Both congressional appropriations committees have now cleared the National Nuclear Security Administration to start work on a low-yield, submarine-launched ballistic-missile warhead in fiscal 2019, with Senate appropriators approving $65 million for the proposed weapon as part of a spending bill passed Thursday.
House appropriators approved the same amount for the warhead, which is to be made over the next two fiscal years by modifying an undisclosed number of existing W76 warheads now used on Trident II D5 missiles deployed on Ohio-class submarines.
The Donald Trump administration says it needs the low-yield warhead to check similarly powerful Russian capabilities. Some congressional Democrats argue today’s U.S. nuclear arsenal already does that job.
The NNSA’s share of the work alone would ring in at $125 million over two years. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), ranking member of the Senate Appropriations subcommittee that wrote the 2019 Energy and Water Development Appropriations Bill, said this week the weapon would cost another $60 million in 2020.
“This weapon is not needed for deterrence, but it is intended to fight an unwinnable nuclear war, and I strongly oppose it,” Feinstein said Thursday at the full committee markup. Her language dovetailed with what Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.), said on the House floor Wednesday, when the lower chamber marked up its 2019 National Defense Authorization Act.
Overall, the NNSA would get $14.8 billion in 2019, if the budget approved by the Senate Appropriations Committee on Thursday becomes law. That is 1 percent higher than the 2018 budget, some 2 percent less than requested, and more than 5 percent below what House appropriators approved in a companion budget bill sent to the lower chamber’s floor last week.
The Senate appropriations bill fully funds the NNSA’s existing nuclear weapon-refurbishment programs at a total of roughly $2 billion, as requested. These include three life-extension programs and one so-called major alteration: the life-extension program for the B61 nuclear gravity bomb; the life-extension program for the W76 submarine-launched ballistic-missile warhead; the W88 Alt 370 program to upgrade certain components of that sub-launched, ballistic-missile warhead; and the life-extension program for the W80-4 warhead that will fly aboard the new long-range cruise missile the Pentagon is building.
Senate Majority Leader Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) is in a hurry this year to get this year’s NNSA budget bill, and other appropriations bills, approved by the full Senate. McConnell stopped by Thursday’s committee markup to say that small groups of the 12 annual appropriations bills could be bundled together this year in a so-called minibus, in order to save time on the Senate floor. McConnell said he wanted to move two spending bills to the floor in June.
Meanwhile, Senate appropriators bucked a trend set by their House counterparts — and continued by the House Armed Services Committee in the 2019 National Defense Authorization Act that cleared the floor Thursday — by proposing to cancel the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility (MFFF) under construction at the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C.
The Senate Appropriations Committee’s bill would provide $220 million in 2019 to wind down construction of the MFFF, which the NNSA wants to turn into a factory for fissile warhead cores called plutonium pits. House appropriators want to give the NNSA $335 million to keep building the plant in 2019: the same level of funding it has this year, and the same amount of funding the House’s 2019 National Defense Authorization Act allows for the budget year beginning Oct. 1.
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), a champion of MFFF and the Savannah River Site, promised a fight on the Senate floor over the committee’s decision to cancel the “big-ass building” CB&I AREVA MOX Services is constructing to turn 34 metric tons of plutonium into commercial reactor fuel.
Graham also dismissed the NNSA’s plan to turn MFFF into a pit factory, casting it as a political sop that is “problematic at best.” For one thing, the lawmaker said, that plan requires consent from New Mexico, so far not given, to bury the 34 metric tons of plutonium underground at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad.
The Defense Department wants the NNSA to provide 80 plutonium pits a year by 2030 as part of the 30-year, $1-trillion-plus nuclear modernization-and-maintenance program started by the Barack Obama administration in 2016. On May 10, Energy Secretary Rick Perry officially put in motion a plan to make 50 of those pits annually at a converted MFFF and 30 a year at Los Alamos National Laboratory, which previously had the pit mission to itself.
Sen. Tom Udall (D-N.M.), who does not often wade into the MFFF debate during budget hearings, called that plan “a bad deal for New Mexico.”
“The Department of Energy needs to change its course [and] rethink this decision to move plutonium pit production away from New Mexico,” Udall said during Thursday’s appropriations mark.
The NNSA budget Senate appropriators approved Thursday “supports” the pit-production infrastructure already planned to produce 30 pits a year at Los Alamos by 2026, though a detailed bill report appended to the measure did not say how much funding it would receive. The White House requested $235 million for Los Alamos pit facilities in 2019.
The Senate Appropriations Committee’s bill was not scheduled for a floor vote at deadline Friday for Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor. The House Rules Committee said Thursday it would “likely” take up the lower chamber’s version of the bill on June 4 as part of a minibus package that also includes spending for the legislative branch, and military construction and veterans affairs. A floor vote in the chamber would follow.
