After a marathon of amendments and votes that began Tuesday morning and ended Wednesday morning, the House Armed Services Committee defeated a doomed-to-fail Democratic attempt to prevent the National Nuclear Security Administration from starting work on a new low-yield nuclear warhead in fiscal year 2019.
Ranking member Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.), who called the low-yield warhead “a very bad, and a very dangerous idea,” offered an amendment that would have stripped the weapon out of the massive defense policy bill.
The committee shot the amendment down along party lines, then approved the underlying bill along party lines in the early morning hours Wednesday. The full House at that time had not scheduled a vote on the bill. The Senate Armed Services Committee was set to mark up its version of the NDAA the week of May 21. The Republican margin in the Senate is too slim to pass the bill without Democratic votes.
The NDAA does not provide funding; the bill sets defense policy and spending limits for congressional appropriators.
The House committee’s NDAA would authorize the semi-autonomous NNSA to spend $65 million on a low-yield, submarine-launched ballistic-missile warhead in the fiscal year that starts Oct. 1.
The Donald Trump administration says the U.S. needs the weapon to counter, and prevent the use of, similarly powerful Russian nukes.
To reach low-yield, NNSA plans to dial down the power of an unspecified number of existing W76 warheads, which are now used on the Trident II D5 missiles carried aboard Ohio-class nuclear submarines. The work will be done as part of NNSA’s ongoing W76 life-extension program, which began in 2000 and is slated to cost about $4 billion to complete by Sept. 30, 2019, according to DOE budget documents.
Also during the markup, the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility dodged another bullet after Rep. Jim Cooper (D-Tenn.) offered, then withdrew, an amendment that would have defunded the over-budget plutonium disposal facility. Cooper called the plant a “zombie earmark” that deserves to “collapse under its own weight.”
The Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility, under construction at the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C., is years behind schedule and could soon be turned into a manufacturing plant for nuclear-warhead cores called plutonium pits. A decision about that is due on the Hill Friday.
Overall, the House’s version of the 2019 NDAA recommends $15.3 billion for NNSA: about four-and-a-half percent more than the 2018 appropriation, and about one-and-a-half percent more than the White House requested for 2019. The bill calls for a series of reports on crucial NNSA defense programs.
