The Senate Armed Services strategic forces committee will retain some of its nuclear backbone in the 117th Congress with Sen. Deb Fischer (R-Neb.), who has a major nuclear constituency in the form of the Triad’s land-based leg, retaining her leadership role.
That’s less nuclear leadership than the panel, which writes policy for nuclear forces and the National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) nuclear-weapons complex, might have had, if former ranking member Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) had remained on the Armed Services Committee after Democrats won control of the Senate in November’s general election.
Sen. Angus King (I-Maine), who caucuses with Democrats, will now chair the strategic forces subcommittee, the full Committee announced Tuesday. Heinrich had already departed Armed Services for his first-ever stint on the Appropriations Committee by the time of Tuesday’s subcommittee roster rollout.
Heinrich is an unflappable backer of New Mexico’s nuclear weapons laboratories. As a member of the Armed Services strategic forces subcommittee, he went to bat time and again to secure for the Los Alamos National Laboratory a mission to produce new plutonium pits — nuclear weapon triggers — for most of the rest of the century. Heinrich has been more than willing to question why any other NNSA site should have a role in pit manufacturing.
In the 116th Congress, with the now-retired Sen. Tom Udall (D-N.M.) still ensconced on Appropriations and Heinrich on Armed Services, Los Alamos may have had a broader aegis in the Senate than it has now. Still, with Fischer on strategic forces and Heinrich a check-writer, there remains a theoretical bipartisan axis uniting Armed Services and Appropriations in defense of new pits and the planned Ground Based Strategic Deterrent intercontinental ballistic missiles that will use them.
