Todd Jacobson
NS&D Monitor
6/20/2014
With lawmakers raising questions about the Obama Administration’s ‘3+2’ strategy for modernizing the nation’s nuclear stockpile, Strategic Command chief Adm. Cecil Haney this week continued to advocate for the full suite of modernization efforts proposed by the Administration. Authorizers and appropriators in both the House and Senate have raised questions about the now-deferred first interoperable warhead proposed by the Administration over technical issues as well as concerns that the warheads might be too expensive in the current budget climate, and this week, the Senate Energy and Water Appropriations Subcommittee zeroed out NNSA funding for work on the nuclear cruise missile warhead.
While Haney called modernizing the sea leg of the deterrent his top priority, he said the air leg is no less important. “I won’t speculate on where Congress will go at the end of this journey, but I will say as we do this balance of where our funding is relative to sequestration and what have you, we just have to be mindful of what it needs to have a strategic deterrent that also has an air leg associated with it,” Haney said during a June 18 speech at the Capitol Hill Club.
Haney has previously argued for continued support of modernization funding in Congressional testimony. He called the W76 and B61 life extension programs “necessary to maintain confidence in the reliability, safety and intrinsic security of our nuclear weapons” and he said StratCom continues to work with NNSA on the “feasibility of an interoperable nuclear package for our ballistic missile warheads and options for sustaining our air-delivered standoff capabilities.”
Haney Emphasizes Importance of Infrastructure Modernization
He also emphasized the importance of modernizing the weapons complex. “Sustaining and modernizing the nuclear enterprise infrastructure is crucial, too, to our long-term strategy,” he said. “Continued investment in the nuclear enterprise infrastructure is needed to provide critical capabilities that meet our stockpile requirements.”
Previous StratCom chief Gen. Robert Kehler closely followed NNSA efforts to revitalize its plutonium capabilities after the deferral of the Chemistry and Metallurgy Research Replacement-Nuclear Facility, and Haney said he was doing the same with the Uranium Processing Facility, which has been scaled back to a smaller project at the Y-12 National Security Complex. “I’m confident that we have the professionals working this issue today so we can get through it,” he told NS&D Monitor after his speech. “My role is more what do I need as a warfighter on the end of this piece and why the infrastructure is so important to be able to sustain—now particularly as we look to the future.” He said he wouldn’t be completely happy until a new plan for maintaining Y-12’s enriched uranium capabilities was in place. “We’ve got to get to the execution of those plans. I am pessimistic in nature so until we get to the execution I will be looking hard at it.”
