The ranking Democrat on the Senate panel that writes the National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) annual funding bill said Wednesday she would not vote for a budget that keeps the B83 nuclear gravity bomb in service. Meanwhile, New Mexico’s senior senator laid into the Energy Department subagency’s top official about plans to move production of nuclear-weapon cores out of his state.
Those were some of the few defense nuclear highlights of a Wednesday hearing of the Senate Appropriations energy and water development subcommittee, which will write Congress’ first draft of the NNSA’s fiscal 2019 budget later this spring.
Toward the top of the afternoon hearing, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) vented to Energy Secretary Rick Perry about the Trump administration’s plan — published in February in the 2018 Nuclear Posture Review — to continue using the B83 gravity bomb, which was to be retired under the 30-year nuclear deterrent modernization program set in place by the Barack Obama administration.
“I will not support an energy and water bill now or in the future that violates our agreement [with the Obama administration] and retains the B83,” Feinstein told Perry and subcommittee Chairman Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.).
Feinstein said dropping the high-yield B83 from the arsenal was a major part of the reason she voted in favor of the NNSA’s ongoing program to modernize another gravity bomb, the B61. The agency’s B61-12 program would homogenize different versions of that low-yield bomb, reducing the aggregate number of deployed U.S. nuclear weapons.
“Why should this subcommittee agree to fund the B61 life extension at all if this administration is just going to retain the B83 anyway?” Feinstein asked rhetorically.
Later in the hearing, Sen. Tom Udall (D-N.M.) railed against the NNSA’s plans to possibly move some production of plutonium pits — fissile nuclear-weapon cores — to the Savannah River Site in South Carolina from the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.
“There is only one place in the U.S. with the technical know-how to do this, and that is Los Alamos National Laboratory,” Udall told Perry and NNSA Administrator Lisa Gordon-Hagerty, who also testified Wednesday.
Udall complained, as he and Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) did last year in a letter to Perry, that the NNSA’s analysis of alternative pit plants unfairly ignored planned upgrades to Los Alamos.
The 2018 National Defense Authorization Act called for NNSA to update Congress on pit production planning by May 11. Gordon-Hagerty, in congressional testimony last month, said that update would come from Deputy Energy Secretary Dan Brouillette, who she would brief following a meeting at NNSA headquarters with Ellen Lord: undersecretary of defense for acquisition and sustainment.
After the hearing, Gordon-Hagerty declined to say whether she had yet met with Lord.