The ranking Democrat on the Senate panel that writes the National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) annual funding bill said this week she would not vote for a budget that keeps the B83 nuclear gravity bomb in service. Meanwhile, New Mexico’s senior senator laid into the Energy Department subagency’s top official about plans to move production of nuclear-weapon cores out of his state.
Those were some of the few defense nuclear highlights of a Wednesday hearing of the Senate Appropriations energy and water development subcommittee, which will write Congress’ first draft of the NNSA’s fiscal 2019 budget later this spring.
Toward the top of the afternoon hearing, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) vented to Energy Secretary Rick Perry about the Donald Trump administration’s plan — published in February in the 2018 Nuclear Posture Review — to continue using the B83 gravity bomb, which was to be retired under the 30-year nuclear deterrent modernization program set in place by the Barack Obama administration.
“I will not support an energy and water bill now or in the future that violates our agreement [with the Obama administration] and retains the B83,” Feinstein told Perry and subcommittee Chairman Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.).
The Trump administration requested about $35 million in fiscal 2019 for maintenance of B83 bombs carried by B-2 aircraft. That is about 2 percent less than the 2018 appropriation. The money would have been spent to maintain the weapon in these fiscal years, whatever the Trump administration decided to do with the B83 after the Nuclear Posture Review. The nonprofit Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists estimated there were about 500 of these weapons in the arsenal as of 2017.
Feinstein said dropping the variable-yield B83 from the arsenal was a major part of the reason she voted in favor of the NNSA’s ongoing program to modernize another gravity bomb, the B61. The agency’s roughly $8-billion B61-12 program would homogenize different versions of that low-yield bomb, reducing the aggregate number of deployed U.S. nuclear weapons.
“Why should this subcommittee agree to fund the B61 life extension at all if this administration is just going to retain the B83 anyway?” Feinstein said.
The senior senator from California also complained about the Nuclear Posture Review’s direction to build a low-yield submarine-launched ballistic missile warhead.
“This comes at the 11th hour of efforts to modernize our sub-launched missile force, and we already have low-yield options in our nuclear arsenal that are already undergoing modernization,” Feinstein said. “Why are those insufficient?”
No one at the appropriations hearing Wednesday had an answer for Feinstein between the gavels.
In another Senate hearing Wednesday, another Democratic senator told senior Pentagon officials that the NNSA might be unprepared to add a W76 warhead modification to its four ongoing warhead furbishment programs.
“I just have real concerns about their [NNSA’s] capacity to take on additional work,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) said in a hearing of the Senate Armed Services strategic forces subcommittee. “I think maintaining our current arsenal and our current programs should be our No. 1 priority. And that we should manage that first.”
The NNSA has said it will modify the existing W76 warhead, currently deployed on Trident II D5 missiles carried aboard Ohio-class submarines, to create the low-yield capability called for in the Nuclear Posture Review. The DOE agency did not request funding for the effort in its fiscal 2019 budget plan, in part because the agency needs separate congressional authorization to modify the warhead.
The Republican majority’s margin in the Senate is razor-thin — 51 to 49 — enhancing the bargaining position of the minority, should it vote as a unit.
If the Pentagon has its way, the low-yield W76 modification would be done by the end of fiscal 2019 on Sept. 30 of that year: the time the NNSA had planned to wrap up a separate life-extension program for the warhead that had been underway since well before the Trump administration started writing the Nuclear Posture Review last year.
Although the NNSA has not requested the money and Congress has barely started to debate whether to proceed with a low-yield W76, Rob Soofer, deputy assistant secretary of defense for nuclear and missile defense policy, told Warren on Wednesday the low-yield modification “should be” finished by the end of the current W76 life-extension program.
Meanwhile, both the Armed Services and Appropriations subcommittees touched on the NNSA’s plutonium-pit mission, the future of which could be decided as soon as early May.
In the appropriations hearing, Sen. Tom Udall (D-N.M.) railed against the NNSA’s plans to possibly move some production of plutonium pits — fissile nuclear-weapon cores — to the Savannah River Site in South Carolina from the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.
“There is only one place in the U.S. with the technical know-how to do this, and that is Los Alamos National Laboratory,” Udall told Perry and NNSA Administrator Lisa Gordon-Hagerty, who also testified Wednesday.
Udall complained, as he and Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) did last year in a letter to Perry, that the NNSA’s analysis of alternative pit plants unfairly ignored planned upgrades to Los Alamos.
The 2018 National Defense Authorization Act called for the NNSA to update Congress on pit production planning by May 11. Gordon-Hagerty, in congressional testimony last month, said that update would come from Deputy Energy Secretary Dan Brouillette, who she would brief following a meeting at NNSA headquarters with Ellen Lord: undersecretary of defense for acquisition and sustainment.
After the hearing, Gordon-Hagerty declined to say whether she had yet met with Lord.
In the Armed Services subcommittee, the staff director of the joint DOE-DOD Nuclear Weapons Council did not narrow the timeline any further.
“We’re undergoing right now a final assessment of to make a recommendation to the Deputy Secretary of Energy,” Guy Roberts, assistant secretary of defense for nuclear, chemical, and biological defense programs, told the panel. “Hopefully that will be done very soon.”
