President Donald Trump this week signed the fiscal 2018 National Defense Authorization Act, which makes it harder to move plutonium pit production out of New Mexico, calls for a competition to design a new nuclear warhead for ballistic missiles, and authorizes Congress to keep funding a controversial plutonium-conversion facility.
Trump inked the bill Tuesday, nearly a month after Congress sent the measure to his desk. The massive military policy legislation does not set agency budgets, but it does provide policy guidance and funding ceilings for congressional appropriations committees that do.
Overall, the bill authorizes more than $14 billion for the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) in the budget year that began on Oct. 1: about $1 billion more than the prior budget, and a little more even than the White House’s request.
On the policy side, the legislation requires the NNSA to secure approval from the secretary of defense and NNSA administrator before manufacturing plutonium pits — the fissile cores of nuclear weapons — anywhere except the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. It will cost more than $3.5 billion to upgrade the lab’s existing plutonium-production plant to meet the Pentagon’s projected needs, according to congressional estimates.
The agency plans to produce between 50 and 80 plutonium pits per year by 2030 to refurbish U.S. nuclear warheads. While it has not yet announced an intention to manufacture pits anywhere but Los Alamos, the agency is studying alternative production sites that could be cheaper, including the Mixed Oxide (MOX) Fuel Fabrication Facility at the Savannah River Site near Aiken, S.C.
The 2018 National Defense Authorization Act also requires the NNSA administrator to start, by fiscal 2019, a competition to design a new U.S. nuclear warhead that could be deployed on ballistic missiles by 2030.
The bill requires the NNSA administrator to pull plans for a competition together quickly, and with the chairman of the Nuclear Weapons Council brief Congress about the plan by March 1, 2018. That briefing to congressional defense committees must include “an assessment of the costs, benefits, risks, and opportunities of such plan, particularly impacts to ongoing life extension programs and infrastructure projects,” according to the bill text.
The NNSA is now funding five major warhead life-extension programs as part of the nuclear arsenal modernization effort started in 2016 by the Barack Obama administration. These include: homogenizing different versions of the B61 nuclear gravity bomb; and refurbishing warheads for air-launched cruise missiles, plus ground- and submarine-launched ballistic missiles.
The Trump administration requested a total of about $1.8 billion for the five NNSA life-extension programs in fiscal 2018: roughly a 20-percent increase from the 2017 budget.
The 2018 defense bill also authorizes:
- $340 million to construct the MOX facility: about $70 million more than the White House requested for the budget year that began on Oct. 1 to cancel the project and wind down construction. The plant is designed to turn 34 metric tons of nuclear weapon-usable plutonium into commercial reactor fuel, but the NNSA is studying whether the facility could instead be used to produce plutonium pits. The agency could still cancel the plant if, among other things, it can certify there is an alternative way to de-weaponize the plutonium.
- $98 million that the Trump administration requested to start building a new office building for some 1,200 NNSA employees in Albuquerque, N.M., which would be capped at $174.7 million.
- $58 million to research and develop capabilities that could allow the U.S. to field a new ground-launched cruise missile in the range prohibited by the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty. The United States says Russia violated the treaty in 2014 by deploying a ground-launched cruise missile known in Russia as Novator 9M729 and by NATO as the SSC-8. Russia denies any violations, and President Vladimir Putin this week accused the U.S. of preparing to abandon the treaty.
- About $30 million for the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board. Earlier this year, board Chairman Sean Sullivan privately proposed that the White House ask Congress to eliminate this independent nuclear health-and-safety watchdog.
Trump objected to certain provisions of the massive military-policy measure, using boilerplate language similar to what other presidents have deployed to indicate they will interpret certain measures as they see fit.
Among those provisions to which Trump objected:
- A requirement that future budget requests for the NNSA, beginning in fiscal 2019, include the amount the agency plans to spend each year to dismantle and dispose of unneeded nuclear weapons. The agency may spend no more than $56 million on these activities annually, according to the National Defense Authorization Act of 2017.
- A prohibition against using funds authorized by the bill to deploy fewer than 400 nuclear-armed ballistic missiles in the U.S. fleet — that is 300 fewer than allowed by the 2010 New START arms-reduction pact with Russia.
- Requirements that the White House and the Pentagon report to Congress on Russian breaches of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty; identify individuals responsible for such a breach; and identify potential economic and travel sanctions to be levied against those individuals.
Congress has yet to pass a permanent 2018 appropriations bill, so all government agencies are still funded at 2017 levels under a stopgap budget bill. The latest temporary funding expires Dec. 22, before which time Congress will either have to pass a permanent 2018 budget, or pass another continuing resolution.
