LANL Names Charlie Nakhleh New Deputy Director for Weapons Program

Charles W. "Charlie" Nakhleh, who most recently held line responsibility for the nuclear weapons designers and simulation code architects at Los Alamos National Laboratory as its Associate Laboratory Director for Weapons Physics, has been named the laboratory's new Deputy Laboratory Director for Weapons. He steps into a post that carries direct line management responsibility for planning, coordinating, and integrating the Weapons Program, particularly for the directorates of Weapons Engineering, Weapons Design and Weapons Production. The appointment takes effect April 1, 2026.

Bob Webster, who held that post and had direct line management responsibility for the Weapons Program's core directorates, was a 29-year veteran of the Weapons Program at LANL and is retiring March 31 after more than 40 years of service to the nuclear security enterprise.

Nakhleh's path to the DDW seat runs nearly the full length of his career at Los Alamos. Prior to serving as ALDX, he was the Executive Officer to the Deputy Director for Weapons, where he was responsible for integrating and aligning activities across the weapons program, and from 2013 to 2018 he was the Division Leader of the X-Theoretical Design Division (XTD). Before that posting, he served as Group Leader and Deputy Group Leader for the Thermonuclear Applications Group in the Applied Physics (X) Division of Los Alamos, spending nearly a decade as a staff member in X Division where he worked extensively on uncertainty quantification and made significant contributions to weapons physics and design issues.

Between his early Los Alamos work and his return to lead XTD, Nakhleh spent six years at Sandia National Laboratories. At Sandia, he led the Inertial Confinement Fusion Target Design Department in the Pulsed Power Sciences Center, heading theoretical design and analysis efforts for magnetically-driven ICF and radiation-effects targets for the Z pulsed-power facility and indirect-drive experiments for the National Ignition Campaign.

As ALDX, the directorate Nakhleh led was central to the U.S. stockpile certification mission. ALDX develops and applies cutting-edge theory, computational models, large-scale weapon simulation codes, and state-of-the-art experiments for the design, certification, and assessment of U.S. nuclear weapons. His portfolio also included program responsibility for the NNSA's NA-11 weapons science, computing, and technology maturation work, spanning the Office of Experimental Sciences, Inertial Confinement Fusion, Advanced Simulation and Computing, and Engineering Technology and Maturation programs.

Nakhleh is a graduate of the Theoretical Institute of Thermonuclear and Nuclear Studies (TITANS) program at Los Alamos and has served on a wide variety of advisory panels, including as a founding member of the NNSA's Predictive Science Panel, a consultant to JASON, and an adviser to the Under Secretary of Energy for Science on the National Ignition Campaign. He holds a Ph.D. in physics from Cornell University.

During his tenure leading XTD from 2013 to 2018, he oversaw nuclear weapon physics design, assessment, and certification efforts at the Laboratory, work that complements the broader mandate he now inherits as DDW. His research interests include nuclear weapons design and physics, inertial confinement fusion, high-energy-density physics, and applications of Bayesian inference techniques to uncertainty quantification, fields that together underpin the scientific rigor LANL brings to stockpile stewardship.

Webster's retirement closes a four-decade chapter in the laboratory's weapons leadership. Nakhleh, who first walked into Los Alamos in 1996 as a member of the Applied Physics Division, now takes ownership of the program he has helped shape at nearly every level.