The Joe Biden administration ought to look at undoing the legal deadlines the National Nuclear Security Administration faces to begin production of new nuclear weapon triggers, a former senior official with the agency said Wednesday.
“I think the administration needs to look at how those statutory timelines really line up to the programmatically driven timelines and come up with what may be a more realistic schedule, even if it means asking for legislative relief,” Madelyn Creedon, principal deputy administrator for the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) in the Barack Obama administration from 2014 to 2017.
Under current law, the secretary of energy must ensure that the NNSA is able to annually produce certain amounts and types of plutonium pits, fissile warhead triggers, by certain fiscal years: qualification pits in fiscal 2021; at least 10 war-ready pits by fiscal 2024; at least 20 pits by 2025; at least 30 pits by 2026; and at least 80 pits by 2030.
Production is to be split between the Los Alamos National Laboratory, set to start casting multiple war-usable pits in 2024, and the Savannah River National Laboratory, set to come online in 2030.
Although not anything as explicit as Creedon suggested, Congress did give the DOE a sort blow valve for the pit deadlines in the 2021 National Defense Authorization Act, which could allow the commander of U.S. Strategic Command to certify that NNSA could produce pits up to five years later than planned without affecting military confidence in the nuclear arsenal.
Meanwhile, as she has once already since Joe Biden was elected President of the United States, Creedon declined to say whether she would take a job in the Biden administration, or whether the Biden administration had offered her a job.
“You know I’m not going to answer that one!” Creedon said, to a chorus of laughter from the virtual room. “But thank you for asking.”
Creedon spoke during an online panel discussion hosted by the Advanced Nuclear Weapons Alliance, a Washington-based non-government group with a pro-nuclear bent that organizes periodic speaking events with current and former government officials involved with nuclear weapons programs.
