September 17, 2026
America’s Secret Weapon in the Nuclear Race
This article was originally published in The Washington Post.
Chinese leader Xi Jinping isn’t dawdling when it comes to science. He has directed his country to build a network of enormous fusion-energy facilities that could strengthen its ability to design and validate nuclear weapons without explosive testing. The United States has no comparable program, but it does possess a unique advantage: Private companies are already financing and building essential next-generation fusion technologies.
The choice is between an integrated American system that combines public missions with private capital and a fragmented one facing off against China’s coordinated buildup.
Beijing doesn’t benefit from such an ecosystem, and Washington still leads across much of nuclear-weapons science and development. The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, for example, is still the only facility in the world to achieve fusion ignition. But scientific leadership doesn’t guarantee the experimental capacity, industrial base or construction speed that the U.S. will need for effective deterrence. The U.S. National Nuclear Security Administration, or NNSA, knows that well. It faces the increasingly difficult mission of modernizing the nuclear stockpile, producing more warheads and keeping pace with China’s rapid buildup, all with limited resources.
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