By Energy Secretary Rick Perry and the head of the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) both assured Congress last week that the two new low-yield warheads called for in the Trump administration’s Nuclear Posture Review can fit in projected agency budgets.
Perry and NNSA Administrator Lisa Gordon-Hagerty faced the same question Thursday on separate sides of Capitol Hill, where lawmakers could not seem to shake the warning former NNSA chief Frank Klotz dropped on his way out the door in January: that the agency’s four ongoing nuclear weapons life-extension programs had stretched the agency’s budget, infrastructure, and workforce to capacity, and that new warhead work could be overwhelming.
In a Thursday hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Sen. Deb Fischer (R-Neb.) asked Perry if he thought the NNSA would need more than the nearly 14-percent budget increase it expects to receive over the next five years in order to make a new low-yield, submarine-launched ballistic missile warhead and possibly a new low-yield, sea-launched cruise missile.
“I don’t,” Perry replied.
The Nuclear Posture Review called on the NNSA to make that submarine-launched ballistic missile right away, and to begin studying the cruise-missile warhead. For the ballistic missile warhead, the DoE branch plans to remove the secondary stage from a classified number of existing W76 submarine-launched warheads. That warhead is currently undergoing a life extension that predates the Nuclear Posture Review, presenting the NNSA with an opportunity to use existing assembly lines for the low-yield modification.
Gordon-Hagerty, who testified at three different hearings on the Hill this week, declined to comment about her agency’s timeline for putting some W76 warheads under the knife for a low-yield modification.
“We’re looking into it,” the NNSA boss told Defense Daily sister publication Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor after a 2019 budget hearing before the House Appropriations Energy and Water Development Subcommittee.
The NNSA needs congressional authorization even to do design work on a warhead modification, which complicates the timetable for what otherwise might be a straightforward process involving much of the same assembly and disassembly work already done to extend the life of existing W76s. Rumor persists that the agency wants to do the modification in fiscal 2019, even though the 2019 budget request it released last month contains no mention of that work. That means the NNSA may eventually come before Congress seeking a supplemental appropriation.
While she remained cagey in open hearings, Gordon-Hagerty was, like Perry, confident the NNSA could fit the Nuclear Posture Review’s low-yield warheads into its projected budget.
Invoking Klotz’s farewell warning about how the NNSA was operating at capacity before the Nuclear Posture Review put new warhead work on its plate, Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Ala.), chairman of the House Armed Services Strategic Forces Subcommittee, asked Gordon-Hagerty on Thursday if the NNSA could handle the new low-yield warheads with the budget it has requested from Congress.
“Yes, I believe we can get it done,” Gordon-Hagerty said.
The NNSA would receive more than $14.5 billion for fiscal 2018, under the omnibus spending bill President Donald Trump signed into law Friday. For 2019, the agency has requested a little over $15 billion. As part of its detailed 2019 budget justification, the agency included its projected budget through 2023: projections that show the agency’s annual spending rising in each of the five years from 2019 onward, eventually climbing more than 14 percent to around $17 billion in 2023.
