House Committee nixes plan to repeal binding pit-production targets; authorizes $24B for NNSA

June 23, 2023

By Dan Leone

Early Thursday, a House committee approved a bill to cap National Nuclear Security Administration spending in 2024 at about $23.8 billion and blocked a plan to repeal legal deadlines to make new nuclear weapon cores.

The 2024 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) would also approve $70 million to fund development of a sea-launched variant of the W80-4 cruise missile warhead that the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is working on. The Joe Biden (D) administration for two years has proposed canceling that weapon, which would ride on a yet-to-be-developed sea-launched cruise missile, but Congress has consistently overridden the president on a bipartisan basis.

The pit amendment from Rep. John Garamendi (D-Calif.), a regular critic of the 30-year refurbishment of the U.S. nuclear arsenal that began in 2016, went down on a bipartisan vote, 31-28 during the House Armed Services Committee’s marathon markup session of the NDAA.

Garamendi’s amendment would have repealed legally binding deadlines to produce plutonium pits at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico starting in 2026 and the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C., in 2030 with dates that “the Administrator for Nuclear Security determines technically achievable and cost effective.”

The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) has acknowledged it cannot meet the current deadlines to make at least 30 war-ready pits annually at Los Alamos by 2026 and at least 50 annually at the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C. At Los Alamos, 2028 is more likely. At Savannah River, it might not be sooner than 2032, the agency has said.

When Congress set those deadlines in 2019, lawmakers in favor of the strict targets essentially said the mandate gave the NNSA legal backing to pull out all the stops to make the new pits, which will be used in the W87-1 warhead scheduled to tip the Air Force’s silo-based Sentinel missiles some time after 2030. 

Though Garamendi did not get his way with pit deadlines, he did manage to add, as part of a non-binding directive contained in the bill report accompanying the NDAA, a new report on plutonium pit aging by the JASON group of independent scientists. That group is now funded by the NNSA.

Garamendi’s pit-aging report was one of several non-controversial amendments offered en bloc and approved by voice vote during the NDAA markup that began Thursday. The package included a number of other NNSA-related amendments.

Meanwhile at the markup, the top democrat on the committee’s strategic forces panel, which drafts the parts of the bill that include the NNSA, assailed a $15 million decrease in nuclear nonproliferation funds included in the committee’s version of the 2024 NDAA.

“Regardless of Russia’s erosion of all remaining arms control agreements, the ability for the United States to independently monitor the development of nuclear weapons around the world is something we should not only maintain, but improve,” Rep. Seth Moulton (D-Mass.) said during the full House Armed Services Committee’s Wednesday markup.

Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor affiliate publication Defense Daily contributed to this report from Washington.