Just after 8 p.m. on Thursday, the Senate overwhelmingly approved the 2024 National Defense Authorization Act, which provides a modest boost to civilian and military nuclear weapons modernization programs.
The Senate’s version of the 2024 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), approved 86-11, authorizes the National Nuclear Security Administration to spend $24 billion or so, up $276 million from $23.8 billion in the Biden Administration’s initial request and identical to what the House proposed in its version of the NDAA for the fiscal year that begins Oct. 1.
In a statement following passage of the bill, the Biden Administration said it “is grateful for and commends the strong, bipartisan work of the Senate Armed Services Committee on behalf of America’s national defense.”
Department Of Energy weapons activities overseen by the NNSA got a boost of $276 million to $19.1 billion in the Senate’s version of the bill, up from $18.8 billion in the 2024 request.
Though it provides essentially the same amount for the NNSA, the House-approved version of the NDAA largely caps spending at fiscal 2022 levels, which spells a rocky road to reconciliation before the legislation can become law.
Within NNSA weapons activities, the Senate bill would boost spending on stockpile modernization to just over $5.27 billion, some $75 million from the administration’s fiscal 2024 request. That $75 million – the House NDAA provides $70 million for the same purpose – would go to development of a version of the W80-4 warhead that would ride on a controversial nuclear sea-launched cruise missile, or SLCMN. The missile itself received another $190 million plus-up in the Senate’s bill through the Navy’s Precision Strike Weapons Development Program.
As it has in the previous two years and in its 2022 Nuclear posture review, the Biden Administration said it “strongly opposes” funding the SLCM and its warhead, which is says “has marginal utility.”
“SLCM-N, which would not be delivered before the 2030s, has marginal utility and would impede investment in other priorities,” the administration said in a Thursday statement. “Further, deploying SLCM-N on Navy attack submarines or surface combatants would reduce capacity for conventional strike munitions, create additional burdens on naval training, maintenance, and operations, and could create additional risks to the Navy’s ability to operate in key regions.”
The Senate’s bill requires that both the Defense Department’s nuclear-armed sea-launched cruise missile program and W80-4 Warhead development program reach initial operational capability by fiscal year 2035.
The majority of Senate-approved increases for NNSA weapons programs are for various National Laboratory efforts that develop or test nuclear components and their potential yields if deployed.
The Energetic Materials Characterization Facility at Los Alamos National Lab (LANL) in New Mexico would receive $19 million under the Senate’s version of the NDAA, instead of nothing in the next fiscal year. That program would support the High Explosive Synthesis, Formulation, and Production Facility at the Pantex Plant in Texas, which would get $110 million under the Senate’s bill, instead of nothing, as requested.
Both program restarts are preserving “conventional high explosives manufacturing … for the unique conventional high explosives used at the NNSA,” according to a fact sheet about the Senate committee’s version of the bill.
Inertial confinement fusion, high-energy experiments performed at the National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore National Lab in California got an additional $40 million to $641 million in the Senate bill, up from $601 million in the fiscal 2024 request. The facilities respectively use lasers and magnetic fields to test materials under nuclear-explosion-like conditions.
