Besides backing a new low-yield warhead and at least one more year of building a plutonium disposal plant, the Senate Armed Services Committee is pressing the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) to exchange some weapons personnel with the Pentagon, in a bid to improve relations between the government’s major nuclear weapons agencies.
That is according to the long-awaited text of the committee’s fiscal 2019 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which was unveiled Wednesday about a week after the panel approved it for a floor vote. The Senate began procedural steps Wednesday that could lead to a floor vote next week.
Like the House’s version of the 2019 NDAA, the Senate panel’s NDAA would authorize the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) to spend $65 million in 2019 on a new low-yield nuclear warhead.
The Donald Trump administration called for the weapon in February as part of its Nuclear Posture Review. The new submarine-launched ballistic-missile warhead would be a modified version of the W76 warhead now used on Trident II D5 missiles carried aboard Ohio-class submarines.
The Senate NDAA bill would also allow NNSA to develop future low-yield weapons — such as the low-yield, sea-launched cruise missile the Nuclear Posture Review asked the Department of Energy and the Pentagon to study — simply by requesting funding for such weapons. Under current law, Congress must explicitly authorize development of new low-yield warheads.
The ranking Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee promised an amendment to preserve that requirement. “Given the policy ramifications of development and deployment of low-yield nuclear weapons and any type of nuclear weapon, I believe that Congress should be involved every step of the way,” Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.), said Wednesday on the Senate floor.
The Senate committee’s bill would also allow the NNSA to develop future low-yield weapons — such as the low-yield, sea-launched cruise missile the Nuclear Posture Review asked the Department of Energy and the Pentagon to study — simply by requesting funding for such weapons. Under current law, set in place by the 2004 NDAA, Congress must explicitly authorize development of new low-yield warheads.
The Senate measure would forbid the NNSA from canceling construction of the unfinished and over-budget Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility (MFFF) at the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C., until fiscal 2020. The facility is designed to turn 34 metric tons of surplus weapon-usable plutonium into commercial reactor fuel as part of an arms-control pact with Russia.
The bill authorizes $220 million to continue building the plant in 2019. However, the measure would also authorize $59 million for an alternative program to downblend the plutonium and ship it to DOE’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M., for disposal. The White House wants the $59 million to upgrade Savannah River Site’s K-Area, where the plutonium would be diluted — specifically to help shop for new plutonium-handling glove boxes.
The Senate committee’s bill would also prohibit the NNSA, again until 2020, from carrying out its plan of turning the MFFF into a factory for fissile warhead cores called plutonium pits.
Meanwhile, the Senate committee’s NDAA also aims to foster better cooperation between NNSA and Pentagon nuclear-weapons personnel by temporarily swapping some of those personnel from one agency to the other.
The exchange program, as the bill calls it, would apply to both military and civilian personnel “working on nuclear weapons policy, production, and force structure issues,” the Senate Armed Services Committee wrote in its bill.
Overall, the Senate committee’s NDAA authorizes just north of $15 billion in NNSA spending for 2019: exactly what the administration requested.
