Los Alamos National Laboratory Collaboration for Explosives Detection

The Explosives Center at Los Alamos

The Center’s goals are to integrate and advance the Laboratory's explosives capabilities for the modern nuclear weapons mission and a range of national security challenges.

Since its inception during the Manhattan project, Los Alamos National Laboratory has continuously been building expertise in explosives development, characterization, and testing. Laboratory scientists today harness more than 70 years of experience in explosives to address today’s complex challenges.

Scientists at Los Alamos are

  • ensuring safety and security of explosives in nuclear weapons.
  • countering weapons of mass destruction.
  • supporting Warfighter missions.
  • countering terrorism, including the ever-evolving production of improvised explosives.

To detect, disable, and defeat a variety of explosive-material threats, Los Alamos scientists and engineers today successfully assist America’s

  • nuclear weapons experts,
  • intelligence analysts,
  • policy makers,
  • homeland security personnel,
  • emergency response teams, and
  • military ground forces.

The Explosives Center at Los Alamos National Laboratory provides expertise that spans comprehensive explosives development, characterization, testing, modeling and simulation. The Center’s goals are to integrate and advance the Lab’s explosives capabilities for the modern nuclear weapons mission and a range of national security challenges, such as

  • characterizing homemade explosives;
  • determining explosive lethality and vulnerabilities;
  • developing techniques and technologies to defeat explosives threats;
  • determining the short and long-term effects of explosives aging;
  • performing core surveillance;
  • analyzing blast effects as well as potential mitigation; and
  • characterizing shock and detonation physics properties of materials.

Our full spectrum of end-to-end integrated capabilities in explosives, coupled with our experience in nuclear weapons development as well as our extensive modeling and simulation capabilities make Los Alamos the ideal place to develop, characterize, and test all types of explosives and explosives threat scenarios.