A House Armed Services panel this week called for a briefing about delays to a bomb and warhead refurb at the National Nuclear Security Administration and a new report on planned subcritical testing facilities.
The strategic forces subcommittee wrote the requirements into a report appended to its portion of the fiscal year 2022 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA): the annual policy bill that sets spending limits for national defense programs, including those at the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA).
If the subcommittee’s language becomes law, NNSA will have to brief the Armed Services Committee by Feb. 28 about an internal NNSA review of the year-plus delays to the B61-12 gravity bomb life extension, and the W88 Alt 370 major alteration, which is refreshing parts of the Navy’s larger submarine-launched ballistic missile warhead for decades more at sea. The programs fell more than a year behind schedule after the NNSA in 2019 decided to replace capacitors intended for use with some of the refurbished weapons’ components.
The full House Armed Services Committee is not scheduled to mark up the 2022 NDAA until Sept. 1, a month before the 2022 fiscal year begins. The big nuclear weapons debate in the lower chamber, if there is one this year, will happen then, when the committee reveals whether it plans to follow the lead of House appropriators in essentially meeting the NNSA’s 2022 budget request of about $20 billion.
At deadline, House Armed Services had not said which levels of funding it recommended for which NNSA nuclear weapons programs. Appropriators essentially met the request, though they notably provided less funding than sought for early development of the W93 submarine-launched ballistic missile warhead and no funding at all for a sea-launched variant of the W80-4 cruise-missile warhead — a move that did not sit well with the White House.
The appropriators’ decision to hold back funding for W93 and the sea-launched W80-4 “appear to pre-judge the outcome of the [Joe Biden administration’s] Nuclear Posture Review,” the White House wrote Monday in a statement of administration policy. “As the Administration works to reduce the role of nuclear weapons in the national security strategy, it looks forward to working with the Congress to ensure that the most critical elements of the nuclear modernization program are fully funded and that the FY 2022 funding levels do not constrain policy options available for consideration by the President in the [nuclear posture review].”
Meanwhile, the strategic forces subcommittee has also directed the Government Accountability Office to study the NNSA’s Enhanced Capabilities for Subcritical Experiments program, which includes mining out new space for non-nuclear-explosive testing at the Nevada National Security Site and fitting the new space with the planned Scorpius x-ray imaging device.
The Government Accountability Office would have “to provide an interim briefing to the House Committee on Armed Services not later than December 31, 2021, and a final report to the committee not later than April 1, 2022,” the subcommittee wrote in its NDAA bill report.
