After state lawmakers broke up his district, Rep. Jim Cooper (D-Tenn.), the chair of the Armed Forces panel that writes the first drafts of nuclear-weapon policy each year, will retire from Congress when his term ends in January 2023, he said this week.
“There’s no way, at least for me in this election cycle, but there may be a path forward for other worthy candidates,” said Cooper, whose fifth Tennessee district — now split into three — had included most of left-leaning Nashville. “I am announcing my decision promptly so that others have more time to campaign” ahead of November’s midterm elections.
Cooper chairs the House Armed Services strategic forces subcommittee. In recent years, he opposed W76-2 low-yield, submarine-launched ballistic-missile warhead that went to sea with the Columbia fleet in 2019 aboard Trident II-D5 missiles and urged the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) to drop plans to manufacture the fissile nuclear-weapon triggers called pits at the Savannah River Site — a project he called “pork” for South Carolina.
Ideologically, he hovered midway between Democratic orthodoxy on nuclear weapons — which in the most recent two sessions of Congress involved broad support for the ongoing modernization program started by the Barack Obama administration but opposition to the Donald Trump administration’s proposals to add more low-yield warheads to the arsenal — and the progressive wing of the party, which has called for slow-rolling or eliminating the Ground Based Strategic Deterrent intercontinental ballistic missiles slated to replace the Minuteman III fleet starting in 2030 or so.
Occasionally, in sparsely attended hearings of the strategic forces subcommittee, Cooper helped the NNSA make news at subcommittee hearings.
In 2019, he outed the Pentagon’s decision to cancel its long-running support of the independent JASON group of scientists, after which the NNSA put the group on a kind of life support, commissioning studies into plutonium pit aging, among others.
In the summer of 2021, though the agency had sort of let the cat out of the bag in its annual budget request, Cooper got then-acting NNSA administrator Charles Verdon unambiguously on the record that completion of the Savannah River Plutonium Processing Facility, the South Carolina pit plant Cooper opposed, would be delayed beyond 2030 — a goal the agency had steadfastly clung to throughout the Trump administration.
Meanwhile, Cooper will get one more go-round with the gavel when the Armed Services Committee starts drafting the fiscal year 2023 National Defense Authorization Act: traditionally, an early summer activity.
