The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) will name its under-construction Albuquerque headquarters building after the late John Gordon, the former agency administrator who died early this year.
Lisa Gordon-Hagerty, the current administrator of the semiautonomous Department of Energy nuclear weapons agency, announced the decision on Aug. 21. The building’s official name will be the John A. Gordon Albuquerque Complex. Gordon, the long-retired first administrator, died of a stroke in April, following a long illness.
Albuquerque is the NNSA’s administrative headquarters in the west, giving management a foothold near its nuclear weapons labs in New Mexico and California, along with the Pantex weapons assembly and disassembly plant in Texas. The new complex, being built under contract to the Army Corps of Engineers, will be ready for occupation by some 1,200 NNSA staffers by “late 2021,” the agency stated in a press release.
The new three-story, 330,000-square-foot building will replace about a dozen mostly classified buildings of mid-century vintage.
The Gordon Complex is being built on DOE-owned land on Eubank Boulevard in Albuquerque and will eventually be fenced within Kirtland Air Force Base. The effort will cost somewhere between $100 million and $250 million, the agency has estimated.
lThen-President Bill Clinton nominated Gordon to lead the NNSA in 2000, the year Gordon ended his nearly three-year tenure as CIA deputy director. The general’s confirmation in the GOP-held Senate took only about a month and a half, under then-Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.).
Gordon led the then-newly semiautonomous Department of Energy branch from 2000 to 2002, helping the sub-agency find its legs after a big federal debate about how the executive branch should care for the U.S. nuclear stockpile in the post-Cold War era.
Gordon left the NNSA in June 2002, and the agency relied on interim leadership until the Senate in May 2003 confirmed Linton Brooks as his full-time successor.
