So far Russia’s lack of such a laser hasn’t been a great disadvantage in ensuring its weapons function. That’s because Russia is committed to continuously remaking plutonium “pits,” the explosive cores found in many nukes, named after the hard centers of fruits like peaches. If you can readily replace old explosive pits with new ones, there’s less need to use lasers to check how much they have degraded over the years. “In the US, we would be remanufacturing our nuclear weapons too, except that we don’t have the capacity to produce large numbers of pits,” says Lewis. The largest US production facility, in
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