Thanksgiving has plenty in common with a congressional hearing about nuclear-weapons production infrastructure, if you think about it.
One day, a lot of folks who know each other well but see each other seldom gather round a big table, make small talk, and (to the extent that decorum and tempers allow) probe weightier issues.
And if the holiday meal works as a metaphor for the National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) production complex, then the Pantex Plant in Amarillo, Texas, is no doubt the meal’s centerpiece: the whole family wants some and nobody likes to clean up after it.
“All roads lead to Pantex,” goes the saying about the nation’s central nuclear-weapons service depot, and the comparison with ancient Rome is apt in a way that whoever first uttered the words probably didn’t intend.
Just since Labor Day, there have been official reports of crumbling roofs, cracked support structures and water intrusion from early snows at Pantex — which, by the way, is also in the middle of one of the worst COVID-19 hotspots of any NNSA nuclear-weapons site.
In hallways ‘round D.C., before COVID chased widely-attended gatherings onto Zoom, you might well hear somebody who’d recently visited Pantex describe the facility using unprintable words.
And it’s not a secret, anymore than it’s a secret that somebody got that cranberry sauce from a can. Everybody at the table knows.
With President-elect Joe Biden on his way to the White House, it’s possible that the NNSA might be in store for further belt-tightening, as Democrats in the House test their new commander-in-chief’s willingness to hear arguments about the size and structure of the U.S. nuclear arsenal.
That might bode ill for Pantex and the rest of the NNSA production complex, because, sure as football in Detroit this Thursday, no congressional authorizer or appropriator is going to put renovations or office furniture ahead of a nuclear-weapons life-extension program.
Yet at some point, something has to give. Maybe during the Biden administration, maybe not. Either way, whenever the President-elect’s people finally establish their DOE beachhead, they ought to at least consider how long Congress and the White House can pit infrastructure and mission against each other in a zero-sum game.
There’s a notion in nuke world that has a striking amount of cachet among both treaty-shredding defenders of American sovereignty and anti-nuclear activists who want the U.S. to lead the way to a world without nuclear weapons: disarmament through decrepitude is an extraordinarily bad idea.
At some point, the NNSA’s nuclear infrastructure will affect its nuclear mission. Decision-makers need not wait until that crisis arrives to manage it.
