AI and Additive Manufacturing Are Accelerating U.S. Nuclear Weapons Development

For decades, the United States’ nuclear weapons enterprise has faced two competing demands. It must respond quickly to geopolitical shocks and unexpected technical challenges, yet thermonuclear warheads require years of meticulous research, engineering, testing, and certification. A simple solution to that tension is unlikely. A new development model, however—one built around artificial intelligence, advanced computing, and additive manufacturing—is bringing faster capabilities closer to reality.

Under the Genesis Mission, a White House initiative led by the Department of Energy, America’s weapons laboratories are building an interconnected supercomputing network powered by AI. Using the government’s classified scientific datasets, the program is intended to accelerate research across national security, including work on the nuclear stockpile. Its applications include improving warhead designs, identifying strategic materials, and shortening production timelines.

In my role as administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration, my central responsibility is to speed both nuclear stockpile modernization and the scientific and industrial infrastructure that supports it. I and other agency leaders have emphasized urgency: planned warhead upgrades must proceed faster, while prompt, precise, and proportionate options must be developed for requirements beyond the existing program of record—within timeframes that affect adversary decision-making.

Weapons tailored to specific deterrence needs understandably raise concerns about arms-race dynamics. This effort, however, is not a return to the tit-for-tat buildup characteristic of the Cold War. The United States is not pursuing a nuclear arms race with Russia or China, although it remains in a broader capabilities competition centered on science, technology, and manufacturing. The ability to respond quickly to novel nuclear capabilities could discourage rivals from seeking a strategic advantage through surprise developments.

Greater responsiveness will depend heavily on transformative technologies, particularly AI. Aires Tide was conceived as a proof of concept demonstrating how AI can produce complex systems more quickly and cheaply. It is a flight-test vehicle designed to measure the environmental conditions a weapon would encounter while traveling toward its target. Its importance, however, extends beyond the vehicle itself: it illustrates a new approach to design and production.

Aires Tide combined generative AI with additive manufacturing, or “3D printing,” a technique increasingly used to produce components for the nuclear stockpile. The project shows how scientists and engineers can potentially deliver responses to emerging deterrence requirements in a fraction of the time and cost of a traditional development program.

Addressing Concerns About AI

References to AI and nuclear weapons naturally provoke concern. Recent reports that some AI models have repeatedly selected nuclear strikes during simulated conflicts reinforce those fears. It is essential, however, to distinguish between technical functions—such as designing and producing warheads, where AI can provide valuable support—and decisions about actually using nuclear weapons, which remain the sole authority of the President. The U.S. nuclear enterprise has firmly adopted the principle that AI may assist human experts but never replace their judgment or accountability.

AI cannot simply be instructed by an arbitrary user to create a nuclear weapon or delivery system and produce a usable result. The commercial frontier model used in the Aires Tide program was licensed to government laboratories and configured with security controls designed for national-security applications. Once installed on the laboratories’ classified, air-gapped computers, its outputs remain accessible only within the U.S. government.

The project relied on some of the world’s most powerful computers: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s El Capitan, among the fastest supercomputers on Earth, and Los Alamos National Laboratory’s Venado, an AI-optimized system developed through a partnership with Hewlett Packard and NVIDIA. An industry team spent much of a year installing and validating the model at Los Alamos so it could operate reliably in a secure environment.

Engineers entered the vehicle’s specifications and payload requirements into the system, which generated thousands of possible designs. El Capitan then ran simulations to narrow the field. The engineers and AI model iterated continuously, refining the design at speed. Humans retained final authority, checking that the result met the original requirements and satisfied the exacting safety and performance standards expected of any nuclear-related system.

Moving Beyond a Costly Development Model

Combining AI with additive manufacturing helps overcome two long-standing obstacles: shortages of specialized engineering talent and the high cost of producing advanced weapons. World War II’s “Tallboy” bomb illustrates the difficulty. British engineer Barnes Wallis developed the heavy aerial bomb to penetrate underground and fortified German targets. Its aerodynamic form and gyroscopic spin produced a supersonic impact velocity, while its high-tensile steel casing enabled penetration to a depth of roughly 20 meters. Building it, however, required expensive materials, labor-intensive casting and machining, and Wallis’s exceptional individual expertise.

Aires Tide did not depend on those constraints. Its principal designer was a machine, and its constituent materials were comparatively inexpensive. It is not a weapon, but as an example of rapid design and fabrication for a complex system, it points to substantial possibilities.

A brief explanation of the division between the National Nuclear Security Administration and the Pentagon is useful. NNSA is responsible for the nuclear explosive package—the plutonium core, high explosives, and initiators—that produces a weapon’s nuclear effect. The Pentagon develops the delivery systems, including ballistic and cruise missiles, submarines, and bombers. Warheads and their delivery vehicles are designed in coordination so that each informs the other.

Flight testing is the final stage. Laboratories and the military collaborate on highly accurate, nonnuclear facsimiles of weapons, which are launched from missiles or aircraft to evaluate their in-flight performance without fissile material. Such vehicles can cost approximately $1–2 million each, and laboratory schedules are often constrained by the armed services’ test calendar. Producing vehicles internally would give laboratories greater scheduling control and could reduce the cost per flight test by as much as ten times. Aires Tide therefore demonstrated both Genesis’s generative capabilities and a practical remedy for a process bottleneck.

A Manufacturing Transformation

Once the AI-generated Aires Tide design exceeded flight requirements, production began quickly at a satellite facility of the Kansas City National Security Campus in Albuquerque. The process was far removed from small desktop printers making prototypes from plastic filament. The machine that built the vehicle, a Velo3D Sapphire XC, is also used by SpaceX to print Raptor 3 engines. It weighs more than eight tons, extends nearly 30 feet, and includes a built-in staircase.

The printer uses Laser Powder Bed Fusion. It lays a thin layer of Inconel powder—a nickel-chromium superalloy prized for strength and heat resistance—across its baseplate. Eight 1-kilowatt lasers then fuse the powder into solid metal. Additional layers are added until the component is complete.

Aires Tide’s long, cone-shaped fuselage was printed in nested sections of decreasing diameter, much like Russian dolls. The initial print stood only 18 inches high; once separated and assembled, it reached a height of 11 feet. Producing the entire body in one operation avoided the slow, labor-intensive assembly required by traditional manufacturing and saved considerable time.

Conventional “subtractive” manufacturing begins with a large block or forging that a machinist cuts, mills, and grinds into shape. Removing material creates waste, and discarded metal represents part of the raw material’s cost. Additive manufacturing uses nearly all of its feedstock, producing a “buy-to-fly” ratio—raw material purchased compared with material incorporated into the finished component—close to one-to-one.

Additive manufacturing also reduces supply-chain exposure. The availability of finished, foreign-sourced metals can fluctuate, while powdered feedstock is easier to secure domestically. That reduces dependence on vulnerable external sources.

Faster Capabilities for the Future Stockpile

Despite its technical sophistication, Aires Tide’s most significant achievement was its speed. The engineering team began work in November, and the first fuselage was printed by mid-January despite the government shutdown. The program ultimately produced not one vehicle but a small family of test models.

A miniature version, Aires Cub, was printed for wind-tunnel testing. In May, a half-scale version called Aires Fox was released from 32,000 feet at the Army’s Dugway Proving Ground in Utah. The test examined such factors as sensor resistance to vibration and the performance of actuators—small fins that guide the vehicle during descent. Data from the flights will be sent to El Capitan to help optimize future systems developed with the same approach.

The form of those future systems may be limited more by engineers’ imagination than by technical feasibility. Additive manufacturing is already used to produce components for U.S. nuclear warheads. Printing a vehicle capable of accommodating a nuclear explosive package would not be easy, but it would be a logical next step. Genesis combined with advanced manufacturing could also help create reentry vehicles engineered to survive the extreme heat and pressure of atmospheric reentry and withstand enemy defenses.

Even so, the pursuit of new systems cannot justify accepting unsafe or ineffective weapons or abandoning the proven certification process that sustains America’s deterrent. No contemplated system would incorporate a warhead that departed radically from the existing nuclear explosive testing basis. For the explosive package and other weapon components and materials, the same modeling, simulation, experimentation, and testing tools used to evaluate present warheads can provide confidence in the safety and reliability of new systems.

A new program is already putting that premise into practice by combining conventional human design and manufacturing with advanced methods. Last summer, NNSA established a Nuclear Deterrence Rapid Capabilities Team to reduce the development timeline for new weapons from approximately 10 years to three or five. Scientists and engineers are evaluating concepts with rapid production in mind, helping move innovations from prototype to deployable asset. Any resulting systems would still be certified with the scientific tools used to sustain and modernize the existing stockpile. Some may become enduring elements of future deterrents; others may never be needed.

Maintaining strategic stability is a central purpose of this work. The United States has criticized Moscow and Beijing for developing unconventional nuclear systems, including Russia’s nuclear-powered Burevestnik cruise missile and China’s fractional-orbital bombardment system. Rather than seeking destabilizing weapons of its own, the U.S. nuclear enterprise aims to preserve stability—especially at the regional level—by demonstrating that it can counter shifts in adversary postures.

A country unable to answer disruptive military moves invites competitors to make them. Aires Tide and related prototype programs signal America’s capacity to respond without seeking an arms race. Critics may misinterpret these investments, but truly threatening programs would be accompanied by other evidence of an appetite for escalation—evidence that is absent. The objective is to preserve the superiority of American nuclear science and manufacturing, and the enterprise is moving with urgency to do so.

Acceleration has become more than a slogan within America’s nuclear weapons complex; it now guides work ranging from weapon design to materials production. The long-term goal is to field systems tailored to specific deterrence requirements almost as soon as those requirements emerge. Armed with advanced manufacturing tools and exceptionally powerful computing platforms, American scientists and engineers are working to make that goal a reality.

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