KEHLER: STOCKPILE REDUCTIONS POSSIBLE WITH INTERIM PU STRATEGY

U.S. Strategic Command chief Gen. Robert Kehler advocated yesterday for a permanent solution to the nation’s plutonium needs during a House Armed Services Committee hearing, but he suggested that an interim plutonium capability being pursued by the Obama Administration could be sufficient to allow additional reductions to the size of the nation’s nuclear stockpile. “I think that’s one consideration. I don’t think that’s the only consideration,” Kehler said during an exchange with Rep. Michael Turner (R-Ohio), the chairman of the Air/Land Forces Subcommittee. Turner had asked Kehler whether he would “agree that our ability to have a long-term ability for a production infrastructure should be a basis for us considering whether or not we reduce any of our hedge in case there isn’t an issue with the weapons that we have.” Kehler said, “I think that there are some scenarios that you can unfold where an interim strategy will serve us, even under some technical issues.”

 

Turner, who has in the past said he is opposed to any further reductions to the size of the nation’s nuclear stockpile until the nuclear weapons complex is modernized, said he was surprised with Kehler’s answer. “Gen. Kehler specifically focused on FY14 proposals the Committee hasn’t seen yet. If we’re departing from the President’s policy about a responsive infrastructure in his NPR, we expect a reasonable explanation,” Turner spokesman Thomas Crosson told NW&M Monitor. “The General reaffirmed the need for a permanent solution, like CMRR-NF would have been. Mr. Turner agrees with that.” The nation’s plutonium capabilities have been a point of contention between Congressional authorizers and the Administration since the Obama Administration decided to defer work on the multi-billion-dollar Chemistry and Metallurgy Research Replacement-Nuclear Facility for at least five years in favor of an interim strategy that would use existing facilities at Los Alamos National Laboratory and across the weapons complex.

 

Kehler wouldn’t reveal details of the interim plutonium strategy, but said he was comfortable with how the plan was laid out. What he worried about, however, was whether there would be support to fund the plan. More details are expected when President Obama’s Fiscal Year 2014 budget request is released. Authorizers in the House and Senate have opposed the deferral of CMRR-NF, while appropriators supported the Administration. “What I don’t know is what’s going to happen to it now,” Kehler said. “Because I am far more comfortable with the approach that I believe that we have hammered out over the last year. I believe that the plan does close. It’s not without risk, but I don’t know what’s going to happen to it, given the fiscal uncertainty in Fiscal Year ‘14 in particular.”