Answers have been edited for length and clarity.

Searchlight: What are your views on nuclear weapons testing, given the reigning scientific opinion that it’s not scientifically necessary?

Robert Peters: I’m not sure that’s a true statement. We’re looking to develop new warheads as part of the program of record. Moreover, the 2023 [Congressional] Strategic Posture Commission said that the current nuclear modernization program is necessary, and that we may need additional capability in order to deter our adversaries. If you need additional capabilities, then perhaps you may need to test new nuclear warheads, because you’re creating new warhead designs. But even if none of that were true, to say that it’s not technically necessary to test is frankly irrelevant. 

Searchlight: How so?

Peters: A president may choose to detonate a nuclear weapon as a means of signaling stake and will. Let’s say Russia tests a nuclear device on an uninhabited island off the coast of Siberia. The president may want to say, “Well, I’m not going to back down, so I want to demonstrate that I will not be coerced or intimidated. Therefore, we are going to detonate a nuclear weapon of our own.” You go to the Nevada test site and reopen the old, underground chambers in which we did testing during the Cold War, and you detonate a weapon there to demonstrate to Russia that we will not be coerced, and that their stakes are not, in fact, greater than ours. 

A president may want to go down that route. You’re engaging in nuclear signaling, and if that is the level at which you’re engaged with your opponent, you don’t want to bind the president’s hand. You want to make sure that he or she has all the tools necessary to deter the crisis from escalating further.

Searchlight: In that sense, testing is primarily a political tool?

Peters: Yes.

Searchlight: The NNSA needs to be on a “wartime footing,” in your words, working faster to significantly increase America’s arsenal size. Are you suggesting focusing the totality of LANL’s mission on plutonium pit production? 

Peters: With everything that is going on at LANL and also at the Savannah River Site that is not dedicated to revitalizing the arsenal, if those activities are inhibiting the ability to produce those warheads and plutonium pits at scale, then we need to look hard at shutting those activities down. Because that is the primary mission of NNSA. That is why NNSA was established: to ensure that America’s nuclear deterrent remains credible to our adversaries. Right now, the enterprise is struggling mightily and is already years behind where it needs to be. If the NNSA is doing other activities that are undermining our ability to fill the arsenal that we need, then those activities should be relocated.

Searchlight: You wrote recently that “the risk of a nuclear war is far higher — and has far greater consequences — than the risk of an environmental accident at a nuclear weapons lab.” What do you believe is an acceptable amount of environmental risk in the name of national security? 

Peters: During the Cold War, in 1962, we cranked out 6,000 nuclear warheads in a single year. That’s an industrialized scale. Let’s be honest, we contaminated the Rocky Flats Plant in Colorado as part of that. And so we correctly implemented safety regulations to make sure we don’t create those types of environmental or safety hazards again.

According to the Department of Defense’s 2023 China Military Power Report, China is not only the fastest-growing nuclear power on the planet, but they are also fielding capabilities that can strike bases from Japan to Guam to northern Australia with nuclear weapons, and would be able to destroy American aircraft carriers with nuclear armed anti-ship missiles. So it is very possible that we could find ourselves at war with China at any time. And I would offer that — by moving so slowly at building the arsenal that we need to deter Chinese aggression, nuclear coercion or even nuclear deployment — that’s a strategic risk that is ultimately self-defeating for American national interests. 

We have to think about how we accept risk. Again, I’m not in favor of creating environmental hazards like what was done 60 years ago in Colorado, but there has to be a happy medium. I don’t want workplace injuries and so forth. But we have to remember that if you’re in the defense establishment — and I say this as someone who left the Department of Defense after 17 years of service — soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines die every single year in training accidents. That’s accepted by the workforce, and that’s accepted by the DOD.

Searchlight: Continuing with the military metaphor: Are you saying that some populations, like those that work at or live near Los Alamos, are going to be expendable? 

Peters: No one’s expendable. I don’t at all want to convey that. But you have to understand that, at the end of the day, the mission is not to do science. The mission is to field a credible force that can defend the citizenry of the United States. It’s no different than fielding a marine rifle regiment or a carrier strike group or an army combat brigade. The mission is fielding a capability that can deter adversaries. And so, you cannot allow onerous safety and security and environmental regulations to create an environment of paralysis. And I would offer that, given that it took us 14 years to create a single diamond-stamped plutonium pit, that is paralysis.