El Capitan: New supercomputer is the fastest

Are they always designing new nuclear bombs? Why the ongoing work to simulate?

It's also to check that the ones they have will still work, now that there are test bans.

The euphemistic term used in the field is "stockpile stewardship", which is a catch-all term involving a wide range of activities, some of them forward-looking.

Because even normal explosives degenerate over time, and fissile material in nuclear devices is even worse about it - remember that unstable elements are ongoing constant fission events, critical mass is just one where they trigger each others' fission fast enough for runaway process.

So in order to verify that the weapons are still useful and won't fail in random ways, you have to test them.

Which either involves actually exploding them (banned by various treaties that have enough weight that even USA doesn't break them), or numerical simulations.

Multiple birds with one stone.

* It's a jobs program to avoid the knowledge loss created by the end of the cold war. The US government poured a lot of money into recreating the institutional knowledge needed to build weapons (e.g. materials like FOGBANK) and it's preferred to maintain that knowledge by having people work on nuclear programs that aren't quite so objectionable as weapon design.

* It helps you better understand the existing weapons stockpiles and how they're aging.

* It's an obvious demonstration of your capabilities and funding for deterrence purposes.

* It's political posturing to have a big supercomputer and the DoE is one of the few agencies with both the means and the motivation to do so publicly. This has supposedly been a major motivator for the Chinese supercomputers.

There's all sorts of minor ancillary benefits that come out of these efforts too.

Basically yes, we are always designing new nuclear bombs. This isn't done to increase yield, we've actually been moving towards lower yield nuclear bombs ever since the mid Cold War. In the 60s the US deployed the B41 bomb with a maximum yield of 25 megatons, making it the most powerful bomb ever deployed by the US. When the B41 was retired in the late 70s, the most powerful bomb in the US arsenal was the B53 with a yield of 9 megatons. The B53 was retired in 2011, leaving the B83 as the most powerful bomb in the US arsenal with a yield of only 1.2 megatons.

There are two kinds of targeting that can be employed in a nuclear war: counterforce and countervalue. Counterforce is targeting enemy military installations, and especially enemy nuclear installations. Countervalue is targeting civilian targets like cities and infrastructure. In an all out nuclear war counterforce targets are saturated with nuclear weapons, with each target receiving multiple strikes to hedge against the risks of weapon failure, weapon interception, and general target survival due to being in a fortified underground positions. Any weapons that are not needed for counterforce saturation strike countervalue targets. It turns out that having a yield greater than a megaton is basically just overkill for both counterforce and countervalue. If you're striking an underground military target (like a missile silo) protected by air defenses, your odds of destroying that target are higher if you use three one megaton yield weapons than if you use a single 20 megaton yield weapon. If you're striking a countervalue target, the devastation caused by a single nuclear detonation will be catastrophic enough to make optimizing for maximum damage pointless.

Thus, weapons designers started to optimize for things other than yield. Safety is a big one, an American nuclear weapon going off on US soil would have far reaching political effects and would likely cause the president to resign. Weapons must fail safely when the bomber carrying them bursts into flames on the tarmac, or when the rail carrying the bomb breaks unexpectedly. They must be resilient against both operator error and malicious sabotage. Oh, and none of these safety considerations are allowed to get in the way of the weapon detonating when it is supposed to. This is really hard to get right!

Another consideration is cost. Nuclear weapons are expensive to make, so a design that can get a high yield out of a small amount of fissile material is preferred. Maintenance, and the cost of maintenance, is also relevant. Will the weapon still work in 30 years, and how much money is required to ensure that?

The final consideration is flexibility and effectiveness. Using a megaton yield weapon on the battlefield to destroy enemy troop concentrations is not a viable tactic because your own troops would likely get caught in the strike. But lower yield weapons suitable for battlefield use (often referred to as tactical nuclear weapons) aren't useful for striking counterforce targets like missile silos. Thus, modern weapon designs are variable yield. The B83 mentioned above can be configured to detonate with a yield in the low kilotons, or up to 1.2 megatons. Thus a single B83 weapon in the US arsenal can cover multiple continencies, making it cheaper and more effective than maintaining a larger arsenal of single yield weapons. This is in addition to special purpose weapons designed to penetrate underground bunkers or destroy satellites via EMP, which have their own design considerations.

Great comment- I have only one thing to add. Many people will enjoy reading "Command and Control" which covers the history of nuclear weapons accidents in the US and how they were managed/mitigated. It's always interesting to learn that a missile silo can explode, popping the warhead up and out (but without it exploding due to fission/fusion), that from the perspective of the nuclear warhead, the safety controls worked.

> Another consideration is cost. Nuclear weapons are expensive to make, so a design that can get a high yield out of a small amount of fissile material is preferred. Maintenance, and the cost of maintenance, is also relevant. Will the weapon still work in 30 years, and how much money is required to ensure that?

I've seen speculation that Russia's (former Soviet) nuclear weapons are so old and poorly maintained that they probably wouldn't work. Not that anyone wants to find out.

How do you know all this?

Small addition: weapon precision has drastically increased since the days of the monster bombs

Less need of 9 megatons against a hardened silo if you have a 1.2 megaton weapon with a 120m CEP.