The House Armed Services Committee early Thursday approved its version of the 2020 National Defense Authorization Act after about 18 hours of debate.
The House committee’s annual defense policy bill, now headed to the House floor, authorizes about $15.8 billion for the active nuclear weapons programs managed by the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA). That is 4% less funding than sought by the White House, but an increase of about 4.5%, from the enacted 2019 budget.
The House committee’s bill passed on a mostly partisan vote of 33-24. Two Republicans broke ranks: Reps. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) and Don Bacon (R-Neb.).
Lawmakers fiercely debated nuclear weapons policy in the marathon markup, with most of the attention and acrimony given to a weapon that is relatively small in terms of cost and yield, but of outsized political and strategic importance: the W76-2 submarine-launched, ballistic missile warhead.
House Armed Services Chairman Adam Smith (D-Wash.) made it his mission last year, before his party retook control of the House, to ban the weapon. The NDAA just approved by the committee would, if signed, do just that — at least temporarily. The committee’s bill prohibits the Navy from deploying the weapon in fiscal 2020, which begins on Oct. 1.
Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) tried twice and failed during the protracted markup to reverse Smith’s decision, which Democrats backed to a person. The NNSA got $65 million for the W76-2 for fiscal 2019 and sought $10 million more for 2020, which the House committee’s defense authorization bill did not authorize. House appropriators have also denied NNSA funding for the weapon in 2020.
The NNSA has said it is building “a small number” of W76-2s.
Two Cheney amendments to restore W76-2 failed on party line votes after an hour of charged debate, in which Cheney repeatedly said that failure to approve the low-yield weapon was tantamount to “universal disarmament” by the U.S.
In a potential conventional conflict, the White House said in its 2018 Nuclear Posture Review, the United States could only stop Russia from using low-yield weapons by presenting an American low-yield nuke as a potential counterstrike. Cheney has used the same argument to support her amendments.
She and committee Ranking Member Mac Thornberry (R-Texas) repeatedly appealed to freshmen Democrats to seek, if they had not already, classified briefings on how long U.S. bombers take to deliver existing low-yield nuclear cruise missiles or bombs, compared with how fast a submarine could deliver a similarly powerful weapon with a cruise missile.
Smith and his fellow Democrats rejected those appeals, saying as they always have that the threat of an instant, global-range, high-yield U.S. counterstrike would weigh too heavily in Russia’s calculations for that nation to attempt, for example, to delete a U.S. aircraft carrier with a low-yield nuke.
Rep. Jim Cooper (D-Tenn.), ranking member of the House Armed Services strategic forces subcommittee, said putting a low-yield weapon on a ballistic missile submarine needlessly imperiled the most secure leg of the U.S. nuclear triad. Launching a low-yield nuclear weapon from a submarine would mark that vessel, and its remaining high-yield weapons, for adversary attack submarines, according to Cooper.
One of Cheney’s W76-2 amendments, which would have removed language prohibiting deployment of the weapon by the Navy, failed 30-26. One Democrat did not vote. A second amendment, which would have allowed deployment and authorized some $25 million in NNSA and Navy spending on the weapon, failed 29-26, with two Democrats absent.
Cheney also tried, and also failed on a party line vote, to save the W76-2 last week in the House Armed Services strategic forces subcommittee.
The full House committee also shot down, along party lines, an amendment by Rep. Joe Wilson (R-S.C.) that would have prevented the majority’s bill from blocking production of plutonium pits — fissile nuclear weapon cores — at the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C.
The NNSA, at the direction of the Donald Trump administration, wants to build 80 pits a year by 2030 using upgraded pit facilities at the Los Alamos National Laboratory and a new plant at the Savannah River Site, planned to be built on the remains of the partially completed and now canceled Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility.
The House Armed Services Committee’s bill directs the NNSA to focus only on the Los Alamos facility, which is supposed to make 30 pits a year by 2026. The cores will be for future W87-1-style warheads, suitable for use on future Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent intercontinental ballistic missiles.
The House committee’s bill authorizes about $470 million for the plutonium sustainment account that funds construction of pit plants: almost 35% less than what the administration requested, and in line with what the House Appropriations Committee has recommended for 2020.
The House committee’s bill also forbids increased funding to keep the megaton-class B83 nuclear gravity in war-ready shape into the 2020s. The administration sought more than $50 million for that effort in 2020, and the House committee’s NDAA authorized a little more than $20 million. That also is in line with what House appropriators have approved.
As the House debate began Wednesday morning, the Senate Armed Services Committee, which passed its version of the NDAA in May, at last revealed the text of that measure. The Senate bill authorizes nearly all the spending the White House sought federal nuclear weapons programs, including about $16.5 billion for the NNSA.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) filed cloture on the Senate committee’s NDAA, setting up floor a floor debate as soon as next week. The House had not scheduled a floor vote its Armed Services Committee’s NDAA at deadline Friday for Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor.
If the bills pass their respective chambers, the final NDAA will be negotiated in conference.
