New NNSA Admin. Disagrees With Suggestion That Agency is ‘Failed Experiment’

New National Nuclear Security Administration Frank Klotz said yesterday that he “categorically rejects” the interim findings of a Congressionally mandated panel on governance of the nuclear enterprise that concluded the creation of the semi-autonomous agency was a “failed experiment.” Speaking at the Energy Facility Contractors Group meeting in Washington, D.C., Klotz said the conclusion was detrimental to recruiting efforts across the weapons complex and credited the agency’s Stockpile Stewardship Program for helping to successfully maintain the nation’s nuclear arsenal and its nonproliferation program for spearheading efforts to secure vulnerable nuclear materials around the world. “It’s a heck of a statement to make publicly if you’re concerned as we all must be about recruiting top talent. After all, very few people have a desire to join a failed outfit,” Klotz said, later adding that he felt the statement was “belied” by the facts. “The Stockpile Stewardship Program continues to deliver tangible results from the combined use of our leading edge computational and experimental tools. It is often said, and I believe it, that our level of understanding of how nuclear weapons work is far greater today than when we were conducting nuclear explosive testing,” Klotz said.