Science
Trump Picks Ex-Congressman to Manage U.S. Nuclear Arsenal
President-elect Donald J. Trump has picked Brandon Williams, a former Navy officer and one-term congressman, to become the keeper of the nation’s arsenal of thousands of nuclear bombs and warheads.
Mr. Trump’s selection is a shift from a tradition in which the people who served as administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration typically had deep technical roots or experience in the nation’s atomic complex. What’s unknown publicly is the extent of Mr. Williams’ experience in the knotty intricacies of how the weapons work and how they are kept reliable for decades without ever being ignited.
Terry C. Wallace Jr., a former director of the Los Alamos weapons laboratory in New Mexico, expressed surprise at Mr. Trump’s pick.
Dr. Wallace said he had “never met him or had a meeting” with Mr. Williams and characterized him as having “very limited experience” with the N.N.S.A.’s missions, based on his own decades of work in and around the nation’s atomic complex.
Hans M. Kristensen, the director of the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists, said Mr. Williams “will be facing an incredibly complex, technical job.”
Mr. Williams did not return calls for comment on his selection by Mr. Trump or his credentials.
The credentials and credibility of whoever becomes N.N.S.A.’s new leader may face close scrutiny because advisers to Mr. Trump have suggested that the incoming administration may propose a restart to the nation’s explosive testing of nuclear arms. That step, daunting both technically and politically, would end U.S. adherence to a global test ban that sought to end decades of costly and destabilizing arms races.
From 2023 to early this year, Mr. Williams, a Republican, represented New York’s 22nd Congressional District, an upstate area that includes the cities of Syracuse and Utica. He was defeated by a Democrat in the November election.
Mr. Williams joined the U.S. Navy in 1991 and served as an officer on the U.S.S. Georgia, a nuclear submarine, before leaving the service as a lieutenant in 1996.
In his congressional biography, Mr. Williams said he made a successful transition during his Navy career into nuclear engineer training, calling it “a very steep learning curve” that he met “against significant odds.” The program is widely considered one of the U.S. military’s most demanding.
Mr. Trump announced his choice of Mr. Williams as the nation’s nuclear weapons czar in social media posts on Thursday morning, calling him “a successful businessman and Veteran of the U.S. Navy, where he served as a Nuclear Submarine Officer, and Strategic Missile Officer.”
According to his congressional biography, Mr. Williams founded “a software company that now helps large industrial manufacturers modernize their production plants, secure their critical infrastructure from cyberattacks, and paves the way for reduced emissions through advances in artificial intelligence.”
Chris Wright, Mr. Trump’s nominee for secretary of energy, the cabinet-level post that oversees the N.N.S.A., called Mr. Williams “a smart, passionate guy” who wants to “defend our country and make things better,” according to an interview on Wednesday with the website Exchange Monitor.
A lengthy 2022 profile of Mr. Williams described him as a multimillionaire who starts each morning by reading a section of the Bible. After high school, it said, Mr. Williams went to Baylor University, a private Christian school in Waco, Texas, and then transferred to Pepperdine University in Malibu, Calif.
His congressional biography says he earned a bachelors from Pepperdine in liberal arts, and later an MBA from the Wharton School, a contrast with the advanced degrees in physics or engineering that typically dot the résumés of weaponeers who end up in senior positions of the nation’s atomic complex.
The outgoing administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration, Jill Hruby, offers a striking contrast with Mr. Williams in terms of technical background and nuclear experience. Before her 2021 nomination to the post, she had a 34-year career at Sandia National Laboratories, retiring in 2017 as director. By training, she is a mechanical engineer.
Sandia is one of the nation’s three nuclear weapons labs, with its main branch located in Albuquerque. It is responsible for the nonnuclear parts of the nation’s arsenal of atomic bombs and warheads.
Other N.N.S.A. administrators have had backgrounds in national security, nuclear operations, the military or scientific fields related to nuclear technology. The first was an Air Force general and a former deputy director of the C.I.A.
The overall responsibilities of the N.N.S.A. include designing, making and maintaining the safety, security and reliability of the nation’s nuclear arms; providing nuclear plants to the Navy; and promoting global atomic safety and nonproliferation. In Nevada, the agency runs a sprawling base larger than the state of Rhode Island, where the United States in the latter years of the Cold War tested its weapons in underground explosions.
Dr. Wallace, the former Los Alamos director, said he had tracked Mr. Trump’s search for an agency leader and found that “any candidate will be making a pitch for resumption.” He added, “That more or less disqualifies any recent director of any nuclear weapons lab.”
Many experts see a restart as unnecessary given the depth and breadth of the nation’s nonexplosive testing program, which the N.N.S.A. runs at an annual cost of roughly $10 billion. Experts argue that the program’s decades of analyses have led to deeper understanding of nuclear arms and greater confidence in weapon reliability than during the explosive era.
Dr. Wallace said Mr. Trump was aided in his hunt for a nuclear czar by Robert C. O’Brien, his national security adviser from 2019 to 2021. Last year in Foreign Affairs magazine, Mr. O’Brien, a lawyer, argued that Washington “must test new nuclear weapons for reliability and safety in the real world.” He added that the freshly tested arsenal would be a deterrent to China and Russia.
Republicans have long criticized the test ban and urged a testing restart. President Bill Clinton, a Democrat, signed the accord in 1996. In 1999, however, he suffered a crushing defeat when the Senate refused to ratify the test ban treaty.
In spite of the treaty’s defeat, successive administrations have informally abided the terms of the test ban. That position began to come under fire during Mr. Trump’s first administration.
In 2018, the Defense Department declared that “the United States must remain ready to resume nuclear testing.” John R. Bolton, Mr. Trump’s national security adviser from 2018 to 2019, reportedly argued for a restart but made little headway.
In 2020, when Mr. O’Brien was the national security adviser, the Trump administration reportedly discussed whether to conduct nuclear test explosions in a meeting with national security agencies.
Opponents of a restart see the nonnuclear tests as more than sufficient to ensure arsenal reliability. “We have more confidence today than when we stopped explosive testing,” Victor H. Reis, the program’s architect, said in an interview.
Siegfried S. Hecker, a former Los Alamos director, argued that a restart would probably start a chain reaction of testing among the world’s atomic powers and perhaps among the so-called threshold states. Like Iran, they’re considered close to being able to build a bomb.
Dr. Hecker noted that during the Cold War, China conducted 45 test explosions, France 210, Russia 715 and the United States 1,030. He said that Beijing, which in recent years has rebuilt its base for nuclear tests, had a major incentive to design and explosively test a new generation of nuclear arms. He argued that the arms could make its expanding missile force more lethal.
“China,” Dr. Hecker added, “has much more to gain from resumed testing than we do.”
new video loaded: Pentagon Releases U.F.O. Files
By Jorge Mitssunaga
May 8, 2026
President Trump has signed off on a plan to fire Dr. Marty Makary, commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, after a series of clashes over vaping, oversight of the abortion pill and a series of new drug application denials that rattled biotech companies, according to a person briefed on the matter, who was not authorized to discuss it publicly.
Dr. Makary had a high profile for an F.D.A. commissioner, appearing frequently on television and podcasts to sell the work he was doing at the agency on improving the food supply, speeding up some drug approvals and trying to restore agency morale after thousands of staff members left.
He tried to walk the tightrope between the business-friendly Make America Great Again movement, pledging to get rid of regulations that slow down innovation and to attract more drug trials to the United States. He was an ally of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Make American Healthy Again supporters, voicing the skepticism of the pharmaceutical industry and authorizing natural food dyes.
Ultimately, Dr. Makary’s efforts were not enough to overcome the grievances of a growing band of enemies focused on selling tobacco, opposing abortion and seeing biotech therapies authorized.
Mr. Trump’s decision to dismiss him was first reported by The Wall Street Journal.
The decision could still change, given Mr. Trump’s propensity to change his mind Dr. Makary has also proven persuasive with Mr. Trump in beating back previous efforts to oust him.
Leaving the White House Friday evening, Mr. Trump dismissed the idea that Dr. Makary would be fired.
“I’ve been reading about it, but I know nothing about it,” he said.
The White House has pressured Dr. Makary for months to authorize flavored e-cigarettes, according to a person close to the conversations. The approvals were a top wish of major tobacco companies that have been top donors to Mr. Trump. In March, the F.D.A. issued a memo saying that it would only authorize e-cigarettes in flavors such as mint, tea and spices. The memo said the fruit and candy flavors would be unlikely to pass muster, given their appeal to young people.
Pressure continued, though, and on Tuesday the F.D.A. authorized blueberry and mango flavored e-cigarettes by Glas, a small company based in Los Angeles.
Abortion foes including Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America have continued to turn up the heat on Dr. Makary, reiterating their call for his firing on Thursday. The group’s leaders and others view Dr. Makary as dragging his feet on a safety review of the abortion pill mifepristone, which they viewed as a way to highlight what they believe are dangers of the drug. Former Vice President Mike Pence, who also opposes abortion rights, amplified criticism of Dr. Makary on social media as well.
The administration has been under pressure from conservatives to tighten regulations on the prescribing and dispensing of mifepristone. The Supreme Court is reviewing a federal appeals court ruling that temporarily blocked abortion providers from prescribing the drug through telemedicine and sending it to patients by mail.
Biotech companies and their investors have also raised alarms with the White House about agency decisions to reject a series of treatments for rare diseases. The F.D.A. typically turns down about 20 percent of the applications it receives for drug approvals from companies.
Dr. Makary has been aggressive in defending the decisions, which he said came from career scientists who found the medications ineffective.
Dr. Makary also had to contend with a health secretary who seemed to view the F.D.A. as an avenue for getting his favored products authorized, exemplified by Mr. Kennedy’s social media post saying that the agency would end its “war on” stem cell treatments, peptides and raw milk. Mr. Kennedy pushed the F.D.A. to reverse a 2023 ban and allow the use of a number of peptides, unproven compounds purported to offer anti-aging or muscle-recovery benefits.
Before leading the F.D.A., Dr. Makary was a cancer surgeon and health policy researcher at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. He was also the author of several books about the health care system.
Some of Dr. Makary’s more popular moves included encouraging broader use of hormone replacement products for women and lifting the F.D.A.’s warnings on them. He helped speed some promising drugs to market, including a pancreatic cancer therapy and the pill form of the popular GLP-1 weight loss drugs.
Some California residents were among the 147 passengers and staff aboard a luxury cruise ship stricken by a suspected outbreak of hantavirus that has left three people dead and several others severely ill, officials confirmed Thursday.
California public health officials say they are monitoring the situation after being notified by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that some state residents were passengers on the MV Hondius. The precise status of those individuals, however, remains murky.
Hantavirus is a rare but deadly disease that attacks the lungs and is typically contracted by humans through inhalation of particles contaminated with the urine, feces or saliva of a wild rodent.
However, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the World Health Organization, confirmed Thursday that the Andes virus — a form of hantavirus that can spread from person to person — was involved in the outbreak.
Here’s what we know:
The MV Hondius cruise ship anchored at a port in Praia, Cape Verde, on Wednesday.
(Misper Apawu / Associated Press)
As its name suggests, the Andes virus is typically found in South America. The Dutch-flagged MV Hondius was on a 46-day journey that traveled from Antarctica with stops in Argentina.
In the case of human-to-human transmission, a person would first be infected by a wild rodent’s contaminated particles and then pass the infection to someone else, said Dr. Gaby Frank, director of the Johns Hopkins Special Pathogens Center.
“In previous outbreaks of Andes virus, transmission between people has been associated with close and prolonged contact, particularly among household members, intimate partners and people providing medical care,” Ghebreyesus said. “That appears to be the case in the current situation.”
None of the remaining passengers or crew members on the ship are symptomatic, he said.
The ship was not permitted to allow passengers to disembark at its original destination, Cape Verde, and is sailing for Spain’s Canary Islands.
“I want to be unequivocal here: This is not SARS-CoV-2. This is not the start of a COVID pandemic. This is an outbreak that we see on a ship. There’s a confined area,” Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove, who leads the WHO’s epidemic and pandemic management, said at a briefing. “This is not the same situation we were in six years ago. It doesn’t spread the same way like coronaviruses do.”
California passengers on the cruise
On April 1, 114 guests boarded the cruise ship in Ushuaia, Argentina. Twenty-three days later, 30 passengers — including six people from the United States — disembarked on a stop in St. Helena, a remote island about 1,100 miles off the coast of Africa, according to the cruise operator Oceanwide Expeditions.
Public health agencies in California, Georgia and Arizona were notified by the CDC that some of their residents were among the passengers on the cruise. It’s unclear whether these individuals disembarked on April 24, however.
The CDC is assisting local health authorities with monitoring California residents who were aboard the cruise, according to a statement by the California Department of Public Health on Friday.
As of Friday, one passenger has returned to their California residence and is in contact with local public health officials, and at least one other remains aboard the ship, according to the state agency.
“We understand that news of an unusual outbreak can be concerning,” said Dr. Erica Pan, director of the California Department of Public Health. “Unlike influenza and COVID-19, years of experience in South America have shown that this Andes hantavirus rarely spreads between people.”
Officials said the current public health protocol is to do daily symptom monitoring and reporting.
“As there are no known cases of Andes hantavirus infection from people without symptoms, and any spread has usually been limited to people with prolonged close contact with an ill person with this virus, the risk to the general public in California is extremely low,” the agency said in a statement.
In a statement earlier this week, the CDC also said that the risk to the American public “is extremely low” at this time.
“We urge all Americans aboard the ship to follow the guidance of health officials as we work to bring you home safely,” the agency said.
The others who exited the ship on April 24 were individuals from Canada, Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Switzerland, Sweden, Singapore, St. Kitts and Nevis, Turkey and the United Kingdom.
Of the remaining passengers still aboard the ship headed for Spain’s Canary Islands, California Department of Public Health said none were ill as of Friday.
How many people have been infected?
The number of lab-confirmed hantavirus cases has risen to five, according to the WHO. There are three additional suspected cases.
A timeline of reported cases of hantavirus aboard the cruise ship can be found here.
The WHO is monitoring reports of other people with symptoms “who may have had contact with one of the passengers. In each case, we are in close contact with the relevant authorities,” Tedros said.
The first passenger to have been infected, a Dutchman, became sick aboard the cruise ship on April 6 and died on April 11.
No samples were taken, because his symptoms were similar to other respiratory diseases. His widow left the ship with his body on April 24 during the scheduled stop at St. Helena.
“She deteriorated during a flight to Johannesburg on the 25th of April and died the next day,” Tedros said.
Before boarding the cruise ship, the Dutch couple had traveled through Argentina, Chile and Uruguay on a bird-watching trip, “which included visits to sites where the species of rat that is known to carry Andes virus was present,” Tedros said.
After leaving the ship, the woman was briefly aboard a KLM aircraft in Johannesburg bound for Amsterdam but was barred from the flight due to her medical condition, the airline said in a statement.
Dutch news outlets reported that a flight attendant on a KLM airplane — who briefly had contact with the widow — started feeling sick and had mild symptoms and was in isolation at a hospital in Amsterdam.
The flight attendant has since tested negative for the Andes virus, Dr. Jeremy Faust, an emergency medicine physician, wrote on his Substack blog, Inside Medicine, citing a text message sent to him by Tedros.
“It is still possible that the flight attendant contracted the Andes virus. However, given our understanding of the virus, this information means that the flight attendant’s symptoms are not caused by the Andes hantavirus, but by some other medical illness,” Faust wrote.
More cases may be reported, because the incubation period — the time it takes between exposure to the virus and the onset of illness — for the Andes strain of the hantavirus is up to six weeks.
What we know about hantavirus
There are roughly 50 identified species of hantavirus. The virus that’s found in the Americas tends to cause a cardiopulmonary syndrome, a condition that affects the heart and the lungs, according to Frank.
There have been 890 laboratory-confirmed cases of hantavirus disease reported in the U.S. since surveillance began in 1993, according to the most recent data from the CDC.
From 1980 to 2025, 99 California residents have been diagnosed with a hantavirus infection, according to the California Department of Public Health.
CDC officials said 38% of people who develop respiratory symptoms may die from the disease.
Still, the data suggest that contracting hantavirus is rare, said Dr. Afif El-Hasan, member of the American Lung Assn.’s national board of directors.
There is no vaccine or specific antiviral medicine for hantavirius.
Intensive-care treatment may include intubation and oxygen therapy, fluid replacement and use of medications to lower blood pressure, according to the American Lung Assn.
The signs of hantavirus
Early symptoms of hantavirus are similar to the flu and include fatigue, fever and muscle aches, according to the CDC. Symptoms start to develop within one to eight weeks after contact with an infected rodent.
Half of those who contract the virus also experience headaches, dizziness, chills, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea and abdominal pain.
Four to 10 days after the initial phase of the illness, another round of symptoms can develop, which include coughing, shortness of breath and possible tightness in the chest as the lungs fill with fluid.
Even though contracting hantavirus in the U.S. continues to be a rare event, El-Hasan said, people should take these initial symptoms seriously and promptly seek medical care.
How to protect yourself
Hantavirus cases can occur year-round, but the peak seasons in the United States are the spring and summer, which coincide with the reproductive seasons for deer mice.
To lessen your risk of infection, keep wild rodents out of your home and other enclosed spaces by sealing any holes and placing snap traps.
If you find evidence of mice, wear personal protective equipment and disinfect the area. When you’re done, put everything, including cleaning materials, in a bag and toss it in your trash bin.
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