The House Armed Services Committee so far does not plan a hearing on a Democrat-sponsored bill to ban development of a 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 Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor’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 for work on the warhead. Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.), ranking member of the House Armed Services Committee, is among the measure’s all-Democratic co-sponsors. Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) filed an essentially identical bill in the Senate.
Spokespersons for Lieu and Markey did not reply to requests for comment this week.
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.
The Trump administration says the United States needs the low-yield warhead to check similarly powerful Russian weapons, which some in the administration fear Moscow might use to win a war it starts, but cannot finish, with conventional weapons.
Opponents of the low-yield warhead, including many congressional Democrats, say the existing U.S. nuclear arsenal is sufficient to deter the Kremlin from using a low-yield nuclear weapon in any circumstance.
This spring, when House lawmakers were debating the 2019 National Defense Authorization Act in committee — where minority lawmakers could make policy declarations through votes that could not actually defeat what is regarded as a must-pass bill — Democrats opposed the new low-yield warhead essentially en bloc.
The bill authorized spending on the low-yield warhead, and 2019 appropriations bills subsequently signed into law this month provided the amount of funding the White House requested to create the weapon.
Even if Democrats retake control of the House and Senate this year, President Donald Trump, whose administration ordered up the low-yield warhead, will wield a veto pen for the entire 116th Congress. That session begins in January and would gavel out in January 2021, just before Trump’s first term ends.
Defense Daily reporter Vivienne Machi contributed to this article.
