The numbers are staggering.

In four years, Los Alamos National Laboratory’s budget has gone from $2.5 billion to more than $4 billion, with thoughts it could rise to $4.5 billion the next time Congress signs the check for the next fiscal year.

Also in 2018, the lab hovered around 12,000 employees. Now there are about 15,000 — in an era when hiring and keeping employees is probably harder than it’s ever been. Even so, 3,000 workers in four years.

That’s a growth spurt.

There’s more: This is not your father’s Los Alamos. It’s not your older brother’s Los Alamos. Actually, it’s now your neighbor’s Los Alamos, because Santa Fe offices now teem with lab employees for the first time in 60 years.

But no good news goes unpunished, and Los Alamos again is certain to find itself as a target from critics who contend it has little business, let alone hope, of producing 30 plutonium pits by 2026 — its stated goal. The heat will grow only more intense as that deadline approaches, because let’s face it: Deadlines are deadlines, but 30 pits of plutonium in 3½ calendar years is going to be hard as hell.

Creating a key nuclear component can in no way be equated to producing widgets, but there are some commonalities — you need people, materials, health and consistency to make things work. Last time we looked, none of those are in abundance in America at this time.

Nevertheless, Los Alamos will try.

History is a double-edged sword at the lab. It is the place where the first nuclear weapons were developed, against great odds. J. Robert Oppenheimer’s operation was a can-do — have-to-do — kind of place, and that success, which killed more than 200,000 Japanese, ended World War II and provided the U.S. a nuclear deterrent for decades, was not easily forgotten.

Fair or not, that patina has faded with time and, obviously, missteps. The lab’s struggles with security in the early part of this century and its more recent problems with safety eroded confidence — if not on the Hill, at least for those who watched it from a distance.

But the growth spurt of the past half-decade, a three-administrations-long push to modernize the nuclear arsenal, and now, the pit-production deadline have merged to offer Los Alamos a chance to forge a new path in a post-post-Cold War world. Perhaps you’ve heard of the place: It’s a planet where a Russian dictator can start a land war with a neighbor while modernizing his own nukes; an ascendant China can make threats with the goods to back them up and unpredictable leaders in North Korea and Iran move closer to producing their own atomic weapons.

In 2022 and beyond, the U.S. no longer is Smokey Robinson. The rest of the world no longer is The Miracles.

The hum of change is hard to miss. Lab Director Thom Mason, who took the helm at Los Alamos in the fall of ’18, said about 4,000 to 5,000 new employees have been hired at Los Alamos since he arrived. That’s an astounding figure.

“Being new to the institution, they probably don’t recognize what a unique and special time this is,” Mason said recently. “This is a rare opportunity to kind of remake the institution that we have.”

The new Roaring ’20s places Mason and lab management — and really, the entire U.S. defense nuclear laboratory apparatus — in a position most of them have never been. It’s a mistake to think Los Alamos was ever a sleepy place, but there was a time, not that long ago, when budgets were thinner and threats a bit less unsettling.

Now, money is no object (though it probably should be). Now, the push is for more, more, more — and give it to us yesterday.

All of which creates the potential for danger. Those who rush often make mistakes. The next three years will test Mason, Los Alamos and the defense complex as never before.

“A few years from now, maybe we’ll hit the wall in terms of funding,” Mason said. “But right now, it’s really all about execution. We’ve got to deliver.”