billion to meet all of the goals requested by the DOE. The NAS review led to a reevaluation of these plans, and in July 1990, LLNL responded with the Nova Upgrade, which would reuse most of Nova, along with the adjacent Shiva facility. The resulting system would be much lower power than the LMF concept, with a driver of about 1 MJ. The new design included features that advanced the state of the art in the driver section, including multi-pass in the main amplifiers, and 18 beamlines (up from 10) that were split into 288 "beamlets" as they entered the target area. The plans called for the installation of two main banks of beamlines, one in the existing Nova beamline room, and the other in the older Shiva building next door, extending through its laser bay and target area into an upgraded Nova target area. The lasers would deliver about 500 TW in a 4 ns pulse. The upgrades were expected to produce fusion yields of between 2 and 10 MJ. The initial estimates from 1992 estimated construction costs around $400 million, with construction taking place from 1995 to 1999. NIF, 1994 Throughout this period, the ending of the Cold War led to dramatic changes in defense funding and priorities. The political support for nuclear weapons declined and arms agreements led to a reduction in warhead count, and the US was faced with the prospect of losing a generation of nuclear weapon designers able to maintain existing stockpiles, or design new weapons. At the same time, the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CNTB) was signed in 1996, which would ban all criticality testing and made the development of newer generations of nuclear weapons more difficult. Out of these changes came the Stockpile Stewardship and Management Program (SSMP), which, among other things, included funds for the development of methods to design and build nuclear weapons without having to test them explosively. In a series of meetings that started in 1995, an agreement formed between the labs to divide up SSMP efforts. An important part of this would be confirmation of computer models using low-yield ICF experiments. The Nova Upgrade was too small to use for these experiments. A redesign matured into NIF in 1994. The estimated cost of the project remained almost $1 billion, with completion in 2002. In spite of the agreement, the large project cost combined with the ending of similar