WASHINGTON —The full House Armed Services Committee plans to authorize production of the low-yield nuclear warhead sought by the Donald Trump administration, a lawmaker said here Thursday.
The new Nuclear Posture Review issued in February calls for the new weapon. For fiscal 2019, the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) has proposed spending $65 million to develop the warhead, while the Defense Department has requested $20 million for its part of the project. There has been no public word on how the funds would be used.
“We are directing that they pursue a low-yield [warhead],” Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Ala.) said just minutes before the House Armed Services strategic forces subcommittee approved language for the 2019 National Defense Authorization Act.
The issue falls under the subcommittee’s jurisdiction, but it has proved so contentious among congressional partisans that the full Armed Services Committee directed the panel not to deal with the issue in its mark of the fiscal 2019 National Defense Authorization Act.
Congressional Democrats including Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.), ranking member on the full Armed Services Committee, have questioned whether the NNSA can, or should, afford a new low-yield weapon.
“That issue is going to be at full committee,” Rogers, the subcommittee chairman, said of the low-yield warhead. “There are several issues that typically we handle in our subcommittee that the chairman felt like needed to be full committee.”
Other such issues include production of fissile nuclear-weapon cores, or “pits;” and the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility: the massive plutonium disposal plant under construction in South Carolina, and which the NNSA wants to cancel.
To build the low-yield warheads, the semiautonomous Department of Energy agency plans to modify some of the existing W76 warheads used on the Trident II D5 missiles carried aboard Ohio-class submarines. The specific number of warheads involved remains classified. However, it needs congressional authorization to start the work.
In contrast to Thursday’s roughly 10-minute subcommittee markup — during which nobody offered amendments and hardly anyone besides the subcommittee leaders spoke — Rogers predicted a slog over nuclear-weapon issues when the full House Armed Services Committee marks up the National Defense Authorization Act on May 9.
“They’ll be debated, I am certain, at full committee,” Rogers said.
The language approved Thursday by the subcommittee would authorize an unquantified, but large, budget increase for the National Nuclear Security Administration as part of this year’s National Defense Authorization Act: more than the $15 billion the White House requested for the budget year that begins Oct. 1.
The NDAA sets policy for U.S. defense programs, including DOE nuclear-weapon operations, but it does not actually provide funds. Rather, the measure establishes spending ceilings for the appropriations committees that write annual budget bills for federal agencies.
Among other issues the subcommittee steered clear of Thursday in its NDAA mark was the NNSA’s pit-production program. In a briefing with reporters Wednesday, a committee aide said Armed Services Democrats want to know why the Nuclear Posture Review called for annually producing at least 80 of these fissile nuclear-weapon cores by 2030.
Before the review, the Pentagon said it needed the NNSA to make 50 to 80 of these by 2030. The Armed Services minority took note of the change and, as part of an amendment to be proposed during the full committee markup, plans to ask the NNSA and the Pentagon to justify the decision, the committee aide said.
The NNSA is nearing a decision on whether to move some pit production from the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico to the Savannah River Site in South Carolina, but the decision is not due on Capitol Hill until May 11, two days after the full committee markup.
Also left for the full House Armed Services Committee to decide was the fate of the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility: the plutonium-disposal plant under construction at Savannah River. The White House is seeking $220 million to wind down construction of the facility in fiscal 2019: about 20 percent more than the construction budget approved in the omnibus.
The agency has yet to turn in a cost analysis about its proposed alternative to the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility, another Armed Services committee aide said this week. In the 2018 NDAA, Congress said the NNSA could cancel the plant if the agency can prove its proposed alternative — diluting the plutonium and burying it deep underground in New Mexico — is less than half as expensive as just completing the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility.
Meanwhile, the subcommittee’s bill language directs the NNSA to start thinking about how it will accelerate production of the tritium and lithium needed to keep nuclear warheads at their advertised destructive yield.
These materials are respectively produced at the Savannah River Site and the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tenn. The NNSA currently mines old warheads to maintain a stockpile of tritium and lithium, but the committee said the agency needs to do more to bolster its store of the materials as the government’s ongoing, 30-year nuclear deterrent modernization program ramps up.
To that end, the subcommittee ordered NNSA Administrator Lisa Gordon-Hagerty to give the House and Senate Armed Services Committees a report “by November 1, 2018, on NNSA’s plans to meet near- and long-term requirements for tritium and lithium.”
