The director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory said Tuesday he is “confident” the Northern New Mexico nuclear weapons site could help create the low-yield nuclear warheads the Trump administration requested in the Nuclear Posture Review released in early February.
“Again, I go out on a branch, but I know from our nuclear weapons experts if we had the right box to put around that, we’re confident we could do that,” Terry Wallace said in a question-and-answer session following his presentation to ExchangeMonitor’s annual Nuclear Deterrence Summit. Exchange Monitor is a sister publication to Defense Daily.
The Nuclear Posture Review the Pentagon released earlier this month calls for developing two new low-yield warheads, one or both of which might be submarine-launched. The first of the two would be a low-yield warhead for existing Trident II D-5 submarine-launched ballistic missiles.
Wallace’s confidence hinged on the condition that the new weapon is delivered in more or less the same package and in more or less the same way as the old.
“If we were given a whole different set of requirements with that, so that it had to be a suitcase that you carried … into North Korea’s ping-pong table, or whatever, I would be less confident,” he said.
It isn’t yet clear how much the Department of Energy has proposed spending on any potential new warhead in fiscal 2019. At deadline Tuesday for sister publication Weapons Complex Morning Briefing, the agency had not released its 2019 budget justification: a multivolume document that traditionally includes details of proposed new programs.
Wallace, a longtime manager at the lab, took over as director of LANL and president of LANL prime contractor Los Alamos National Security (LANS) on Jan. 1. He replaced longtime lab Director Charles McMillan and is expected to serve only until LANS’ contract expires — currently scheduled for Sept. 30.
The Department of Energy expects to award a follow-on contract to LANS’ expiring management pact in April or May. Asked about his subsequent career plans, Wallace dodged, saying he was focused on supporting the transition to the new contractor: “After that time, I’ll decide whether a Wal-Mart desk works for me.”