The U.S. National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) this week moved to extend its contract with the panel of scientists known as JASON for up to a year, while the Pentagon works to resurrect its old arrangement with the group.
Also this week, the JASON team endorsed a plan for the semiautonomous Department of Energy nuclear weapons agency to immediately begin building new infrastructure to produce fresh nuclear-weapon cores, according to a letter written by the group’s program manager and published Monday by the Federation of American Scientists.
The NNSA contracted the JASONs last year for a trio of studies including a recently completed — and classified — look at plutonium-pit aging. The $5 million deal, awarded in June, was set to run out this month, but now will be extended “for up to one year” in order “to provide for continuity of services and the completion of existing studies,” according to a procurement note dated Jan. 9.
The note does not quantify the potential value of the extension, which covers both JASON personnel and expenses associated with their studies. Besides plutonium aging, the group is looking into nuclear detonation detection and cybersecurity of operating equipment for the NNSA.
The JASON group of scientists has since the 1950s provided independent advice about defense science programs to the Pentagon through an indefinite-quantity, indefinite delivery contract that the Department of Defense periodically renewed.
Last year, however, the department decided not to reup McLean, Va.-based MITRE Corp.’s JASON contract. Rep. Jim Cooper (D-Tenn.) broke the news in April during a House Armed Services subcommittee hearing about the NNSA. The Pentagon’s move angered many in Congress, which ordered the Defense Department to bring JASON back as part of the 2020 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) signed into law on Dec. 20.
The new arrangement, according to the text of the defense policy bill and its detailed explanatory report, should be similar to the old JASON deal: a single Pentagon contract with MITRE that allows it and other agencies to commission studies.
The NDAA also ordered the NNSA to use JASON for a new study about the planned W87-1 warhead, which is supposed to tip new Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent intercontinental ballistic missiles starting around 2030. The mandatory W87-1 study must be “an assessment of the risks to certification and the need for planned upgrades to the warhead,” according to the explanatory statement appended to the 2020 NDAA.
Meanwhile, the JASONs are onboard with the NNSA expanding the U.S. plutonium pit complex.
“[W]e urge that pit manufacturing be re-established as expeditiously as possible in parallel with the focused program to understand [plutonium] aging, to mitigate against potential risks posed by [plutonium] aging on the stockpile,” according to the Nov. 23 the letter submitted to Tod Caldwell at the NNSA Defense Programs Office in Washington.
Gordon Long, director of the JASON program office at MITRE Corp., signed the letter. The message was an introduction to a classified report that the NNSA chartered JASON to write in 2019.
Long added that “present assessments of [pit] aging do not indicate any impending issues for the stockpile.” Pits are the fissile cores that power the primary stages of nuclear weapons. In a 2007 report, the JASONs said that “most weapons system types in the stockpile have credible minimum lifetimes in excess of 100 years.”
