Bipartisan votes in annual defense-spending debate save sea-launched nuke, boost pits by lots

June 23, 2022

By Dan Leone

The National Nuclear Security Administration would be authorized to spend $375 million more than requested on a plutonium pit factory at the Savannah River Site in fiscal year 2023, if a bill passed early Thursday morning by the House Armed Services Committee becomes law.

The agency would also be allowed, along with the Navy, to continue research and development on a sea-launched, nuclear-tipped cruise missile that the Joe Biden administration wanted to cancel. The bill would withhold 50% of the Secretary of the Navy’s travel budget in 2023 until the secretary delivered to Congress all written communication to or from the Navy about the missile’s proposed budget. Meanwhile, the NNSA would get $20 million to produce a sea-launched variant of the planned W80-4 air-launched cruise missile warhead.

These developments during the House Armed Services Committee’s public debate of the annual National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) bucked the Biden administration’s spending proposal for the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) on a bi-partisan basis.

The boost for the pit program, contingent on separate appropriations bills that still have to pass muster in a Democratically controlled Congress, was part of a very broad amendment that increased the top line of the committee’s proposed NDAA by $37 million. Even before the amendment, the committee’s NDAA had proposed the requested level of funding for the Savannah River Processing Facility, to be built from the partially completed Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility.

Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.), the chair of the committee, voted against the top-line increase, but 14 of his Democratic colleagues voted for it, resulting in a easy 42-17 victory that boosted allowable funding for the larger of the National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) two planned plutonium pit factories well above the Joe Biden administration’s request.

The Savannah River Plutonium Processing Facility would be authorized to spend about $1.1 billion under the committee’s NDAA, which the full House still will have to debate and pass. Before the top-line boost, part of an amendment from Rep. Jared Golden (D-Maine), the South Carolina pit plant was in line for an authorization of just over $758 million. NNSA is also building a smaller pit plant at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.

The agency cannot produce 80 pits annually by 2030, as the military requires, due to challenges at the planned Savannah River plant, discovered when the agency was formalizing its design in 2021.

Senior NNSA and Pentagon officials repeatedly said, in hearings this spring, that spending more money on the plants in fiscal year 2023 would not allow the agency to cast the required number of pits by the required date.

Overall, Golden’s amendment boosts the NNSA authorization to about $22.1 billion, more than $685 million above the request and about even with the authorization the Senate Armed Services Committee approved last week in its own NDAA. The Senate committee also included funding for the nuclear sea-launched cruise missile, plus the B83 gravity bomb that the Biden administration wants to retire.

Golden’s amendment will also allow the NNSA to spend even more money on other programs in fiscal year 2023, including but not limited to:

• The Enhanced Capabilities for Subcritical Experiments program at the Nevada National Security site. This expansion of the site’s underground plutonium laboratory, where NNSA conducts explosive tests that produce what the U.S. calls zero nuclear yield, will contain new imaging equipment required to certify refurbished U.S. nuclear weapons for much of the rest of the century.

• Production of conventional explosives at the Pantex Plant in Amarillo, Texas. The NNSA’s ongoing nuclear weapons modernization programs, and presumed refurbs later this century, will require the agency to replace the conventional explosives that trigger a nuclear weapon’s nuclear explosion. The existing military contractors that supply the material can provide neither the quantity nor the quality of explosives the NNSA expects to need.

Meanwhile, a separate amendment from Rep. Jim Cooper (D-Tenn.), chair of the Armed Services strategic forces subcommittee, cleared the NNSA and the Navy to spend a combined $45 million on SLCM-N, the low-yield, sea-launched cruise missile the Biden administration wanted to cancel. 

Cooper’s amendment, offered jointly with Rep. Doug Lamborn (R-Colo.), the strategic forces ranking member, passed on a voice vote. NNSA would, if this language becomes law, be allow to continue work on a sea variant of the W80-4 warhead that the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is working on for the Air Force’s Long Range Standoff Weapon Cruise missile. 

The air-launched version is supposed to go into service around 2030. The NNSA once thought it could have a first production unit of the warhead ready in 2025 but said this year that date would slip.

Finally, language to be added to the bill report for the committee’s NDAA will direct NNSA to give Congress, by April 21, an integrated master schedule for its pit program, courtesy of an amendment from Rep. John Garamendi (D-Calif.), one of the most anti-nuclear Armed Services Democrats. The schedule should include “timelines, required resources, and budgets for planned work,” according to Garamendi’s amendment.

Another Garamendi amendment would require the Department of Defense to annually declare to Congress and DOE the number of pits the Pentagon requires the NNSA to produce annually for the next 10 years, and also to justify the production requirement and provide a cost estimate for that level of production.