dropped on Hiroshima was assembled. Provided by Los Alamos National Laboratory\/Joey Montoya, photographer<\/p>\n Officials at Los Alamos are quick to point out that despite what the lab is best known for, scientists there are working on more than just weapons of mass destruction. During my tour, I met with chemists using AI to design new targeted radiation therapies to improve cancer treatment and visited the Los Alamos Neutron Science Center, a kilometer-long particle accelerator that, in addition to weapons research, produces isotopes for medical research and pure physics experiments.<\/p>\n Critics point out<\/a> that the vast majority of its budget is still devoted to weapons research, but still, Los Alamos is one of the best places in the world to observe the seismic impact AI is having on how scientific research is conducted. When the decision was made to move Venado onto a secure network, it cut off a number of ongoing scientific research projects, which is one big reason why two new supercomputers, known as Mission and Vision, are planned to debut this summer. Both are designed specifically for AI applications \u2014 one for weapons research, one for less classified scientific work.<\/p>\n AI projects, including at Los Alamos, are often criticized for their power use, but scientists at the lab say their work could ultimately result in safer and more abundant energy. There\u2019s a long-running joke that nuclear fusion technology, which could deliver clean power in vast quantities, is perpetually 20 years away. LANL scientists are hopeful that AI could help crack the remaining scientific breakthroughs needed to get it off the ground. Several researchers mentioned the potential use of AI tools to design heat-resistant materials for use in nuclear fusion reactors. Scientists at LANL\u2019s sister lab, Livermore, achieved the world\u2019s first fusion ignition reaction a few years ago, though it lasted only a few billionths of a second. \u201cThe thing that excites me\u2026is the notion that we can move out of this computational world and start interacting with these experimental facilities,\u201d said Earl Lawrence, chief scientist at the National Security AI Office.<\/p>\n Researchers increasingly use AI for \u201chypothesis generation,\u201d devising new potential compounds or materials for testing. But the main feature of AI that excited the Los Alamos scientists I spoke with the most harkens back to what Metropolis and Feynman discovered about using early computers 80 years ago: It can do more work, faster, and without breaks than any human. Increasingly, it can do the sort of physical real-world experiments that post-docs and junior researchers were responsible for as well.<\/p>\n Asked about how he envisioned the future of scientific research in a world of AI, Lawrence quipped, \u201cI hope it\u2019s more coffee shops and walks in the woods.\u201d Grider, a career computer programmer, said, \u201cI hope to hell we can get out of the code business.\u201d<\/p>\n There are downsides to that ease, as well. The sort of grunt work that AI can now do more efficiently is how scientists once learned their craft, assisting senior scientists with research. As in other fields, the pathways to those careers could narrow.<\/p>\n \u201cWe need to be intentional about how we train the next generation of scientists,\u201d Lawrence said.<\/p>\n From the atomic age to the AI age<\/p>\n Reminders of Los Alamos\u2019s history are everywhere on the Mesa. During my visit to the lab, I toured the sites, now eerie abandoned historical monuments maintained by the National Parks Service, where the bomb detonated by Oppenheimer and company in the 1945 Trinity test, and Little Boy, dropped on Hiroshima, were assembled. They\u2019re possibly the only US National Parks locations where visiting involves a safety briefing on radiation and nearby live explosives testing.<\/p>\n 1\/5Industrial boilers used in the original Manhattan Project. Provided by Los Alamos National Laboratory\/Joey Montoya, photographer<\/p>\n But the heirs to Oppenheimer and Feynman have mixed feelings about the Manhattan Project metaphor when it comes to AI.<\/p>\n Lang felt it was a mistake to characterize AI as a weapon, or frame development as an arms race, with China the main competitor this time instead of Germany. He preferred to think of today\u2019s research as continuing the Manhattan Project\u2019s model of \u201cgiving a bunch of multidisciplined scientists a goal to really go after and try to make progress on.\u201d Others pointed to the scientists who were concerned at the time about the risk of a nuclear explosion igniting the earth\u2019s atmosphere<\/a> as somewhat equivalent to today\u2019s AI \u201cdoomers.\u201d<\/p>\n There\u2019s also a fundamental difference between the two in how knowledge is disseminated. \u201cIn the very early days of nuclear energy, there were only a handful of people who had the knowledge and understanding to even know what was going on,\u201d said Fairchild, the deputy director for LANL\u2019s National Security AI Office. Plus, supplies of uranium and plutonium could be tightly controlled. \u201cThese days, everybody knows what\u2019s going on…and much of it is happening in open source.\u201d<\/p>\n AI is also developing in a very different way from previous technologies with national security implications. In the past, the government and military have often dictated academic research into futuristic tech to meet their own needs, with commercial applications only being found later: The internet may be the prime example<\/a>. Now, as LANL\u2019s partnership with OpenAI shows, it\u2019s the government and military racing to react to cutting-edge applications developed first by private industry for commercial use.<\/p>\n \u201cFor the very first time, I would argue, on a really big scale, we find ourselves not in a leadership role here,\u201d said Aric Hagberg, leader of LANL\u2019s computational sciences division.<\/p>\n There may also be an AI-atomic parallel in the sheer size of investment proponents should be devoted to the advancement of the technology. Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI\u2019s former chief scientist once remarked (maybe jokingly) that in a world of superintelligent AI<\/a> \u201cit\u2019s pretty likely the entire surface of the Earth will be covered with solar panels and data centers.\u201d The remark brings to mind another one by the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Niels Bohr,<\/a> who had been skeptical that the United States would be able to build an atomic bomb \u201cwithout turning the whole country into a factory.\u201d When Bohr first visited Los Alamos, he felt, stunned, that the Americans had \u201cdone just that.\u201d<\/p>\n The majority of the Manhattan Project was not the work done on chalkboards on the Hill by physicists, but the industrial scale efforts to enrich uranium and produce plutonium in Oak Ridge, Tennessee and Hanford, Washington. The latter site, carried out in large part by chemical firm Dupont \u2014 a \u201cpublic-private partnership\u201d of its era \u2014 produced radioactive waste that is still being cleaned up today<\/a>. Likewise, the work of producing the AI future is as much or if not more about a massive build-out of data centers and the power needed to keep them cool and humming as it is the cutting edge research coming out of Silicon Valley or government labs.<\/p>\n When you visit Los Alamos, it\u2019s hard not to be struck by the amount of ingenuity \u2014 in everything from nuclear physics, to explosive design, to revolutionary new techniques in high-speed photography<\/a> \u2014 as well as the sheer industrial output that turned theoretical physics into a workable bomb in just three years.<\/p>\n You can still see the raw intellectual talent and can-do spirit that built the most advanced civilization the world has ever seen at Los Alamos today, and can easily imagine how it might build an even better one tomorrow. But it\u2019s also impossible not to wonder if you\u2019re seeing something else: Humanity\u2019s thirst for power over the material world meeting with its instincts toward fear and aggression to engineer new nightmares. Perhaps we\u2019ll get an answer soon.<\/p>\n This story was produced in partnership with Outrider Foundation<\/a> and Journalism Funding Partners<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"If there\u2019s anything that makes people more uncomfortable than highly advanced AI or nuclear weapons technology, it\u2019s the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":371401,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[345,178569,343,344,51645,85,1720,46,238,125],"class_list":{"0":"post-371400","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-ai-and-nuclear-weapons","10":"tag-artificial-intelligence","11":"tag-artificialintelligence","12":"tag-defense-security","13":"tag-il","14":"tag-innovation","15":"tag-israel","16":"tag-politics","17":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/371400","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=371400"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/371400\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/371401"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=371400"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=371400"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=371400"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"a](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/VoxLANLTourSCC-VSite-Gunsite-LANSCE13.jpg\"\/)
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