Editor’s note
The Exchange Monitor this week hosted its annual Nuclear Deterrence Summit. The unclassified gathering draws government officials and industry executives from across the National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) nuclear-weapons enterprise.
The three-day summit is a professional conference for people in the nuclear-weapons business, which is a serious business.
Even so, there were a few laughs.
Below, you will read a selection of pithy quotes, and one longer anecdote, that might remind you, if you were there, about both the serious head-nodding and the mood-lifting laughs at the summit. If you were not there, well, there’s always next year.
“It’s been almost an hour, probably, since I talked about pit production.”
-NNSA Administrator Jill Hruby, Feb. 14, 2023.
Hruby made the remark a half-hour through an hourlong appearance that included the summit’s opening keynote address and a lengthy question-and-answer session with the audience. It was the first session of the day.
The standing-room-only crowd appeared to get the joke.
Pits are the fissile cores of nuclear-weapon first stages. The NNSA is building two new pit factories: one at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, one at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina. The one in Los Alamos could be ready by the end of the decade.
People on stage at the conference talked about things other than pits, but not often.
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“What happened was, actually, the administrator came and … she literally told me, ‘Jay, you have a pretty good bullshit meter.’”
-Jay Tilden, associate administrator for counterterrorism and counterproliferation at the NNSA, Monday, Feb. 13.
Tilden, a tall, loquacious, can’t-miss figure who describes himself as someone you never want to see in your meeting — because it would mean something bad has happened — was explaining to the summit’s audience why he led a study about contract and management reform for the NNSA’s nuclear-weapons programs.
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“A good idea that doesn’t work out is not a reason to get killed and it’s not going to interrupt your career and it’s not something to fear.” James McConnell, the NNSA’s associate principal deputy administrator, Monday, Feb. 13.
McConnell was summarizing for the attendees some of the goals of the reform study that Tilden led.
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“If somebody just gives you a blanket statement, like ‘pits last a hundred years,’ … you might question whether they know all that much about what they’re talking about.”
-Marvin Adams, NNSA deputy administrator for defense programs. Feb. 14, 2023.
Adams appeared for multiple presentations at the summit and fielded many questions from the audience, including from critics who say the NNSA does not need to build more plutonium pits today because existing pits could last almost a century.
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“This entire system, our workforce, the laboratory, had 30 years where there was not really a sense of urgency. And so there are a lot of behaviors that are locked in there, and you don’t want to mentor those behaviors.”
-Robert Webster, deputy director for weapons, at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, Feb. 15, 2023.
Webster and fellow nuclear-weapons laboratory directors were again discussing the challenge of passing the design, maintenance and modernization of the U.S. nuclear arsenal onto a new generation of stewards.
The discussion, which focused on the post-Cold War decades, ranged from what absolutely should be taught to what absolutely should not be taught.
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“They want to stop working at Taco Bell and start building submarines.”
-Rear Adm. Scott Pappano, Feb. 16, 2023.
Pappano, on the final day of the summit, was discussing the Navy’s efforts to recruit new members to the workforce responsible for building the next generation of nuclear-weapon-bearing ballistic-missile submarines.
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“We still have to operate under New START. It is one of those things that, for me, I would love to just take the handcuffs off of all of you that have great minds and want to do great things in this community and say ‘go develop!’ Be innovative! You can’t be innovative if I handcuff you!”
-Brigadier Gen. Ty Neuman director of concepts and strategy and deputy chief of staff for Air Force Futures, Feb. 16, 2023.
Neuman made the remark while discussing China’s nuclear buildup, which is unconstrained by the bilateral New START strategic nuclear-arms control treaty between Russia and the U.S., and Russia’s nuclear ambitions.
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Eric Wollerman resuscitates the room
During a question-and-answer session with four senior managers from NNSA’s production and test sites, an audience member took advantage of the ability to ask anonymous questions via mobile device and put the panel on the spot about how the government’s nuclear-weapon factories might return to a Cold War footing — or something even more severe.
“As we look at the geopolitical context,” the unidentified summit-goer asked in fluent strategic jargon, “if the nation has to upload the hedge to accommodate roughly doubling the number of counterforce targets, at least partially rebuild the hedge and deploy some hundreds of new theater nuclear weapons all in the next five to 10 years, how could the sites posture themselves for that?”
The room abruptly went the kind of quiet rooms usually only go when they’re empty.
On the stage, the NNSA’s production-site managers glanced around without speaking. They had spent the last hour discussing some of the challenges of coping with the agency’s current program of five serial nuclear-weapon modernizations — the largest workload of the 21st century by far, but nothing remotely approaching the frenzy of the Cold War.
It was anyone’s guess who would break the nervous silence weighing down the room, and if no one would have guessed that it would be Eric Wollerman, the president of Honeywell Federal Manufacturing and Technologies in Kansas City, Mo., who had just finished quite a detailed story about polymers, anyone would have understood.
“We don’t have any requirements to do that,” Wollerman matter-of-factly answered the anonymous questioner. “We don’t have any funding to do that. But we can stand ready to serve whenever we need to,” said the man in charge of the NNSA’s factory for non-nuclear nuclear-weapon parts.
The pulse returned to the room.
Laughter broke out. Then applause.
“That sounds like a national emergency!” someone said from the stage.
