The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) plans to issue the MITRE Corp.-operated JASON group of civilian scientists more nuclear security work by the end of April, according to a procurement note published last week.
The agency announced its intention to keep JASON on the job in February. The Feb. 13 procurement note provides further details about the arrangement.
The semiautonomous Department of Energy nuclear weapons agency took ownership of McLean, Va.-based MITRE Corp.’s JASON work last year, after the Pentagon on April 30, 2019, decided for the first time in decades not to renew the company’s indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity (IDIQ) deal to manage the JASONs.
The NNSA “intends to negotiate and issue a new Task Order for JASON Studies under the Master IDIQ once the final number of studies are identified in the March/April 2020 timeframe,” the procurement note says.
The NNSA estimates its JASON work will potentially be worth up to $13 million over two years ending in early June 2021, once the agency finalizes its next task order this spring. The figure includes the study contract, plus an associated project management contract with roughly the same performance period, and which covers travel logistics for roughly 70 scientists. The NNSA signed its JASON contracts in June 2019.
Under the contracts, JASON had already been working on studies about the aging of plutonium pits — fissile nuclear-weapon cores — and cybersecurity for the NNSA.
Congress, in the National Defense Authorization Act for 2020, directed the Pentagon to continue using the JASON group “as advisory personnel to provide advice, on an ongoing basis, on matters involving science, technology, and national security, including methods to defeat existential and technologically-amplified threats to national security.”
The defense policy measure also orders the NNSA to use JASON to study the agency’s planned W87-1 life-extension program: a drive to modernize an intercontinental ballistic missile warhead that could be used on planned Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent missiles beginning around 2030.
