Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.), who is running for chair of the House Armed Services Committee in the incoming 116th Congress, is set today to make his first nuclear weapon-oriented speech since Democrats secured control of the House of Representatives in last week’s midterm elections.
Smith is slated to speak at 9:20 a.m. Eastern time in Washington, D.C., at the anti-nuclear Ploughshares Fund’s The Future of U.S. Nuclear Policy event. The current ranking member of the House Armed Services Committee is one of four lawmakers, all Democrats, scheduled to speak at the one-day briefing.
Smith is an outspoken critic of the 30-year nuclear-deterrent modernization program set in place by the Barack Obama administration in 2016 and bolstered by the Donald Trump administration in February as part of the 2018 Nuclear Posture Review.
Smith is opposed in particular to the low-yield, submarine-launched ballistic-missile warhead funded in 2019 at Trump’s request by the GOP Congress, and to the ongoing modernization of the U.S. intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) fleet.
The low-yield warhead, which the Department of Energy plans to develop and deploy between fiscal years 2019 and 2024, will be a dialed-down version of the existing W76 warhead now carried by Trident II-D5 missiles on Ohio-class submarines. Smith has already signed on to a bill — which unless it passes in the next few weeks would have to be reintroduced in the 116th Congress — that would ban development and deployment of the low-yield W76.
ICBM modernization is a driving force behind billion-dollar upgrades to the DOE National Nuclear Security Administration’s warhead-core production infrastructure at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, and to an ongoing missile development program at the Pentagon. Under the latter, Boeing and Northrop Grumman are spending almost $2 billion combined under four-and-a-half-year contracts awarded in 2017 to mature competing designs for a Minuteman III ICBM replacement.
Ploughshares plans to live-stream today’s scheduled event on Facebook.
