After it leaked to the media that the Senate’s annual defense authorization act for fiscal 2021 had a sliver of funding for nuclear-explosive test readiness, the five Democrats of Nevada’s congressional delegation released a letter to the White House condemning any return to testing.
“With no stated justification to resume testing, we unequivocally oppose any Administration’s efforts to resume explosive nuclear testing in Nevada,” the state’s two U.S. senators and three of its four House members wrote in a June 12 letter released late Monday by Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.). Only Rep. Mark Amodei, the delegation’s sole Republican, did not sign the letter.
In the letter, the lawmakers requested written answers to 10 questions by July 3. Among other things, they asked point blank whether the White House plans to resume nuclear-explosive testing at the Nevada National Security Site, and how much it might cost to do so. They also wanted to know the potential environmental affects of the test, and whether discussion of explosive testing implied any shortcomings in the National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) current program of subcritical testing. Such tests, which the government says produce no nuclear yield, have for decades helped the agency certify that U.S. nuclear weapons are in working order.
This week, news organizations reported that the Senate’s version of the 2021 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) would authorize $10 million worth of funding to “carry out projects related to reducing the time required to execute a nuclear test if necessary.”
The language came from an amendment offered by Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), the firebrand conservative who helped convince President Donald Trump to increase the 2021 budget request for the NNSA to almost $20 billion. The $740 billion defense policy bill would authorize that amount for the semiautonomous Department of Energy agency.
The Washington Post reported in May that some in the White House have advocated for a “rapid” nuclear explosive test to induce Russia and China to negotiate a trilateral nuclear arms-control agreement to replace the New START treaty between Washington and Moscow.
The federal government conducted hundreds of atmospheric and underground nuclear tests at what is now called the Nevada National Security Site. The United States agreed in the 1960s to a ban on atmospheric nuclear testing, but underground test blasts continued until 1992. In May, Drew Walter, a former Capitol Hill staffer now working at the Pentagon, said he believed that there are some boreholes in Nevada that could still be used for a yield test, once instrumented and prepared against post-test leaks.
Meanwhile, in a separate letter this week to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), a group of 12 nuclear weapons and nuclear policy experts on Tuesday also urged against a return to testing this week.
Among the signatories was renowned physicist and nuclear-weapon designer Richard Garwin, and Jill Hruby, director of the NNSA’s Sandia National Laboratories from July 2015 to May 2017. The Washington-based Peace and Security Collaborative nonprofit widely circulated the letter this week. In the letter, the experts said “there is no technical or military need to conduct a nuclear explosive test [and] doing so would have serious negative security consequences for the United States.”
The Senate Armed Services Committee approved its NDAA last week, but had not released the bill text at deadline Thursday for Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor. This week, the GOP-controlled Senate decided to debate a police reform bill before bringing the NDAA to the floor. Previously, the Armed Services Committee thought the full upper chamber might approve the latest NDAA before the July 4 weekend.
On the other side of the Hill, the House Armed Services Committee is scheduled to mark up its NDAA from June 22 to July 1.
The NDAA sets policy and funding limits for defense programs. The actual money would be included in appropriations bills that have not yet arrived for fiscal 2021. The next federal budget year begins Oct. 1.