Leading the way for Weapons

Charlie Nakhleh is Los Alamos National Laboratory’s new deputy director for Weapons (DDW). He succeeds Bob Webster, who retired March 31 after more than 40 years of service to the nuclear security enterprise.

In this role, Nakhleh leads all organizations and programs associated with the Laboratory’s Weapons portfolio, totaling approximately $6 billion and 6,000 employees. Nakhleh guides the strategic alignment of these programs to meet national objectives, ensuring rigorous design, simulation, manufacturing, and certification processes that sustain the nation’s nuclear deterrent. 

Though only weeks into the job, Nakhleh has already collaborated with partners across the nuclear security enterprise, United States Strategic Command, and policy makers. “We are the lead lab on a number of national security initiatives and play a supporting role in others,” he says. “One thing I hope to achieve is better, more integrated interactions at the Laboratory and beyond. Close collaboration is nothing but good.”

Among Nakhleh’s priorities is working across disciplines at the Laboratory to increase the number and types of experiments that support the assessment of the four weapons systems for which the Laboratory is responsible (the B61 family of bombs and the W76, W78, and W88 warheads),  the manufacturing of weapons components, and the development of future weapons systems. “We should all be seized with urgency,” he says. “I am extremely focused on trying to bring our experimental and production cadence to where it needs to be to accomplish our mission at the speed of relevance.”

Since joining the Lab in 1996, Nakhleh has served in several leadership roles, most recently as the associate Laboratory director for Weapons Physics (ALDX), where he oversaw the Lab’s weapons physics and design portfolio, dynamic experimentations, and multiphysics computational simulations. Prior to leading ALDX, Nakhleh was the executive officer for Weapons programs and the division leader for the X Theoretical Design division. From 2007 to 2013, Nakhleh spent six years at Sandia National Laboratories, where he led target design and analysis efforts for inertial confinement fusion (ICF) and high-energy-density physics experiments on the Z machine pulsed-power facility. Before joining Sandia, he was a member of the Applied Physics Division at Los Alamos, where he made significant contributions to weapons physics and design. “Throughout his career, Charlie has exemplified the integrity, rigor, and sense of purpose that define Los Alamos,” says Lab Director Thom Mason.

Nakhleh’s research interests span nuclear weapons design and physics, ICF, high-energy-density physics, and applications of Bayesian inference techniques. Nakhleh earned doctorate and master’s degrees in physics from Cornell University and a bachelor’s degree in physics from the University of Virginia. He is also a graduate of the Laboratory’s Theoretical Institute of Thermonuclear and Nuclear Studies (TITANS) program.

Nakhleh says he’s continually inspired by the Laboratory’s scientific and technical pursuits that exhibit creativity, innovation, excellence, and responsiveness. “Whenever I see a piece of work exemplifying those traits from anyone in the Laboratory, I think to myself ‘this is what a national lab is all about. This is why we’re here.’” ★