The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) could be ready to perform an underground nuclear-explosive test in a matter of months, a Pentagon official said Tuesday.
“I’ve heard NNSA administrators and lab directors in the past talk about a very quick test with limited diagnostics, though certainly diagnostics, within months,” said Drew Walter, who is performing the duties of deputy assistant secretary of defense for nuclear matters. “A fuller test, fully diagnostic, and lots of data, all the bells and whistles, so to speak, might be measured in years. But ultimately, if the president directed because of a technical issue or a geopolitical issue, a system to go test, I think it would happen relatively rapidly.”
Walter also said that he believes the NNSA has a borehole at the Nevada National Security Site that would be suitable for such a rapid test.
Walter spoke to members of the press on a webcast hosted by the Washington-based nonprofits the Mitchell Institute and the Advanced Nuclear Weapons Alliance. It occurred just days after The Washington Post on May 22 reported that the Donald Trump administration discussed a possible nuclear-explosive test in a May 15 meeting.
According to the Post’s report, there was “serious” disagreement about the need to test a nuclear weapon, particularly from NNSA participants at the meeting. The paper also said conversations about a nuclear test were “ongoing.” Both NNSA headquarters in Washington and the White House declined to comment for this article.
Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee for president and former vice president in the Barack Obama administration, said this week it would be “as reckless as it is dangerous” to resume nuclear-explosive testing, and that “when I was vice president, the secretaries of defense and energy certified annually that the stockpile continued to be safe and reliable without the need for nuclear testing. By all accounts that remains true today.”
The United States performed explosive nuclear testing from World War II until 1992, when it began observing a voluntary nuclear test moratorium even while refusing to ratify the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. The Atomic Energy Commission, and later the Energy Department, used the tests to prove that new nuclear weapons worked as intended, or to resolve technical problems with existing weapons. From the early 1960s to 1992, the U.S. fired its tests shots underground at the facility now known as the Nevada National Security Site.
Since doing away with nuclear explosive tests, the U.S. has relied on subcritical plutonium experiments to verify that American nuclear weapons retain their designed destructive potency as they age. Some of these experiments are performed at the Nevada National Security Site, which is upgrading its underground U1a Complex to continue, and enhance, the subcritical regime into the latter half of the century. On the basis of these subcritical tests, DOE nuclear weapons labs have certified each year for decades that U.S. weapons will function as designed.
From the time testing ceased, the President has required that the NNSA be ready to start it again, should the White House call for it. The NNSA would have to be ready to fire the shot sometime between two and three years afterward, according to the agency’s 2020 Stockpile Stewardship and Management Plan: the annual unclassified summary of ongoing civilian nuclear-weapon work. The source of the order-to-test deadline is a presidential directive from the Clinton administration, the document says.
The Trump administration’s 2018 Nuclear Posture Review said “the United States must remain ready to resume nuclear testing if necessary to meet severe technological or geopolitical challenges.”
According to the Stockpile Stewardship and Management Plan, “DOE/NNSA assumes that a test would be conducted only when the President has declared a national emergency or other similar contingency and only after any necessary waiver of applicable statutory and regulatory restrictions.”
There is no centrally managed NNSA program for “test readiness:” the agency term for making sure that test infrastructure, personnel, and support systems could be ready to fire a shot underground at the Nevada National Security Site within three years, if ordered. Likewise, Congress has not appropriated funding specifically for test readiness since 2010, according to the Stockpile Stewardship and Management Plan.
“The problem with the idea of doing a test of a nuclear device is where to do it,” Cheryl Rofer, a former chemist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, wrote on Twitter this week. “There just aren’t big enough spaces. And would the test be underground? That requires a lot of drilling and instrumentation that would pretty much have to be invented from scratch.”
Amy Woolaf, a staffer at the Congressional Research Service who focuses on nuclear weapons, mused on Twitter that the administration could, if it really wanted to, simply “pop one [test] off” — possibly even in the atmosphere. International optics might be the only effect of such a one-off, Woolaf speculated.
“Besides, NNSA really wants a lot more money for the enterprise — new production, new facilities, etc.,” Woolaf wrote. “Funding this adrenaline rush would be a distraction, at best, and, more likely, a disruption.”
The NNSA has requested a roughly $20 billion budget for fiscal 2021, up from more than $16.5 billion this year. The 2021 request came in much larger than the $16.9 billion figure NNSA forecast last year that it would seek for fiscal 2021, which begins Oct. 1. NNSA Administrator Lisa Gordon-Hagerty has said previous budget estimates low-balled the agency’s needs.
Low-Yield SLCM-N Analysis Cruising
Separately, Walter said Tuesday that the Defense Department continues its analysis of alternatives for a possible future nuclear-armed, sea-launched cruise missile. The “initial results” of that continuing analysis, in which the Pentagon will broadly outline the characteristics of the missile, should be finished “shortly,” he said.
The early results will feed into “discussions this fall” about how the proposed sea-launched nuke might fit into the Pentagon’s fiscal 2022 budget request, Walter said. The budget request is notionally due in February 2021.
If the Pentagon decides it wants the weapon built and deployed, it would replace the TLAM-N nuclear-tipped cruise missile that, the Federation of American Scientists estimates, the Navy retired by 2013. That weapon used a W80-0 warhead. The NNSA is refurbishing and rebranding the kindred W80-1 to tip the next-generation air launched cruise missile, the Raytheon-built Long-Range Standoff weapon.
