After nine months of stop-and-start progress, the Senate on Thursday confirmed former Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory physicist William Bookless to be the principal deputy administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration.
The Senate confirmed Bookless by voice vote. The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) had not set a date for his swearing-in at deadline Friday for Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor.
Bookless walked a long and bumpy road through the Senate, including a sometimes pointed confirmation hearing before its Armed Services Committee. The process in total took about nine months, and the White House had to put him up for the job twice. The 115th Congress adjourned without voting on Bookless’ initial August 2018 nomination, so the administration renominated the former Livermore hand in January.
Then, for around two months, Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.) stood between Bookless and a floor vote. From mid-March to mid-May, Nevada’s senior senator blocked nominees for senior DOE jobs, relenting only after after Energy Secretary Rick Perry reiterated a promise to remove around 500 kilograms of weapons usable plutonium from the Nevada National Security Site by 2026.
The NNSA in January admitted that it had shipped this weapon-usable plutonium metal to the former Nevada Test Site over the state’s objections.
Once sworn in, Bookless will fill the last of four senior NNSA leadership position that require congressional approval. The others are: NNSA administrator; deputy administrator for defense programs; and deputy administrator for defense nuclear nonproliferation. Half of those jobs will be filled by former Livermore hands, after Bookless is sworn in.
In his confirmation hearing in November, Bookless got briefly swept up in 2020 presidential politics. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), a candidate for the Democratic nomination, pressed him to take a position on the U.S.-Russian New START arms control treaty.
The accord, which caps U.S. and Russian deployed long-range nuclear warheads at 1,550, will expire in 2021. But the two governments can renew it for five years. Bookless said that, at the time, he would “lean towards extending” the treaty.
Bookless was previously retired. He left the federal government in 2015 after serving as assistant laboratory director for policy and planning at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York state. Prior to Brookhaven, he was an adviser to then-NNSA Administrator Thomas D’Agostino in Washington.
All told, Bookless, spent more than three decades at Livermore, where his roles included deputy associate director for the facility’s nuclear weapons program and associate director for safety and environmental protection.
Bookless received his doctorate in physics in 1980 from the University of Wyoming: the same year he joined the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
