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Office of Stockpile Stewardship

Mission Develop, direct, maintain, and oversee the research, development, computer simulation, and inertial confinement fusion activities that support maintaining the safety and effectiveness of the nuclear weapons stockpile.

The Office of Stockpile Stewardship is responsible for maintaining a robust scientific infrastructure in the national security enterprise and attracting the brightest science, technology and engineering professionals to the nation’s Stockpile Stewardship Program (SSP).  The office is comprised of the following offices:

  • Office of Institutional Programs,
  • Office of Inertial Confinement Fusion,
  • Office of Defense Science,
  • Office of Advanced Simulation and Computing, and
  • Office of Nuclear Experiments.


The synergy resulting from these five offices working together enables the Office of Stockpile Stewardship to provide comprehensive support and make significant contributions to the SSP.  Among our ongoing efforts are the following activities:

  • Providing a thermonuclear ignition platform at the National Ignition Facility  to enhance our understanding of weapons performance;
  • Developing first-principle’s physics models to replace empirical parameters for advanced modeling for three of four major physics uncertainties;
  • Conducting key experiments and modeling to inform the advanced certification, safety, and surety of our stockpile, enabling at least two intrinsic multi-point safety options;
  • Providing a suite of world-class high energy density physics  user facilities and planning and preparing for steps beyond ignition; and
  • Managing NNSA’s institutional programs and building academic alliances to ensure a continuous pipeline of the preeminent scientific and engineering talent to the national laboratories.


All of these efforts represent a great scientific challenge coupled with a challenging timeline that we manage and meet through the Predictive Capability Framework (PCF). The PCF is a long-term integrated roadmap to guide the science, technology and engineering activities and Directed Stockpile Work for assessing issues and challenges to the nuclear stockpile and for the continuing certification of it.