Sandia National Laboratories' safeguards the nation's nuclear stockpile and helps the country solve some of its most pressing engineering problems in homeland security, energy, and basic research.

Its roots lie in World War II's Manhattan Project. Its history reflects the changing national security needs of postwar America.

Sandia's original emphasis on ordnance engineering — turning the nuclear physics packages created by Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories into deployable weapons — expanded into new areas as national security requirements changed.

In addition to ensuring the safety and reliability of the stockpile, Sandia applied the expertise it acquired in weapons work to a variety of related areas such as energy research, supercomputing, treaty verification, nanotechnology, and nonproliferation.