Fresh from his primary victory over Rep. Joe Kennedy (D-Mass.), Sen. Edward Markey (D-Mass.) led a big chunk of the Senate’s Democratic caucus, including the minority leader, in calling on conferees to maintain a prohibition against nuclear-explosive testing in the final version of the 2021 National Defense Authorization Act.
“A U.S. nuclear weapons testing restart would give license to other nuclear armed countries to conduct their own tests — including Russia and China, whose nuclear arsenals are especially in our national interest to restrain,” Markey and his Democratic colleagues wrote in a letter.
The Senate Armed Services Committee’s version of the annual defense policy bill, which authorizes Department of Energy nuclear weapons and defense-nuclear-waste programs, provides $10 million for the agency’s semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) to prepare for a yield-producing nuclear test, if the President should order one.
The House’s version of the bill, on the other hand, prohibits any funding for that purpose. The lower chamber crammed the ban on yield-producing test-preparation through the floor in a mostly party line vote. There is little Republican support for such a policy anywhere on Capitol Hill, and there is debate in Washington about whether $10 million would accomplish much in the way of preparation, anyway.
The issue of a nuclear-explosive test ban in 2020 is more political than technical. In May, The Washington Post reported that the Donald Trump administration was considering a rapid nuclear-explosive test as a means of persuading Russia and China to negotiate a trilateral nuclear arms-control treaty with the U.S.
The NNSA has not maintained a centralized spending account for return-to-testing preparations for decades. Instead, the agency scatters such funding among the nuclear weapons labs, and the Nevada National Security Site.
Since the last U.S. nuclear-explosive test in 1992, the NNSA has used supercomputer modeling, high-energy plutonium experiments, and subcritical plutonium explosive tests to certify annually to the President that U.S. nuclear weapons have retained their designed destructive power. The NNSA says these tests are zero yield, producing no sustained nuclear chain reaction.
Last week, Rep. Mac Thornberry (R-Texas), the outgoing ranking member of the House Armed Services Committee, said House and Senate lawmakers probably will not get together to hash out a compromise 2021 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) until after the Nov. 3 presidential election.
