ALEXANDRIA, VA — The National Nuclear Security Administration plans to reassess the priorities of its Office of Defense Nuclear Nonproliferation, senior administration officials said here this week.
The review, which had yet to start as of Wednesday, will “reexamine the priorities and missions” of the Office of Defense Nuclear Nonproliferation (DNN) “in light of the current geopolitical environment,” Jill Hruby, the administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration, told the Exchange Monitor here during the Monitor’s annual Nuclear Deterrence Summit.
With an annual budget of more than $2 billion, NNSA’s Office of Defense Nuclear Nonproliferation handles a broad portfolio of programs aimed at preventing bad actors from acquiring fissile and radioactive materials. The office also handles disposal of U.S. surplus plutonium and uranium left over from the Cold War arms race with the Soviet Union.
Asked whether the forthcoming review was aimed at shrinking or right-sizing the DNN office, Hruby said, “it’s just aimed at doing the right thing.”
After President Joe Biden took office in January 2020, he nominated Corey Hinderstein, most recently a think-tanker who during the Barack Obama administration was detailed to the NNSA from the Pentagon, to be NNSA’s deputy administrator for Defense Nuclear Nonproliferation.
During Hinderstein’s October confirmation hearing in the Senate Armed Services Committee, lawmakers asked more questions about perceived international proliferation threats from Iran and North Korea and Russia than about the U.S’s domestic materials-reduction programs — a change compared with the last such confirmation hearing for a DNN head, during the Donald Trump administration.
On Wednesday, Hinderstein said the upcoming DNN review would be conducted by people from within the NNSA but outside the nonproliferation office.
“It’s still an NNSA-initiated, NNSA-scoped panel,” Hinderstein told the Monitor on the sidelines of this week’s summit. “The work of the panel will be independent. We’re giving them their charge, but then they’re going to do their review and come back to us with their guidance.”
During a question and answer session at the summit, Hinderstein characterized the upcoming reassessment of the NNSA office she now leads as “more of a strategic review of the DNN mission space, not a reexamination.
“In my mind, reexamination implies that there are fundamental questions or changes,” Hinderstein said from the stage. “And I think what the administrator wanted to do, and I’m fully supportive of all this, is having some outside people with specialized knowledge of not just our mission space but the world in which we’re operating and to give us some good advice.
“I’m not expecting the outcome to be a fundamental rethink of DNN,” Hinderstein said.
