Inside the New Mexico lab where the U.S. is moving into the most terrifying chapter of the nuclear arms race

It weighs just 824lbs, but packs enough plutonium to vaporize a city center and kill and maim three million people in the blink of an eye.

Scarier still, production of America’s new B61-13 gravity bomb is seven months ahead of schedule, as scientists speed up work at their laboratory in the New Mexico desert.

The timeline was moved up due to the ‘critical challenge and urgent need’ for a new nuclear deterrent. It is 24 times more powerful than the atom bomb that levelled Hiroshima, Japan, in 1945.

They speak of an ‘urgent need’ for the new super-nuke, as everywhere from Russia to China, North Korea and even Britain boost their stockpiles of warheads.

Nuclear arms watchers say that, while overall global inventories have fallen since the Cold War, the number of warheads deployed for combat readiness is on the rise once again.

For some, this new nuclear arms race is scarier than when America and the Soviet Union built enough nukes to wipe out mankind many times over in the years after World War II.

That’s down to the wide array of states that possess the weapons now — which includes India, Pakistan, and, reputedly, Israel — and as a multipolar balance of power emerges.

As the US Trump administration slights its allies in Europe and Asia, the club of nine nuclear powers looks set to expand, perhaps quickly, and grow even more unwieldy.

In recent months, officials from Germany to Poland, South Korea, Japan, and Saudi Arabia have broken the nuclear taboo and spoken about acquiring nukes, or related technology.

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