ALEXANDRIA — Congress should not relax legal deadlines to produce plutonium pits this decade, even though the National Nuclear Security Administration has acknowledged it won’t meet at least one of them, nuclear-weapons managers here said Wednesday.
“I would say no,” Michael Thompson, said here Wednesday when asked whether Congress should change the law so that the National Nuclear Security Administration was not legally bound to produce multiple war-reserve pits beginning in 2024.
The deadlines, written into law in successive National Defense Authorization Acts in 2019 and 2020, “have helped us focus, have helped us get the resources we need and have required us to actually … make progress,” Thompson told attendees of the annual Nuclear Deterrence Summit here. “To me, until we absolutely have to, I would say it’s best to keep those limits in place.”
The law requires the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) to produce at least 10 war-reserve plutonium pits in 2024, at least 20 in 2025, at least 30 in 2026 and at least 80 in 2030. NNSA has acknowledged it likely will not meet the 2030 quota and officials here this week differed in their assessments about whether the complex would meet the 2024 and 2025 deadlines.
The NNSA has said it is highly confident it will hit the 2026 number of 30 war-usable pits. The cores are for W87-1 warheads, which will tip Ground Based Strategic Deterrent intercontinental ballistic missiles.
“I think Mike was exactly right,” Bob Webster, deputy director for weapons at Los Alamos National Laboratory, said during a panel discussion here a few hours after Thompson spoke. “As a country we’ve got to make a commitment, we have to try to pull this off.”
After election day, but before Joe Biden was sworn in as president, Madelyn Creedon, a former NNSA deputy administrator, publicly urged the administration to petition Congress immediately for relief from the pit deadlines.
The NNSA’s 2022 budget request included no such language.
The Senate Armed Services Committee had not published the language of its 2022 National Defense Authorization Act at deadline, and the House Armed Services Committee had not yet marked up its version of that bill.
