The roughly 1% annual increase the Joe Biden administration proposed for civilian nuclear weapons programs is “minimally sufficient” to keep warhead and bomb modernization on track in 2022, but maybe not beyond, a joint Pentagon-Department of Energy nuclear acquisitions group told Congress recently.
The Biden request of roughly $20 billion for the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) in fiscal year 2022 “meets immediate, known nuclear weapons stockpile and Stockpile Stewardship Program requirements for [fiscal year] 2022 only,” the Nuclear Weapons Council certified to Congress in a letter dated July 23 and delivered to the Armed Services and Appropriations Committees of both chambers.
The council, which by law must certify annually that the NNSA’s budget request is adequate for Pentagon needs, warned that anything less than the request in fiscal year 2022 “would result in program delays and misalignment with complementary DoD [Department of Defense] nuclear modernization programs, and therefore, potentially significant cost increases to DoD sustainment and acquisition programs.”
Meanwhile, after a marathon debate Tuesday, the full House of Representatives was set to approved a seven-bill appropriations package that would provide roughly the requested funding for NNSA nuclear weapons programs in fiscal year 2022.
“We agree with the [Nuclear Weapons Council] that the Biden budget request ‘injects risk’ in the cornerstone of our national security, and we further agree with the [council’s] ‘unanimous and grave concern that accepting increased programmatic risk within NNSA’s nuclear weapons activities will further increase operational risk.’” Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) and Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Ala.), ranking Republicans on the Senate and House Armed Services Committee, wrote in a statement Tuesday.
“As the letter states, the Nuclear Weapons Council unanimously supported the President’s FY22 Budget Request for NNSA Weapons Activities,” an aide for the Democrat-controlled House Armed Services Committee said. “This is the largest request for Weapons Activities in NNSA history. Those are the facts. It is by no means surprising to read in a Department of Defense document that they could use additional resources to reduce risk.”
Among the most controversial of NNSA’s weapons programs, at least with more left-leaning members of Congress’ thin Democratic majority, is the agency’s plan to build a pair of plutonium pit factories at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C. Pits are the fissile cores of nuclear weapons.
Among the things that the Nuclear Weapons Council must certify annually is that NNSA’s budget request is adequate to meet a statutory requirement for the weapons complex to be able to produce certain numbers of war-usable pits: at least 10 pits annually by fiscal year 2024, at least 20 annually by 2025, at least 30 annually by 2026 and at least 80 pits a year by 2030.
The pit production complex already faces delays, compared with the notional readiness dates the NNSA provided to Congress before lawmakers codified the current pit deadlines. Earlier this year, the agency told Congress that the Savannah River plant will not be ready to come online by 2030 as required but that the Los Alamos pit factory would still likely hit its 2026 goal.
Yet the NNSA might need more than 2% annual growth in its budget to keep up with future upgrades to its “long-term infrastructure capacity,” the Nuclear Weapons Council warned in its certification letter, signed by Stacy Cummings, a career Pentagon official who chairs the Council on an acting basis while performing the duties of the under secretary of defense for acquisition and sustainment.
