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facility, they argued, America’s nuclear weapons arsenal would be in grave danger. Congress was sold. Even as magnetic fusion scientists were wringing their hands in the mid-1990s, their laser fusion brethren were rolling in money—thanks, in part, to the danger posed by the test ban. On September 23, 1992, the United States detonated its last nuclear bomb, Julin Divider, before ceasing testing altogether. Throughout the 1990s, the world’s nuclear powers were negotiating a permanent ban on nuclear testing. Though a few nations conducted a small number of such tests while the discussions went on, the United States held firm. No nuclear explosions.

Of course, nuclear testing was the way weapons designers evaluated their new warheads; no nuclear testing means no new types of nuclear warheads—more or less. There’s some debate about whether the United States could manufacture slight variants on old weapons designs without resorting to underground detonations. However, it is certain that any sizable design change wouldn’t be considered reliable until it was subjected to a full-scale nuclear test.

It’s not a huge problem if the United States can’t design new nuclear weapons; the ones on hand are sufficient for national security.76 Instead, the test ban presented a more insidious problem. Without periodic nuclear testing, weaponeers argued, they could not be certain that the weapons in the nuclear stockpile would work. Nuclear bombs, like any other machines, decay over time. Their parts age and deteriorate. Since nuclear weapons use exotic radioactive materials, which undergo nuclear decay as well as physical decay, engineers don’t have a firm understanding of how such a device ages. An engineer can moth-ball a tank or airplane and be certain that it will still function fifty or a hundred years from now. Not so for nuclear warheads. So, to assure the reliability of the nuclear stockpile, engineers would take aged weapons and detonate them to see how well they worked. With a test ban, though, scientists could no longer do this. Many weaponeers insisted there was no way to guarantee that the weapons in the nuclear stockpile would still work in ten or twenty or thirty years. So what was the government to do? Enter the Science-Based Stockpile Stewardship program. Weapons scientists assured federal officials that with a set of high-tech experimental facilities they could ensure the reliability of the nation’s arsenal. Some facilities would concentrate on the chemical explosives that set off the devices. Some would study how elements like plutonium and uranium respond to shocks. But the jewel in the stockpile stewardship’s crown would be NIF, the National Ignition Facility at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

NIF is the successor to Nova. According to its designers, NIF, ten times more powerful than Nova, will zap a pellet of deuterium and tritium with 192 laser beams, pouring enough energy into the pellet to achieve breakeven. It will also ignite and have what is called propagating burn: at the center of the pellet, the fuel will begin fusing, and the energy from those fusions will heat the fuel and induce nearby nuclei to fuse. And of course, the fusion will produce more energy than the lasers put in. This is the same promise the designers made with Nova. And Shiva. But while Shiva cost $25 million and Nova cost about $200 million, in the early 1990s NIF was projected to cost more than $600 million. That number increased to more than $1 billion by the time the facility’s construction started in 1997. That was just the beginning.

As late as June 1999, NIF managers swore to the Department of Energy that everything was peachy, that the project, which was scheduled to be finished in 2003, was on budget and on schedule. This was a lie. Within a few months, officials at Livermore had to admit to enormous problems and cost overruns. Some of the issues were simple oversights. The laser facility, for instance, had problems with dust settling on the laser glass. Dust motes would scatter the laser light and burst into flame, etching