NNSA head defends weapons program post-election, says agency ‘not just sitting on our hands’

WASHINGTON, D.C. — With the U.S. producing more modernized nuclear weapons annually than it has since the end of the Cold War, the government should not “over respond” to rising nuclear threats abroad, the head of National Nuclear Security Administration said here Wednesday.

Although she is “very worried about global conditions,” Jill Hruby, administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), said the agency was “not in a moment of weakness.”

Hruby spoke on a panel held here at the National Press Club by the anti-nuclear organization Los Alamos Study Group a week after U.S. voters elected Donald Trump (R) president. The Exchange Monitor moderated the discussion. 

“The STRATCOM commander agrees. The vice chair agrees. I talk to them all the time. I talk to them every week,” Hruby said. “We have developed a strategy that we believe is a credible and effective deterrent. It’s harder than hell to execute. It is faster than we’ve executed before.”

Also on the panel was Bob Peters, a deterrence research fellow from the conservative Washington think tank Heritage Foundation, who said that the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) should ramp up from its current “glacial pace” to a “wartime footing” for building warheads to compete with Russia and China.

“NNSA, many people have suggested, has become captive to a work free safe zone mentality, where overly onerous interpretations of regs, particularly environmental and safety regs, has created environments in which little progress or not enough progress, is being made on plutonium pit or warhead production at scale,” Peters said. “I would hope that the next NNSA administrator understands this and takes us on head first, because if we don’t, what are the consequences? The consequences is that we’ll be accepting strategic risk. That is the risk that a nuclear war will break out because our adversaries do not believe that we have the arsenal that can credibly deter them.”

Asked earlier in the panel by the Exchange Monitor how many pits the agency had so far made for W-87-1 warheads, aside from the single pit certified earlier this year as as war-usable, Hruby replied that while only that one pit had been certified, a few more were “in the pipeline.”

As far as production of weapons without new pits goes, Hruby said Wednesday that in 2023, the NNSA delivered 200 modernized warheads to the Department of Defense.

“I get a little bit tired of these allegations that we don’t, we can’t do it, and that China can. We’re doing it too,” Hruby said. “We’re not sitting on our hands. I just like, I just have to say that. You know, the complex is working really hard and things are happening. It’s not a bunch of people who aren’t working. It’s just not.”