John Benner Tapped as LANL Weapons Production Associate Director

The Los Alamos National Laboratory has appointed nuclear weapons technician John Benner as associate director of weapons production. He will start in his new job on Jan. 3.

In his new leadership role, Benner will manage 1,400 employees, working with other organizations across LANL’s nuclear weapons complex and overseeing tasks related to pit production and assessment, nuclear weapon detonators and non-nuclear components. He will also be responsible for plutonium processing and disposal, waste operations and power supply manufacturing for some NASA deep space missions.

Benner, who is currently the executive officer of LANL’s weapons program, will replace Dave Eyler, who retired from the position in the fall, Stars and Stripes reported Tuesday.

Benner has been with LANL since 1993, when he was a technical staff at the Advanced Engineering Technology and Engineering Analysis groups. He was also the project director of the W76-1 life extension program and a weapon systems engineering division leader. He also held other leadership roles at LANL until 2017, when he became vice president and chief operating officer of Mission Support and Test Services. He returned to LANL in 2019 as a senior technical adviser at the National Nuclear Security Administration.

The Los Alamos National Laboratory is a federally funded research and development center that supports the Department of Energy‘s national security, science, energy and environmental management missions. It also supports the Department of Defense, the Intelligence Community, the Department of Homeland Security and other government agencies.