Longtime Los Alamos National Laboratory manager Carolyn Zerkle will become deputy director of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory effective Sept. 12, the California nuclear-weapon design lab said Monday.
Zerkle spent more than 30 years at Los Alamos, most recently as senior director for project execution. In that job, she was responsible for the entire portfolio of pit construction projects at Los Alamos, which in fiscal year 2022 had an estimated budget of more than $1 billion.
Zerkle has an undergraduate degree in architecture and civil engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass., graduate degrees in architecture and business from the University of Illinois-Urbana/Champaign, according to a Livermore press release.
Chris James will take over as director of project execution for the Los Alamos pit project, which is supposed to turn out a proof-of-concept plutonium pit usable in a W87-1 intercontinental ballistic missile warhead by fiscal year 2023, which begins Oct. 1.
Los Alamos is supposed to make multiple war-usable W87-1 pits beginning in 2024 and ramp up to 30 pits a year, the lab’s notional maximum output under regular working conditions, by fiscal year 2026.
Livermore, meanwhile, is in charge of the W87-1 warhead itself, and the W87-0 warhead that will pair with it aboard the future Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missile systems due to replace Minuteman III missiles in U.S. silos beginning in 2030 or so. Livermore is also in charge of the W80-4 warhead, the nuclear tip of the planned Long Range Standoff weapon air-launched cruise missile.