The program is touted as the best way to maintain the safety and reliability of the existing nuclear weapons arsenal. The program includes dozens of upgraded and new research facilities and supercomputers, enhanced weapons production capabilities, and explosive tests using nuclear material. The stockpile stewardship program, for the most part, has very little to do with actually maintaining safety and reliability. It is a nuclear safety smokescreen, which primarily exists to maintain the capability to design and develop new weapons and to train a new generation of nuclear weapons designers. Not only does this undermine efforts to keep other nations from going nuclear, it is very expensive.
More money is spent now on weapons research and development than in the last decade.
It does have use for weapons design, however, and the NIF is of interest to other countries that hope to build similar facilities or to do joint experiments on the US facility. DOE also plans to increase plutonium pit production capability at the Los Alamos National Lab in New Mexico. Manufacturing pits is an extremely hazardous process that resulted in massive contamination and shutdown of the Rocky Flats plant in Colorado. As nuclear arsenals are reduced in size, fewer pits will be needed, but instead of scaling back, DOE is increasing capacity to 50 pits per year. This will add to the 12,000 unused pits in storage and the 11,000 in the current arsenal.