Ex-administrator advises successors to look at NNSA enterprise blueprint

WASHINGTON — Ahead of President Donald Trump’s (R) swearing-in, Jill Hruby, now former administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration, advised the Trump administration to look at the agency’s enterprise blueprint.

“I want to be clear that the blueprint is not a wish list,” Hruby said last week at a tell-all at Washington think tank the Hudson Institute, four days before Trump’s inauguration Monday. “We must have the capabilities outlined to deliver on time for national security. If the investments aren’t made, the program of record will be delayed. The Blueprint is intended to make connections clear, so that decision makers will be informed.”

Hruby added, “I believe the enterprise blueprint provides the next administration a strong starting point for budget requests and resource allocation.”

The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) published a 40-page vision for the next 25 years of the U.S. nuclear weapons complex, entitled the Enterprise Blueprint, in October. When the Blueprint came out, Hruby said it “sets out a roadmap for a complex that enables us to be proactive rather than reactive in the face of rising mission demands, a more volatile world, and emerging technological opportunities and challenges.”

Among the looming changes to the works of nuclear security, the New START nuclear-arms-control treaty between the U.S. and Russia will lapse in February 2026, and by 2030, the Pentagon estimated in a 2023 report, China will “probably” have more 1,000 nuclear warheads and continue moving toward deployment of a large nuclear triad, with land-, sea-, and air-based weapons. 

According to the Pentagon, by 2050, the end of the Enterprise Blueprint’s timeline, Beijing aims to field what Xi Jinping, China’s president, called a “‘world class’” military.

When asked about China’s “world class” military, Tong Zhao, a senior fellow at the dove-ish Washington think tank Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told the Monitor in the fall “we don’t know” whether that would mean China would aim to achieve nuclear parity with the U.S. or not.

“Senior Chinese leaders, including Xi Jinping himself, have repeatedly emphasized the importance of asymmetric strategic deterrence,” Zhao told the Exchange Monitor after a Carnegie panel in October, after the Blueprint was published. “So it looks like China’s high-level thinking is still constantly influenced by China’s traditional belief in asymmetric nuclear deterrence. So I don’t think China has decided to achieve nuclear parity or to build a larger nuclear arsenal than the United States. But we don’t know about the specifics.”