There really isn't much call at this point in history for designing new nuclear weapons, but there is a very important need to understand the material limits of nuclear materials that can be weaponized.
These "risks" are vastly overstated in the public mind. The number of people who have been killed by nuclear weapons is dwarfed by the number of people who have been killed by the diversion of biofuels to weapons of mass destruction, since the "palm" in Napalm refers to palmitic acid, derived from palm oil, corn oil and the like.
I don't think U of M would object to the study of corn oil.
(Napalm, which killed more Japanese in 1945 than did Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined, was invented by Louis Feiser at Harvard. It was first tested in a public park in Cambridge.)
Los Alamos designed and operated briefly the most interesting nuclear reactor that never went anywhere in full development, the LAMPRE, the Los Alamos Molten Plutonium Reactor, a good idea that has intrigued me for many years.
I have a personal conflict in this area, for full disclosure. My son's serious girlfriend, serious enough for them to be living together, is obtaining her Ph.D. in addressing nuclear non-proliferarion. I could certainly see her working at Los Alamos. She can't tell me what she's working on; it's classified.
More people have been killed in wars caused by fear of nuclear proliferation whipped up by people like Dick Cheney as a cover for controlling oil deposits than have been killed by nuclear weapons. So there's that.
It would be interesting if the citizens who object to working with Los Alamos were as interested in shutting down the chemical engineering department courses at the University of Michigan related to refining petroleum fuels, since the diversion of petroleum products to weapons of mass destruction and petroleum terrorist events like the Okahoma City bombing and the attack on the World Trade center both relied on petroleum fuels.
The only major nuclear engineering graduate school that did not request an interview with my son was the U of M. (He now collaborates peripherally with scientists there.) It is an excellent nuclear engineering school, an important locus in rebuilding American nuclear power infrastructure after years of deliberate vandalism, and the attack on that institution is as ill advised as similar attacks on our molecular biology institutions, an appeal to ignorance, a short sighted one indeed.
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