The House of Representatives on Friday passed its 2020 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), after bipartisan blocks of lawmakers rejected further restrictions to the W80-4 nuclear warhead life-extension program and development of next-generation intercontinental ballistic missiles.
On a more partisan basis, lawmakers voted 201-221 against an amendment from Rep. Mike Turner (R-Ohio) that would have allowed the Navy to deploy the W76-2 low-yield, submarine-launched ballistic-missile warhead. The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) plans to start delivering the new weapon by Sept. 30, but the House NDAA includes language blocking the Navy from actually equipping the weapon.
The House passed the defense policy bill 220-197 on a mostly party-line vote. The White House has threatened to veto the measure, citing among many other things the language constraining nuclear weapons programs.
With the exception of the politically charged W76-2 amendment, most of the nuke action on the NDAA happened on Thursday, when lawmakers voted 164-264 against a proposal from Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.) to temporarily block $185 million in funding for the NNSA program to refurbish the W80-4 cruise-missile warhead.
The semiautonomous Department of Energy agency requested nearly $900 million for W80-4 for fiscal 2020: a sum already approved by a House appropriations bill passed in June. That is $185 million more than the agency last year estimated W80-4 would require for the budget year beginning Oct. 1. Led by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, the W80-4 program will refurbish the W80-1 warhead for use on planned Long-Range Standoff Weapon air-launched cruise missiles beginning in 2025 or so.
Blumenauer wanted to gate the $185-million increase until the agency’s explained why the W80-4’s 2020 budget soared far above an estimate published only last year.
“They have not really told us what they’re going to do with this additional $185 million,” Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.), chair of the House Armed Services Committee, said Thursday on the floor. “And we have concerns … about the efficacy of the program: about whether or not they’re going to be able to execute this $185 million and what their exact timeline is for the program.”
Rep. Mac Thornberry (R-Texas), the committee’s ranking member, rebutted Smith by citing an unpublished report from the NNSA’s nominally independent Cost Estimating and Programming Evaluation Office, which in January found the W80-4 program was still on track and “on budget as expected” to produce its first war-ready cruise-missile warhead in fiscal 2025.
For W80-4, the NNSA has “a greater need to spend more money from [20]19 to [20]20 than they originally planned,” Thornberry said on the House floor.
Thornberry did not discuss, and the NNSA has not said, exactly what that need involves. Thornberry’s office did not immediately reply to a request for comment. Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor asked an NNSA spokesperson for a copy of the January report Thornberry referred to on the House floor, but the spokesperson had not provided a copy at deadline Friday.
Overall, the House’s National Defense Authorization Act would authorize $15.8 billion spending for the NNSA in 2020. The bill would fund most of the Department of Energy’s nuclear modernization programs at the requested level, but authorize less funding for the agency’s plutonium complex and its intercontinental ballistic-missile warhead programs.
The bill still must be reconciled with the Senate’s version of the NDAA, which the upper chamber passed in June. The Senate bill authorizes the requested level of 2020 funding for all NNSA and Pentagon nuclear modernization programs, including a $16.5 billion topline for the NNSA.
Lawmakers had not scheduled a bicameral conference to reconcile the two NDAA’s at deadline Friday for NS&D Monitor.
Accounting for much of the difference between the two chambers’ bills, the House NDAA would authorize less funding than requested for NNSA programs to develop W87-1-style warheads for future Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent intercontinental ballistic missiles, and the agency’s proposal to build a two-state complex to produce plutonium-pits — nuclear-weapon cores — for the ICBM warheads.
As it turned out, the only way the House NDAA would constrain development of the Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent is by authorizing less funding than requested. On Thursday, House lawmakers solidly rejected Blumenauer’s proposal to block the Office of the Secretary of Defense from spending 10% of its 2020 budget until the Pentagon studies whether it is viable to extend the current fleet of 400 Minuteman III ICBMs through 2050.
The House NDAA authorizes $490 million for the Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent in fiscal 2020: less than the $590 million authorized by the Senate bill or the $570 million the White House requested.
Minuteman III was refurbished after the turn of the millennium and is to remain in service until 2030, when the Pentagon would start replacing the silo-based nuclear missiles with Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent ICBMs. The next-generation missiles would remain in service until the 2080s.
Republicans led by Thornberry flatly dismissed the need for the amendment. Thornberry himself said it amounted to “delay by study” for the GBSD program, which is in the final year of a three-year design competition that will end when the Pentagon selects a design from either Boeing, which designed the Minuteman III, or Northrop Grumman.
Thornberry and Turner, the ranking member of the House Armed Services strategic forces subcommittee, said any delay stemming from a study would only bloat the overall cost of upgrading the land-based leg of the U.S. nuclear triad.
Plenty of Democrats agreed, and 68 members of the majority joined all but one House Republican to shoot down Blumenauer’s ICBM study by a vote of 164-264.
Meanwhile, the House approved 10 other amendments that touch on some way on U.S. nuclear weapons. These are: There seems to be a wrong name at the end, so quickly make sure all are correct.
- An amendment from Rep. Pete Aguilar (D-Calif.) that would require budget officials from the Defense Department, the NNSA, and the White House to attend meetings of the joint DOE-Pentagon Nuclear Weapons Council and Standing and Safety Committee meetings.
- An amendment from Rep. Salud Carbajal (D-Calif.) that would require the National Academies of Sciences “to conduct an independent review of plans and capabilities for nuclear verification, detection, and monitoring of nuclear weapons and fissile material.”
- An amendment from Rep. Joe Courtney (D-Conn) that would require the Pentagon and the director of national intelligence to write for Congress an unclassified report about U.S., Russian, and Chinese nuclear systems, including the systems each nation plans to develop through 2040.
- An amendment from Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) that would authorizes $10 million within the NNSA’s Defense Nuclear Nonproliferation account for possible use in developing “a monitoring and verification program related to the phased denuclearization of North Korea.”
- An amendment from Rep. Ben Ray Lujan (D-N.M.) that would make it the sense of Congress that the secretary of energy require management contractors for NNSA sites to “adopt generally accepted and consistent accounting practices” for research and development work.
- An amendment from Smith that would authorize the Department of Energy to levy civil penalties on contractors who retaliate against nuclear-safety whistleblowers within their corporate ranks.
- An amendment from Rep. Eliot Engel (D-N.Y.) that would make it the sense of Congress that the U.S. should extend the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty that caps U.S. and Russian deployed strategic nuclear warheads at 1,550. The treaty will expire in 2021 if the U.S. and Russian presidents do not agree to extend it. The amendment would also bar the U.S. from using 2020 funding to withdraw from the treaty, and require the Pentagon, State Department, and national intelligence director to report on “the consequences of the Treaty’s lapse.”
- An amendment from Khanna and others that would make it the sense of Congress “that diplomacy is essential for addressing North Korea’s nuclear program.”
- An amendment from Rep. Jim Langevin (D-R.I.) and others that would authorize a total of $25 million in 2020 for research and development on replacing the Navy’s high-enriched uranium-fueled ship reactors with reactors that burn low-enriched uranium. That includes $5 million in funding parceled with the Committee version of the bill, plus $20 million shifted over to NNSA Defense Nuclear Nonproliferation from the agency’s Federal salaries and expenses account.
- An amendment from Rep. Lois Frankel (D-Fla.) that would temporarily prohibit Pentagon funding to develop any missile that flies between the 500-kilometer and 1,500-kilometer range prohibited by the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty from which the U.S. withdrew.
