Of interest in the press conference held by the Department of Energy to announce the new contractor, was a bit of discussion about what would have happened if Lockheed had won the contract. Lockheed already runs Sandia National Laboratories, which create all the mechanisms in a nuclear weapon aside from the actual "nuclear package" - the core of the warhead. And a lot of these non-nuclear components are tres sophisticated and classified. If Lockheed had managed Los Alamos as well, it would also have been building nuclear components. The company would have been in a unique position - unique at least since the nuclear labs split into subsidiary operations decades ago - of working with designs for entire nuclear weapons.
