During debate on the New START Treaty in 2010, the directors of the nation’s three nuclear weapons laboratories endorsed the Obama Administration’s nuclear modernization plan. But given the changes to the plan in the last 18 months, which include the deferment of construction of the Chemistry and Metallurgy Research Replacement-Nuclear Facility and delays to the W76, B61 and W78/88 life extension programs, Sandia National Laboratories Director Paul Hommert told the Senate Armed Services Strategic Forces Subcommittee yesterday that he would not be able to offer the same level of support for the Administration’s current path. Hommert testified before the subcommittee yesterday with Los Alamos National Laboratory Director Charlie McMillan and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Director Parney Albright, but Hommert is the only lab director that was in his current position during the New START Treaty debate. “We don’t yet have a plan that is completely closed and by that I mean with an authorized and appropriated budget plan and multi years that would lead me to … the same level of confidence at the time,” Hommert said during an exchange with Sen. David Vitter (R-La.). “I believe we can get to that and of course in the intervening time we’ve faced additional fiscal constraints overall which have clearly impacted the budget effort. So some further work is necessary to achieve the same level of confidence going forward at this point.”
Hommert wasn’t alone in his concerns. All three of the laboratory directors raised questions about the new modernization path, noting that the Administration is accepting more technical risk with the approach. For instance, McMillan said that it could be up to five years before the agency knows whether its plan to reuse some plutonium pits in the absence of CMRR-NF to meet Department of Defense requirements for a capability to produce 50 to 80 pits a year will work. Hommert noted that the decision to push back the completion of a First Production Unit on the B61 life extension program erases all margin in the program. And all three laboratory directors emphasized that stable funding is needed over the next decade. “My larger concern is not so much what happens next year or the year after that, but what happens five years from now,” Albright said. “If we don’t continue to sustain funding of the overall effort, particularly in the areas of understanding the science of nuclear weapons both experimentally and analytically, we run a huge risk ultimately in our ability to continue to do assessments and to conduct future life extension programs.”