Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm visited the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory on Thursday.
Granholm praised the lab for its work on “biosecurity. Defense. Nonproliferation.”
Nonproliferation policy pro Laura Holgate on Tuesday returned as an ambassador to the U.S. Mission to Vienna, the State Department said.
The Senate in October approved Holgate’s nomination as the U.S. representative to the Vienna office, a position she held in 2016 and 2017, just after the Barack Obama administration clinched the politically binding Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or the Iran Nuclear Deal that curbed Tehran’s ability to acquire fissile material in exchange for lifting some economic sanctions.
But President Joe Biden, who nominated Holgate last year, has so far been in no rush to reverse the Donald Trump administration’s 2018 withdrawal from the agreement and subsequent reissuing of economic sanctions.
Negotiations among the parties to the Iran nuclear deal — China, France, Germany, Russia, the United Kingdom, the U.S. and Iran — continued in Vienna this week. Robert Malley, the U.S. special envoy for Iran, is in Vienna, though Washington and Iran are not talking directly, media reported this week.
Talks in Vienna started back up in late November.
U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken has said that there will come a time when the terms of the old Iran Nuclear Deal will no longer meaningfully delay Iran’s ability to acquire a nuclear weapon, as they did in 2015 when the Obama administration spearheaded the deal.
President Joe Biden signed the National Defense Authorization Act of 2022 into law before Christmas, allowing the National Nuclear Security Administration to spend more funding that requested, if congressional appropriations committees provide that funding in separate appropriations bills.
Aside from allowing the Department of Energy’s nuclear weapons agency to spend more than $20 billion, the bill grants the Joe Biden administration’s request that the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) be allowed to extend the life of the megaton-capable B83 nuclear gravity bomb. The House was against the B83 life extension but the Senate was for it. The bill also contained a host of other policy directives for the NNSA.
