Ultrafast supercomputer to simulate nuclear explosion

Leading nuclear scientists with top security clearances will gather next summer at a screening room east of San Francisco and witness the results of the greatest effort ever in supercomputing.

Using a computer doing 360 trillion calculations per second, scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Lab will simulate the explosion of an aging nuclear bomb in three dimensions. The short, highly detailed video produced by the world's fastest computer will attempt to illustrate how missiles dating to the Nixon administration would perform today.

The U.S. has about 10,000 nuclear warheads as a deterrent against attack. The government stopped real nuclear tests in 1992, a year after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and signed the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty in 1996.That ban means that a huge windowless room at Livermore is becoming a prime testing ground to make sure nuclear weapons dating back decades haven't developed fatal flaws.