From the Director IN 1999, we achieved significant successes in our research endeavors and faced major challenges both to our programs and to the way we operate. We are striving for major scientific and technical advances toward DOE's goals in national security, energy resources, environmental quality, and science and technology. We are also working to meet a standard of operational excellence that should be expected of a premier national laboratory.
National security is our defining responsibility.
We are a vital part of the DOE's exceptionally demanding program to maintain a safe and reliable U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile in the absence of underground nuclear testing-a supreme national interest. We are also working with DOE and other organizations to improve the nation's capabilities to stem the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. In many instances, our national security accomplishments depend on pushing the frontiers of science and technology. Both are vital to the nation's strategy for maintaining the nuclear weapons stockpile without nuclear testing, and both offer the promise of significant advances in science. Through ASCI, we are acquiring increasingly powerful computers, which we are using to vastly improve simulations of weapons physics.