The head of the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) and a State Department arms control official this week released a tally of stockpiled U.S. warheads at the United Nations in New York.
On its website, the NNSA subsequently posted Administrator Jill Hruby’s prepared remarks from the event. “We still believe in minimal credible deterrence as we work toward a world in which the security environment allows for further disarmament progress,” Hruby said.
The NNSA planned to start low-altitude helicopter flights Friday in Boston to establish background radiation levels ahead of Monday’s scheduled Boston Marathon, the agency wrote in a press release.
Flights of the Nuclear Emergency Support Team aircraft were scheduled to run Friday though Monday during daylight hours only. The NNSA helicopters are often sent out ahead of major sporting events to baseline local radiation levels so that crew can spot a radiological weapon smuggled to the event on game day.
President Joe Biden appointed Professor Marvin Adams of Texas A&M University to the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology in late September, the White House announced. The body dates back to the Dwight Eisienhower administration.
Adams, who once said he “never really completely left the weapons program” after a stint at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the early 1990s, got his PhD in nuclear engineering from the University of Michigan. He is a professor of nuclear engineering and an observer on the board of directors for Triad National Security, NNSA’s management and operations contractor for the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New mexico.
The Department of Energy’s Inspector General (IG) last week released a list of the issues it will audit in the 2022 fiscal year that started Oct. 1, and several major defense-nuclear programs will be going under the microscope.
Nuclear-weapons programs on the list include Lawrence Livermore’s W80-4 cruise missile warhead life extension and Los Alamos National Laboratory’s plutonium pit production program. The IG will also delve into the nitty gritty of Department of Energy construction management with a look at indirect-funded minor construction projects. More generally, the internal watchdog will audit grant management and contractors’ substance abuse testing programs.
The Los Alamos National Laboratory selected four 2021 laboratory fellows last week, the world’s first nuclear-weapons design lab said in a press release.
Baolian Cheng, of the Plasma Theory and Applications Group; Elizabeth Hunke, of the Lab’s Fluid Dynamics and Solid Mechanics Group; David Smith, of the Space and Remote Sensing Group; and Blas Uberuaga, of the Materials Science in Radiation and Dynamics Extremes Group.