The House Armed Services Committee so far does not plan a hearing on a Democrat-sponsored bill to ban development of an low-yield, submarine-launched ballistic missile warhead, the panel’s chairman said Tuesday.
In a press gaggle with Capitol Hill reporters, Rep. Mac Thornberry (R-Texas) said the House would recess after this week until the Nov. 6 midterm elections, when all members of the lower-chamber will defend their seats, and that Congress already debated the merits of a low-yield warhead this summer before passing the 2019 National Defense Authorization Act that was signed into law Aug. 13.
“[M]embers have already had a pretty good opportunity not only to hear, but to vote their opinion and it was [a] pretty strong outcome that people believed that lower-yield nukes would help increase the credibility of our nuclear deterrent,” Thornberry said in response to a question from Weapons Complex Morning Briefing’s associate publication, Defense Daily.
The House is scheduled to meet 16 times between election day and the end of the year, and when it returns “we’ll see what are the key pressing issues then,” Thornberry said. The 115th Congress will gavel out the first week of January, at which point any bills not signed into law during that two-year legislative session will be null and void.
Legislation introduced on Sept. 18 by Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.) and some Democratic colleagues would prohibit spending funds appropriated to the Departments of Energy and Defense in fiscal 2019 for work on the warhead. Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) filed an essentially identical bill in the Senate.
Republicans hold the majority in the House and Senate and have already secured $65 million in 2019 funding for the Department of Energy to build the low-yield warhead at the Pantex Plant in Amarillo, Texas. The weapon, which will tip Trident II D-5 missiles carried aboard the Navy’s Ohio-class submarines, is to be a modified version of the Trident’s existing W76 warhead.
