National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) Administrator Frank Klotz on Wednesday lauded the Obama administration’s progress in modernizing the nation’s nuclear warheads and conducting nonproliferation activities worldwide.
Speaking at the ExchangeMonitor Nuclear Deterrence Summit about the NNSA’s $12.9 billion budget request for fiscal 2017, Klotz noted that the proposal includes $222.9 million to complete production of the W76-1 warhead by fiscal 2019; $616.1 million to deliver the first production unit of the B61-12 bomb by March 2020; $281.1 million to deliver the first production unit of the W88 ALT 370 warhead by December 2019; and $220.3 million to deliver the first production unit of the W80-4 warhead modification by fiscal 2025.
“All of our life-extension programs are on schedule, they’re on budget,” Klotz said, adding that the programs’ success depends upon “consistent and predictable funding.”
Klotz highlighted the NNSA’s fiscal 2017 $299.2 million request to add 25 full-time-equivalent personnel to its workforce to manage the increased scope of programmatic work, primarily in life-extension and major construction programs. The workforce increase to 1,715 employees, he said, would accommodate the focus on life-extension program management and maintain skills as the workforce ages. “You want to have some period of overlap so that those of us who are departing the scene have the time to train and mentor those who are following . . . so that there is no interruption in our activity,” Klotz said.
Klotz cited the Obama administration’s “extraordinarily successful and productive” work to reduce the threat of nuclear terrorism and proliferation since President Barack Obama’s April 2009 speech in Prague. The administration’s progress in reducing and securing special nuclear material stockpiles, eliminating highly enriched uranium stocks, incorporating various countries into the Nuclear Security Summit process, and reducing global dependence on highly enriched uranium in research reactors, is work that must continue in the next administration, Klotz said.
“In the future, as more and more countries turn towards civil nuclear power as a means of meeting energy needs as well as clean energy goals . . . there’s going to be a whole new class of countries that are going to need to be assisted in dealing with issues of safety and security of materials,” Klotz said. “I think there’s an awful lot of work for the U.S. government, through the NNSA and the Department of Energy, to assist in that process.”
