Charles Verdon, a longtime manager at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, on Tuesday officially started his new job leading the National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) $11-billion-a-year nuclear weapons portfolio.
Verdon was sworn in as NNSA deputy administrator for defense programs by Deputy Secretary of Energy Dan Brouillette, according to an agency press release.
Verdon, most recently principal associate director at Livermore’s Weapons and Complex Integration Directorate, was sworn in about seven months after after President Donald Trump nominated him for the post.
He will lead a portfolio of warhead refurbishment programs, which seek to keep Cold War-era nuclear weapons viable for years, and sometimes decades, beyond their original design lives. These include life-extension programs for the B61 nuclear gravity bomb, the W76 submarine-launched ballistic-missile warhead, and the W80-4 air-launched cruise-missile warhead. They also include a so-called major alteration program, a shorter-term refurbishment, for the W88 submarine-launched ballistic missile warhead.
Verdon will oversee crucial steps to expanding the infrastructure the NNSA will use to produce the first new U.S. war-usable plutonium pits, or nuclear warhead cores, since the Cold War. In the 2019 fiscal year that started Oct. 1., the agency plans to ramp up modification and expansion of pit-producing facilities at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, and begin preliminary work — pending favorable resolution of a lawsuit that presently blocks it — on converting a plutonium disposal plant in South Carolina into a pit factory.
The Trump administration has now filled all but one of NNSA’s four Senate-confirmed senior-leadership slots. Only the principal deputy administrator post remains vacant. Trump’s nominee — Livermore senior physicist William Bookless — is slated for an Oct.16 confirmation hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee.
If he passes muster, the full Senate would vote whether to confirm Bookless into the agency’s No. 2 spot. However, there are only about a month’s worth of legislative days on the Senate’s calendar between now and the end of the 115th Congress. After that, all nominees could be sent back to the White House without a confirmation vote.
