§6131 Stockpile responsiveness program

Summary

The United States must keep and practice all the skills, tools, and facilities needed to design, build, test (without a nuclear explosion), certify, produce, and deploy nuclear weapons so the country’s deterrent stays safe, secure, reliable, credible, and ready. The Secretary of Energy, working through the Administrator and consulting the Secretary of Defense, must run a stockpile responsiveness program alongside other stockpile programs to do this work. The program must keep and improve capabilities across science, engineering, design, certification, and manufacturing for every phase of the joint nuclear weapons life cycle. It must pass knowledge to the next generation of designers and engineers, show responsiveness using prototypes, flight tests, and integrated demos, develop faster and cheaper technologies for life‑extension or new weapon projects, exercise coordination with the Defense Department, and, with the Director of National Intelligence, keep the ability to assess and build foreign prototype weapons and do no‑yield tests if needed. The joint nuclear weapons life cycle process is the shared Defense and Energy process for developing, making, keeping, and retiring nuclear weapons.