Government Executive - Authors - Martin Matishak

Deficit committee should cut nuclear arms, lawmaker says

Martin Matishak — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 00:00:00 -0400

"America needs a new nuclear weapon as much as Lady Gaga needs another new outfit," Rep. Edward Markey, D-Mass., said at a Capitol Hill news conference.

Markey and 64 other House Democrats on Tuesday sent a letter urging the 12-member, bipartisan committee to look at a major atomic-arsenal rollback, saying that the country could spend more than $700 billion on nuclear weapons over the next 10 years.

"We call on the super committee to cut $20 billion a year, or [$]200 billion over the next 10 years, from the U.S. nuclear-weapons budget," the message states.

That money should instead be funneled to protect social programs such as Medicaid, Medicare, and the Federal Pell Grant program, according to Markey.

One of his proposals is eliminating the air-based component of the nation's nuclear triad.

"Our nuclear policy is the epitome of overkill," the lawmaker said. "When you get your annual flu shot, do you think, 'Well, one shot protects me from the flu, then 10 flu shots must give me 10 times more protection?' Of course not, and that's exactly what we're doing with our current nuclear policy."

Meanwhile, a group of roughly 50 nongovernmental organizations, including arms-control advocates and social-policy and religious groups, distributed a letter asking members of Congress to support Markey's recommendations.

The proposal met stiff resistance from House Armed Services Strategic Forces Subcommittee Chairman Mike Turner, R-Ohio, an ardent supporter of nuclear-weapons funding.

"Congressman Markey should be more careful before irrationally proposing policies that would gamble with our national security. At a time when Russia and China are engaging in significant nuclear modernization programs and North Korea and Iran continue their illegal nuclear weapons programs, what Mr. Markey proposes amounts to unilateral disarmament of the U.S.," Turner said in a statement.

He said Markey's $700 billion figure is "simply not factual" and that the total investment in the nuclear-arms complex would come out to roughly $212 billion over the next decade.

In a bid to draw Republican votes for the New START nuclear-arms-control deal with Russia, the Obama administration last year agreed to a 10-year, $85 billion plan to modernize U.S. nuclear research and production facilities and to maintain an aging stockpile. The Senate ratified the treaty last December. It entered into force in February.

This summer, Congress and the White House struck a deal to raise the federal debt ceiling into 2013, preventing the government from defaulting on its obligations. The agreement called for $350 billion in defense-spending cuts over 10 years as part of $1 trillion in mandatory savings.

While the measure did not offer specifics on where defense cuts should occur, it demanded ceilings on "security" spending, which included funding for the National Nuclear Security Administration, the semiautonomous branch of the Energy Department that maintains the country's atomic arsenal.

The agreement also established the bipartisan panel and charged it with devising a strategy to slice the deficit by at least another $1.2 trillion. Should the joint committee fail to reach an agreement, or Congress not act on its recommendations, the debt package would automatically trigger the $1.2 trillion in cuts; $500 billion of that would come directly from Pentagon accounts.

Markey's proposed $200 billion in cuts would come from a variety of initiatives, including almost $10 billion from the cancellation of the life-extension programs for the B-61 gravity bomb and the W-78 warhead used on Air Force Minuteman 3 ICBMs, according to an initial breakdown provided by the congressman's office.

The plan aims to save nearly $28 billion by reducing the number of Navy Ohio-class ballistic-missile submarines to eight; delaying procurement and cutting back on the number of next-generation nuclear-capable submarines; and paring down the number of Trident D-5 ballistic missiles to 200, the document shows.

"There is broad, bipartisan security consensus that we can no longer afford to carry these Cold War weapons into the new 21st century," Joseph Cirincione, president of the antinuclear Ploughshares Fund, said during the press conference.

"This is just part of the problem we have with the nuclear weapons budget; we spend so much on nuclear weapons that we don't know how much we spend," he said, adding that no "comprehensive" nuclear budget exists.

Markey would also remove the nuclear mission for the country's bomber force and the developmental F-35 fighter aircraft, deleting one leg of the nation's atomic triad, and would cancel the development of a new, nuclear-capable bomber for a savings of roughly $78 billion.

The budget blueprint seeks another $19 billion in savings by canceling development of future NNSA facilities, including the Chemistry and Metallurgy Research Replacement site at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, the Uranium Processing Facility at the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tenn., and the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility and associated buildings at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina.

The plan would also "curtail" the Pentagon's Missile Defense Agency by $55 billion over 10 years, the breakdown shows. It does not elaborate.

Markey told reporters his office is drafting legislation that would tie funding freed up by the nuclear weapons cuts to specific social programs, such as Head Start. He did not say when the measure would be introduced in the House.

The "coalition" of Democratic lawmakers and nongovernmental organizations could seek the support of Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., who earlier this year introduced a deficit-reduction plan that would cut $79 billion in spending on nuclear-weapons systems over the next decade by reducing the U.S. atomic arsenal to below the ceiling of 1,550 deployed strategic warheads established by the New START deal, Markey said after the event.

"Too much of the conversation is about defense spending in general and not specific, and here we're going to provide the specifics of what … can be cut without endangering our security at all," he said.

Representatives from the involved nongovernmental organizations have met or are planning to meet with staffers for all 12 joint committee members, John Isaacs, executive director of the Council for a Livable World, told reporters.

The committee has until Nov. 23 to vote on a deficit plan.

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Senate holds up nominee for State Department nonproliferation bureau

Martin Matishak — Thu, 11 Aug 2011 00:00:00 -0400

An unidentified U.S. senator has placed a hold on the nomination of the veteran diplomat picked to lead a key State Department arms control bureau .

Thomas Countryman, who until last week served as deputy assistant secretary for European and Eurasian affairs, was the White House's choice to head up the International Security and Nonproliferation Bureau.

The office, presently run by Assistant Secretary of State Vann Van Diepen, manages the State Department's international efforts to halt the proliferation and acquisition of weapons of mass destruction, including their delivery systems, materials and technology.

A hold is a parliamentary procedure that allows one or more senators to prevent a motion from reaching a vote on the chamber floor. The restriction in this case originated with at least one lawmaker, according to Foggy Bottom.

"We're aware of the hold. The senator in question has not identified him or herself, so we don't know who it is but we of course are eager to resolve the hold as soon as we can," a State Department official, who was not authorized to speak on the record, told Global Security Newswire.

The official said that Countryman's July 13 nomination hearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee "appeared to go very smoothly." He was approved by the panel in a voice vote during a July 25 business meeting.

"There were no indications, at least at that time, of pending or extant concerns that needed to be dealt with," the official said during a telephone interview on Wednesday.

A spokesman for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee did not respond by deadline to a request for comment submitted on Wednesday.

"The position itself ... has really had a very difficult time getting anyone nominated, No. 1, from the State Department and the White House and, No. 2, getting confirmed on Capitol Hill," according to Paul Walker, security and sustainability chief at the environmental organization Global Green USA.

"In most cases the holds put on nominees have nothing to do with the nominee," he added during a Wednesday phone interview. "It's simply a shot across the bow of the Obama administration to show the Republican opposition is displeased with Obama policy in general."

The International Security and Nonproliferation Bureau has been without a Senate-confirmed assistant secretary since January 2009.

"We do believe that this is a very important position that should be filled and that has for quite some time gone unfilled," the Foggy Bottom official said. "The business of combating the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction is a serious one and it can only be aided with an assistant secretary who is confirmed."

The ISN office is one branch of the State Department's Arms Control and International Security Bureau, working alongside the Arms Control, Verification and Compliance Bureau and the Political-Military Affairs Bureau in what are commonly referred to as the "T" family.

The offices are overseen by Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security Ellen Tauscher.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton last year reshuffled the bureaus in an effort to better execute President Obama's wide-ranging nonproliferation agenda. The reorganization saw the existing Verification, Compliance and Implementation Bureau become the Arms Control, Verification and Compliance Bureau. The previous entity provided policy oversight and resources for all matters relating to certification of other nations' compliance with international arms control, nonproliferation and disarmament agreements.

The move prompted Senate Foreign Relations Committee Ranking Member Richard Lugar, R-Ind. to send Clinton a letter voicing concerns about the shake-up, including that the White House had yet to submit a nominee to lead the nonproliferation office.

"At present, it is not clear if the administration intends to submit a nominee ... before it takes any action to reorganize the ISN Bureau," Lugar wrote in the March 1, 2010 missive.

A spokesman for the Indiana lawmaker declined to comment for this article.

Walker said Van Diepen has been "quite good" as ISN chief but "acting assistant secretary just doesn't give you the same authority as a fully confirmed assistant secretary."

He said a Senate-confirmed bureau chief would also bolster U.S. policy efforts at the Biological Weapons Convention review conference at the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland, this December.

The nonproliferation office has policy oversight for the 36-year-old treaty, which prohibits the development, production and stockpiling of weaponized pathogens such as anthrax, smallpox and plague. The review conferences, conducted every five years, examine the pact's implementation and recommend improvements to the nonproliferation regime.

While most of the work at the three-week conference will be led by Laura Kennedy, the Obama administration's special representative for the convention, "you really need an assistant secretary in charge of that as well" to further advance the U.S. agenda, according to Walker.

The State Department official agreed.

"It would be helpful to have Mr. Countryman in that position" before the three-week review conference, the official told GSN. "We will continue to do our work regardless but it would of course be important to have in place before then."

In addition to the Biological Weapons Convention, the bureau implements the interagency Proliferation Security Initiative and the Global Initiative to Combat Nuclear Terrorism. It also assists with the Cooperative Threat Reduction program.

The State Department official said that the nonproliferation office would provide "business as usual" until the Senate hold on Countryman is lifted and he can be confirmed by the full chamber.

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Homeland Security cancels troubled radiation detector effort

Martin Matishak — Tue, 26 Jul 2011 00:00:00 -0400

The Homeland Security Department has terminated the program to develop the next generation of radiation detection monitors, a senior agency official announced on Tuesday.

"The [Advanced Spectroscopic Portal] will not proceed as originally envisioned. We will not seek certification or large-scale deployment of the ASP," Warren Stern, director of the Domestic Nuclear Detection Office, told the House Homeland Security technology subcommittee.

The agency spent roughly $230 million over five years attempting to develop and field the monitor system. The machines were designed to not only detect radiation but identify the nature of its source. Proponents claimed the devices, each with a price tag of around $822,000, would eliminate time-consuming secondary inspections to determine whether a material was dangerous.

Homeland Security officials had expected to spend $1.2 billion to deploy 1,400 of the machines to scan cargo containers for potential nuclear or radiological weapons materials at U.S. points of entry. However, the system was found to be susceptible to false alarms and other significant technical troubles.

A recent Government Accountability Office examination concluded the program would cost Homeland Security an additional $300 million in the next four years even though the technology had not been thoroughly tested.

Instead, the department will deploy the 13 monitors that have been built and purchased to glean data that would help define requirements for a commercial competition to design and build a future spectroscopic portal, according to Stern. Four of the devices are already deployed, he noted without specifying locations.

"The benefits in making use of the money we've invested by learning technically from them ... are worthwhile applications for the existing systems," the DNDO chief said.

The agency will compensate for the absence of the new monitors in part with the deployment of new hand-held radiation detection devices called the RadSeeker, Stern said. Homeland Security intends to make its final, large-scale procurement decision on that system this Thursday, he added.

One of the main factors in the decision to end the program, according to Stern, was the release in January of a National Academy of Sciences report that was deeply critical of Homeland Security's testing regimen for the effort. In the rush to field the technology, the department conducted poorly designed performance tests that undermined officials' ability to "draw reliable conclusions" about whether the costly new equipment would work as envisioned, the document said.

Meanwhile, field validation tests determined that some operational requirements established at the beginning of the program were "no longer valid," according to Stern.

"We had to make a course correction," he told the panel.

News of the ASP cancellation was greeted cautiously by a representative of the Government Accountability Office, which has issued a series of blistering reports on the effort over the years.

"It helps turn the page for DNDO and the department," David Maurer, director of the GAO Homeland Security and Justice division, told lawmakers. "This has been a troubling chapter for them for many years and it's good to see they're moving on."

The decision also allows the department to focus more broadly on its global nuclear detection architecture, rather than "fixate" on the ASP system, he added.

The detection architecture is the worldwide network of sensors, telecommunications, personnel and measures used to detect, identify and report the potential movement of illicit nuclear and radioactive materials or weapons.

Maurer said the plan to deploy the existing 13 monitors "sounds like a reasonable approach" that would help the department better define technological requirements for detection technology in the future. However, the government auditor warned the agency not to neglect the other systems within the detection architecture.

Stern said there would be an additional cost to deploy the already procured devices but that a budgetary request has not yet been made.

"Relative to the cost of this program, it will be quite small," the DNDO chief said.

The panel's ranking Democrat, Yvette Clarke, N.Y., asked if the government would be able to recoup some of its money. "We're just trying to find money wherever we can," she said.

Stern said the contract with ASP manufacturer Raytheon ended last month and he was unsure if the department would be able to get any of its money back.

Subcommittee Chairman Dan Lungren, R-Calif., repeatedly expressed concern that hand-held radiation detection devices and the department's existing polyvinyl toluene portal monitors would not be enough to spot smuggled nuclear material at the nation's ports.

"The magnitude of the challenge ... would require us to come up with something that allows us to do something more effectively" than with hand-held, personal systems, he said.

"I don't want to mislead you, PVT is never going to be as effective in identifying nuclear material as a spectroscopic portal," Stern replied. Hand-held detectors also will not be as effective because "size matters," he added.

The "fundamental problem" with the next generation detection system was "that we had a number of setbacks and in the interim ... companies have developed a number of portals that again are commercially available," he later explained. "It is my view and the department's view that it doesn't make sense to proceed as we have been proceeding but instead take a step back and say, 'The world has changed. The amount of money we invested many years ago was invested and there's nothing we can do about that.'"

Despite that conclusion, the detection office and the department do not plan on abandoning the concept of such a system altogether, Stern told lawmakers.

There is "no question that I believe that at some point in the future America will have a next generation spectroscopic system," he asserted. "The decision today is it does not have to be the specific system we've been working on."

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House approves $1 billion cut to nuclear agency funding

Martin Matishak — Fri, 15 Jul 2011 00:00:00 -0400

The U.S. House of Representatives on Friday approved spending legislation for the next budget cycle that would cut nearly $1 billion in proposed funding for the U.S. National Nuclear Security Administration's weapons and nonproliferation programs.

The fiscal 2012 Energy and Water Appropriations bill would provide the nuclear agency, a semiautonomous branch of the Energy Department, $10.6 billion to carry out duties including maintaining the country's atomic stockpile and conducting nonproliferation operations around the world.

The sum, approved in a 219-196 vote, is roughly $1.1 billion less than President Obama's original $11.7 billion request for the agency for the budget year that begins on October 1. The lion's share of the reductions would impact the nuclear agency's nonproliferation and weapons accounts, with respective cuts of $428 million and $498 million.

The White House requested $7.6 billion for NNSA "weapons activities," which ensure the safety and stability of the nation's thermonuclear arsenal, and slightly more than $2 billion for nonproliferation programs.

The funding is part of an overall measure that provides around $31 billion for the Energy Department, the Army Corps of Engineers, the Bureau of Reclamation and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, as well as several regional water and power authorities.

The legislation includes $35 million to support activities at Yucca Mountain, including $10 million for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to carry on its review of the license application for the radioactive waste storage site. The Obama administration has aimed to zero funding for the controversial project and to nullify the permit application

The spending blueprint approved last month by the House Appropriations Committee cut NNSA nonproliferation funding by $463 million, but on Wednesday lawmakers adopted by voice vote an amendment offered by Representative Jeff Fortenberry (R-Neb.) and House Armed Services Strategic Forces Subcommittee top Democrat Loretta Sanchez (Calif.) to ostensibly restore $35 million to the agency's Global Threat Reduction Initiative.

The program, which had been slated for a $120 million reduction from the requested amount and under the committee plan would receive $388 million in the coming budget cycle, aims to reduce and remove "high-priority" vulnerable nuclear material, such as highly enriched uranium, from overseas sites. The effort also converts research reactors powered by weapon-usable highly enriched uranium to use proliferation-resistant low-enriched uranium fuel.

The bipartisan amendment restores $35 million to the nuclear agency's nonproliferation operations but does not provide details on which program would receive the funds. However, both lawmakers voiced their desire that the dollars be used by the threat reduction program, specifically its reactor conversion initiative.

Budget documents show that appropriators sliced the $148.3 million request for that account nearly in half, by $70 million.

On Monday, House Armed Services Strategic Forces Subcommittee Chairman Michael Turner (R-Ohio) offered and withdrew an amendment to highlight the nearly half-billion cut to NNSA weapons activities and restore $241 million to the accounts with offsets from a pair of Army Corps of Engineers water projects.

"This restoration is critically important to revitalize and modernize our nuclear security enterprise," Turner said.

His 16-member panel in March submitted a letter to House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) asking that NNSA funding be preserved in fiscal years 2011 and 2012 and classified as national security spending to prevent future reductions.

"The problem is that nuclear weapons spending is considered part of the Energy and Water appropriations bill, instead of defense appropriations," the Ohio lawmaker said on Monday in a House floor speech.

The full chamber in May approved a fiscal 2012 defense authorization bill that would provide the full funding request for the nuclear agency.

Both House measures ultimately have to be wed with the Senate defense authorization and Energy and Water appropriations bills before going to President Obama for his signature or veto.

The Senate is not expected to take up its version of the spending measure until after the August recess.

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Appropriators back $1 billion decrease in nuclear agency budget

Martin Matishak — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 00:00:00 -0400

The House Appropriations Committee on Wednesday approved a spending plan that would reduce the U.S. National Nuclear Security Administration's proposed weapons and nonproliferation accounts by roughly $1 billion in the next budget.

The appropriations blueprint for fiscal 2012 would provide the nuclear agency with $10.6 billion to maintain the country's atomic arsenal, conduct nonproliferation activities around the world and manage other efforts, including its naval nuclear reactor program and defense environmental cleanup initiatives.

That figure is $1.1 billion below President Obama's initial $11.7 billion budget request for the semiautonomous branch of the Energy Department. The bulk of the reduction originates from the nuclear agency's nonproliferation and weapons accounts, with respective cuts of $463 million and $498 million.

Democrats, led by Appropriations Water and Energy Development Subcommittee Ranking Member Peter Visclosky, D-Ind., sharply criticized the proposed reductions.

"The allocation reduces our ability to counter the most serious threats confronting our national security and that's the threats of nuclear terrorism," the Indiana lawmaker said.

"Given the current instability in the Middle East and elsewhere, these programs have never been more important," added Washington Representative Norman Dicks, the full committee's top Democrat. "I fear that we may not be able to provide the level of national security we need with these funding levels."

The funding measure provides roughly $30.6 billion in funding for the Energy Department, the Army Corps of Engineers, the Bureau of Reclamation and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, as well as multiple regional water and power authorities.

It includes $35 million to support activities at Yucca Mountain, with $10 million for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to continue its review of the license application for the radioactive waste storage site. The Obama administration has sought to zero funding for the project and to quash the permit application

The legislation sent to the House floor in a 26-20 vote, with opposition from all Democrats on the committee and Jeff Flake, R-Ariz. The measure, the fifth of 12 spending bills approved by the panel, is expected to be put before the Republican-controlled House after the July 4 holiday.

In May the full chamber approved a fiscal 2012 defense authorization bill that would allow the full funding request for the nuclear agency.

Both House bills would ultimately have to be meshed with the Senate defense authorization and appropriations legislation before going to President Obama for signing or veto.

On Wednesday, Defense Secretary Robert Gates told the Senate Appropriations Committee he was concerned by the House panel's plans to cut funding intended to upgrade the nation's nuclear weapons infrastructure, Reuters reported.

Weapons Activities

The White House in February requested $7.6 billion for NNSA "weapons activities," which ensure the safety and reliability of the nation's stockpile, for the budget cycle that begins on October 1.

The spending package approved on Wednesday recommends roughly $7.1 billion for that work, according to budget documents. While some budget lines did receive additional funds, that appropriation in total is nearly $500 million less than the administration's request.

It is still a boost of $195 million over the amount lawmakers appropriated for the current fiscal year, Appropriations Energy and Water Development Subcommittee Chairman Rodney Frelinghuysen, R-N.J., said in his opening statement.

"Only in Washington could an increase of this magnitude be seen as a cut," the lawmaker remarked.

He charged that the president's request "included hundreds of millions of dollars for construction projects that are not ready to move forward, capabilities that are secondary to the primary mission of keeping our stockpile ready and ... slush funds that the administration has historically used to address its needs."

The full committee recommended more than $1.9 billion be spent on directed stockpile work at the agency's network of facilities, including national laboratories in New Mexico and other states, the draft measure shows. That is a $24 million increase over the present fiscal year but nearly $54 million less than the administration sought.

The operations encompass all activities that directly support weapons in the nuclear arsenal, including maintenance and day-to-day care as well as planned refurbishments.

The legislation includes $279 million for the B-61 gravity bomb life-extension program, $55 million above the White House appeal. The committee also approved $255 million for the refurbishment of the W-76 warhead carried on Trident ballistic missiles, a plus-up of $6.7 million from the present budget, but still $2 million below the initial request, according to the panel's document.

The measure would also provide about $46 million to maintain the Navy W-88 warhead carried on submarine launched ballistic missiles and another $30 million to begin a study on renovating that weapon.

The committee fully funded the administration nearly $57 million request for warhead dismantlement but cut production support, which provides the agency's base manufacturing capabilities, by $54 million to $300 million, the measure's text states.

Lawmakers also shaved $25 million from research and development certification and safety, proposing about $166 million for that account in fiscal 2012. That money pays for basic research and development efforts.

"The committee does not support large increases for non-core activities that have not been justified as directly tied to stockpile requirements," the document states.

The panel slashed $190 million from the requested weapons activities account for science, technology and engineering "campaigns," budget documents show. Those programs consist of multiyear efforts to develop and maintain the capabilities needed to assess the safety and reliability of the nuclear arsenal without underground testing and would receive $1.6 billion in the next budget cycle, $85 million less than fiscal 2011.

Lawmakers took the lion's share of funding, roughly $315 million, from the nuclear agency's "technical base and facilities" program request. The initiative pays for operations, maintenance and recapitalization of NNSA sites and infrastructure.

That account would get about $2 billion, $174 million above fiscal 2011 levels.

Nuclear Nonproliferation

NNSA nonproliferation activities would see a drop from the $2.5 billion sought for the next budget to slightly more than $2 billion under the blueprint approved by appropriators.

Though some accounts saw increases, the bill provides $463 million less than the administration's proposal and marks a $216 million decrease from the appropriated fiscal 2011 level.

Much of the proposed drop-off in funding is connected to the agency's fissile materials disposition activities, including work related to the Plutonium Management and Disposition agreement that requires Russia and the United States to each convert 34 metric tons of weapon-grade plutonium into nuclear power plant fuel.

Those efforts would receive $694 million, a decrease of $196 million from the budget request, documents show.

Lawmakers also deducted $120 million from the request for the Global Threat Reduction Initiative. The program, which would receive $388 million, or $48 million below fiscal 2011 levels, aims to reduce and remove "high-priority" vulnerable nuclear material, such as highly enriched uranium, from overseas sites. It also converts HEU-fueled research reactors to use proliferation-resistant low-enriched uranium fuel.

Another effort that would see less money in fiscal 2012 is the International Nuclear Materials Protection and Cooperation program, which is responsible for enhancing the security of vulnerable stockpiles of nuclear weapons and weapon-usable nuclear material in other countries and improving states' ability to detect the illicit trafficking of those materials. The panel recommended $496 million to the initiative, down $75 million from the president's request.

The committee also sliced $144 million from NNSA nonproliferation research and development and University of California benefit pension plans associated with that work. Overall, the program, which evaluates science and technology associated with nuclear security, would be provided $346 million.

Yucca Mountain

One budget item that gained widespread bipartisan support was the inclusion of $35 million to continue operations at Yucca Mountain. The administration's decision to close the long-planned radioactive materials storage site in Nevada has consistently drawn rebukes from congressional lawmakers.

The project has taken nearly 30 years and cost about $15 billion to date, according to a recent Government Accountability Office report.

"Over the years the committee ... has been at the forefront of criticizing the administration's disdain for sound science and the hard earned tax dollars of our constituents," Frelinghuysen said. "Now, finally, the rest of Congress and this nation [are] joining the call."

Committee Chairman Hal Rogers, R-Ky., referred to the project as a "$15 billion hole in the ground ... that is completely dark now and unused." He derided the Energy Department's move to shutter the site as "foolishness."

"Would you refer to the Yucca Mountain as 'The Hole to Nowhere?'" the Kentucky lawmaker later asked Dicks, in reference to the infamous budget proposal to spend hundreds of millions building a bridge in Alaska that would connect an island of 50 residents to the mainland.

"There's a lot of money in that hole, that's the problem," Dicks replied. He added that to date he has not heard of any proposal to overturn the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982 that originally created the legal timetable and procedure for establishing a permanent, underground repository for radioactive waste.

"I respect this administration in many ways but one thing they did promise us [was] these decisions would be made on a basis of good science; legally defensible, scientifically credible. I don't think that's the case here," Dicks said.

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U.S. needs effective counter-WMD strategy, Defense official says

Martin Matishak — Wed, 15 Jun 2011 00:00:00 -0400

The United States still lacks an effective strategy to prevent or counter the potential loss or diversion of a weapon of mass destruction somewhere in the world, according to a senior Defense Department official.

Several recent Pentagon exercises demonstrated "that our capabilities in this regard have some serious gaps," John Harvey, principal deputy to the assistant Defense secretary for nuclear and chemical and biological defense programs, said on Friday. "A critical gap is that we do not have a systematic approach to achieve what we call in the Department of Defense 'situational awareness' for the combat commands regarding" unconventional weapons.

That enhanced insight into ongoing developments in a particular military theater "is not the broad-area, ground, or maritime surveillance that would be critical once an asset has been lost for days or weeks, assuming we knew it were lost," he added at a breakfast event on Capitol Hill. "While that's important, we want to get our arms around the problem as close to the point of prevention of loss as we can."

The solution, in part, calls for increased intelligence in a number of areas, according to Harvey, including: the state of nations' WMD programs; terrorists' interest in those efforts; existing proliferation networks; national proliferation activities; and the security status of WMD facilities, including possible threats and vulnerabilities. Also key would be continued engagement on enhancing weapons security and ongoing threat-reduction programs with other nations, he said.

"All of these things basically answer the question of what's going on in anything having to do with WMD" in the regions covered by U.S. Central Command and the nine other combat commands, Harvey told the audience.

He said a new Pentagon program designed to address some of those concerns is slated to begin in the next fiscal year.

The United States has long been concerned that another nation's WMD materials might go missing or be acquired by terrorists. Washington has used programs such as the Pentagon's Cooperative Threat Reduction initiative to secure or eliminate nuclear and other WMD materials in the former Soviet Union and beyond.

President Obama has identified countering WMD threats as a top national security goal. Last year the administration released a National Security Strategy that described nuclear weapons and other unconventional arms as the "gravest danger to the American people and global security."

In addition, the administration's 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review addressed the need for WMD response forces. The Pentagon last year announced it would establish 10 National Guard domestic units assigned to that mission. The forces are intended to conduct quick responses to attacks involving chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear, and large-explosive devices.

"The idea of preventing loss of control is not how our military typically thinks," Harvey told Global Security Newswire after the event. "What they think is, if it's lost, tell me where it is, I'll go get it, I'll kill the people who have it, and I'll make sure they don't set it off. But we've got to get to the left of that, if you know what I mean."

Pentagon officials want combatant commands to possess a better day-to-day picture of the security of warheads and other dangerous materials, including chemical and biological agents, in their respective theaters, Harvey told the audience.

He did not discuss specific commands, which cover various regions around the globe. The U.S. Central Command, for example, has an "area of responsibility" that encompasses North Africa, Central Asia, and the Middle East, including Syria, which is suspected of holding a sizable arsenal of chemical weapons, and Pakistan, which remains subject to concerns regarding the security of its nuclear arsenal.

In addition, the department wants to ensure the commands "have the earliest possible indication of a change in status" of those materials, including any tips of unusual activity by people working on WMD programs to head off insider threats, he said.

He noted that the response to a potential loss of an unconventional weapon might not involve U.S. military forces. Instead, the command could share intelligence with the host country's military or police and have them follow up or, if a weapon is in transit, pass coordinates to local officials or allies in neighboring theaters.

The new worldwide approach would need to draw data from classified and open-source information from inside the intelligence community as well as other areas, according to Harvey.

"It's more than intelligence," he said. "It's knowledge."

Harvey offered a "broad-based plan" for addressing potential WMD vulnerabilities, said Rick Nelson, director of the Homeland Security and Counterterrorism Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

"But going forward, it will be important to conduct any strategy-formulation process with as much interagency participation as possible, so as to limit the possibility of a plan that leaves out important issues," he told GSN by e-mail.

Harvey touted the creation of a new Pentagon effort, dubbed Countering Weapons of Mass Destruction Systems, aimed to give combat commands the additional insight needed to prevent or defeat a catastrophic attack.

The newly minted effort would receive roughly $7.8 million in the next fiscal year, slated to begin October 1, budget documents show. Funding would increase in subsequent budgets, settling around $69 million in 2015 and 2016.

"This program addresses developing an integrated and interconnected CWMD capabilities-based system that defines and enables a comprehensive CWMD steady-state and surge posture," the budget item justification states. The text does not offer specific details.

"We fought really hard within the department to get this funded," Harvey told GSN, adding that he and other Pentagon officials recently visited Capitol Hill to speak about the program with staff from the respective appropriations committees.

"We see this as an opportunity to begin to put together the pieces of what I would call a CWMD systems architecture, and a CWMD concept of operations, and to start thinking about what we need to do to improve the capabilities of that architecture," he said.

Nelson warned that "ensuring consistent and continued funding for CWMD will prove challenging given the likely budget cuts or freezes facing DOD and other federal departments.

"That said, the language describing CWMD is encouraging in that it builds on the idea, which is gaining more and more currency in Washington, that most successful initiatives will require interdepartmental and interagency coordination," he stated. "There are very few single agency problems and even fewer single agency solutions."

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House panel cuts more than $1 billion from nuclear agency budget

Martin Matishak — Fri, 03 Jun 2011 00:00:00 -0400

An influential congressional panel on Thursday adopted a fiscal 2012 spending bill that would cut nearly $1 billion in proposed funding from U.S. National Nuclear Security Administration's weapons and nonproliferation programs.

The budget blueprint released by the House Appropriations Energy and Water Development Subcommittee would provide the agency roughly $10.6 billion in fiscal 2012 to maintain the country's nuclear stockpile, conduct nonproliferation activities around the globe and other work, including its naval nuclear reactor program and defense environmental cleanup efforts.

That dollar amount is about $1.1 billion below the Obama administration's initial request of $11.7 billion for the semiautonomous branch of the Energy Department. Nearly all of the funding reduction would come from the nonproliferation and weapons accounts.

The 11-member subcommittee approved the measure by voice vote. There was no dissent.

Last week the Republican-controlled House approved a fiscal 2012 defense authorization bill that granted the White House's full funding appeal for the agency.

The administration request included close to $7.6 billion for NNSA "weapons activities," which ensure the safety and performance of the nation's atomic arsenal, for the coming budget cycle that begins October 1.

The spending measure approved in Thursday's mark-up session would grant about $7.1 billion for that work, according to an initial breakdown of the appropriations bill obtained by Global Security Newswire. That is a decrease of slightly less than $500 million, or 7 percent, from the administration's request, the document shows.

In his opening statement, subcommittee Chairman Rodney Frelinghuysen (R-N.J.) noted the proposed legislation includes an increase of roughly $195 million from the present budget's allocation for weapons work. That amount was just shy of $6.9 billion.

The measure also "fully supports urgent ongoing efforts to secure vulnerable nuclear material worldwide," Frelinghuysen added.

Yet the same preliminary breakdown of the spending bill shows NNSA nonproliferation accounts would drop to just above $2 billion, down from the more than $2.5 billion sought by the administration and approved last month by the full chamber.

The total reduction would equal roughly $463 million, or 18 percent from the administration proposal, the document states. It also marks a $216 million, or 10 percent, decrease from the appropriated fiscal 2011 level.

The panel's lead Democrat, Ed Pastor of Arizona, complained that NNSA nonproliferation accounts are "reduced significantly" in the next budget year.

"The allocation results in a reduction in efforts to secure dangerous materials," he warned.

Meanwhile, the nuclear agency's naval nuclear reactor effort would receive roughly $1 billion, a reduction of about $123 million, or 11 percent, from the requested level, according to the preliminary breakdown of the legislation.

A report of the specific NNSA defense activity accounts affected under the proposed spending bill will be made available June 14, the day before the full Appropriations Committee takes up the panel's bill, according to a committee spokeswoman.

The legislation approved Thursday includes "$35 million to support Yucca Mountain activities, including $10 million for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to continue their review of the license application" and "provisions to forbid the use of funds to close down the program."

The Energy Department's decision to shutter the planned radioactive materials storage site has drawn the bipartisan ire of congressional lawmakers. The project has taken nearly 30 years of the government's time and cost taxpayers about $15 billion, according to a recent Government Accountability Office audit.

Overall the spending package provides roughly $30.6 billion in annual funding for the Energy Department, the Army Corps of Engineers, the Bureau of Reclamation and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, as well as several regional water and power authorities.

The subcommittee mark-up on Thursday was attended by Appropriations Committee Chairman Hal Rogers, R-Ky., and Ranking Member Norman Dicks (D-Wash).

During the debate, Dicks and other Democrats decried GOP plans to "cut and grow" the nation's economy through spending reductions. The Washington lawmaker labeled the various cuts contained in the bill as "a penny wise, a pound foolish."

Rogers, however, applauded the spending measure.

"The austerity that the Congress and the country are being faced with is reflected very loudly in this bill," the Kentucky lawmaker said.

"It'd be easy to be chairman, it'd be easy to do this job if we were just increasing budgets," added subcommittee member Mike Simpson (R-Idaho). "We have to get serious about constraining growth and spending."

Rogers said he intends to have all 12 federal spending bills cleared by the full Appropriations Committee before Congress breaks for August recess.

Not every Republican on Capitol Hill was pleased at the news of the proposed spending cuts.

The subcommittee's reduction "would negatively impact programs to modernize our nuclear security infrastructure and refurbish our aging nuclear weapons," House Armed Services Strategic Forces Subcommittee Chairman Michael Turner (R-Ohio) said in a statement on Wednesday.

That panel, which has budget authorization oversight for the nuclear agency, actively lobbied in recent months to ensure NNSA weapons and nonproliferation activities would be spared from GOP budget-cutting measures.

The proposed cut to NNSA programs "comes as a surprise" as the spending plan for fiscal 2012 and beyond put forth by House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), and passed by the full chamber, preserved all modernization funds, the Ohio lawmaker added.

"I fully recognize and appreciate the fiscal challenges we face. They are not easily overcome. In the face of these challenges we must set priorities and our top priority must be the defense of the nation," according to Turner.

An NNSA spokesman declined to comment on the ongoing budget process.

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Nuclear agency releases strategic plan for next decade

Martin Matishak — Fri, 20 May 2011 00:00:00 -0400

The U.S. National Nuclear Security Administration has published a new outline for implementing President Obama's nonproliferation agenda and for modernizing the country's nuclear enterprise.

The 2011 strategic plan essentially sums up how the nuclear agency, a semiautonomous branch of the Energy Department, will work over the coming decade to implement the president's nuclear-security goals, according to NNSA Administrator Thomas D'Agostino.

"The plan's job is to communicate ... where we're going," D'Agostino told reporters during a Wednesday afternoon conference call.

The agency's last strategic plan was published in 2004.

The newly minted 20-page document identifies the administrator's key goals, including reducing nuclear dangers; managing the nation's atomic arsenal; updating NNSA infrastructure; and improving its personnel and the nuclear enterprise as a whole.

D'Agostino said that the plan encapsulates information he and other agency officials have previously shared through congressional testimony and other venues.

"We have for ... the first time in a long time a national consensus that nuclear security is something that the country cares about and likely will care about for many years into the future," he said. "It's very important ... to have a single document that [people] can read in a sitting that describes, in both broad and certain specific areas, where the whole organization is going."

Nuclear security usually refers to, among other things, the prevention of the illegal transfer of fissile materials or other malicious acts involving these materials.

The White House in February requested that the nuclear agency receive about $11.8 billion in the next budget year to maintain the country's nuclear stockpile and conduct nonproliferation activities around the globe.

That figure is a nearly $2 billion increase over the enacted level for the 2010 budget cycle and represents a more than 5 percent hike from the $11.2 billion the administration sought for this budget year. That request was mostly maintained, although the agency only received a $190 million infusion for its nonproliferation programs, rather than the more than $500 million sought by the administration.

Fiscal 2012 begins on October 1.

The strategic plan reaffirms the agency's commitment to the president's intention to remove or lock down the global stores of loose nuclear material within four years.

It also restates the administration's goal to help develop and implement best practices for nuclear security through the establishment of centers of excellence that would evaluate a country's equipment and security personnel, as well as provide training to those assigned to protect sensitive materials. Facilities are slated to begin operations in China, Japan, and South Korea in 2012.

The agency pledged in the document to continue to strengthen domestic and international efforts to detect and prevent the illicit trafficking of nuclear weapons and technologies through the detection and monitoring of potential clandestine atomic programs and illegal diversion of fissile materials.

The branch would also contribute to developing a new international framework for civil nuclear-energy programs that ultimately could include an international nuclear-fuel bank and possible fuel-leasing agreements to provide alternatives to fuel-cycle development for nations new to the atomic market.

So-called "123 agreements" allow other nations to purchase U.S. nuclear materials and technology for their civil-power programs. Washington has inked such deals with more than two dozen nations, including Australia, Canada, China, India, and Russia.

The nuclear agency will continue to maintain the nation's atomic stockpile through its warhead-life-extension-and-dismantlement efforts, and will augment the complex through the establishment of the Chemistry and Metallurgy Research Replacement site at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and the Uranium Processing Facility at the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tenn.

D'Agostino acknowledged that the strategic plan contained no new efforts or changes to existing programs.

"If you find something in there that's a big surprise, let me know about it," the administrator told reporters. "Our point here is not to surprise people."

One nuclear-stockpile expert somewhat agreed with that assessment.

"Honestly, it sounds like a sound-bite update in the sense that it's a snapshot of the NNSA workload," according to Hans Kristensen, director of the Federation of American Scientists' Nuclear Information Project.

The document allows the agency to demonstrate it is focused on efforts to maintain the country's nuclear arsenal, he told Global Security Newswire during a Wednesday phone interview.

That said, the strategic document "is a public-relations document more than it is a plan," Kristensen said.

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Obama administration readying to make case for test ban treaty

Martin Matishak — Wed, 11 May 2011 00:00:00 -0400

The Obama administration will soon launch its campaign to win U.S. Senate approval of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, a senior State Department official said on Tuesday.

"I cannot predict ... when the president will make a choice to send the treaty to a vote but I will tell you that we intend to win that vote," said Ellen Tauscher, State's undersecretary for arms control and international security.

Acknowledging that the pact is likely to face stiff opposition in the Senate, Tauscher said the administration is preparing an "education campaign" that will inform lawmakers as well as the public on the matter to a point where voters -- en masse -- can influence an ultimate decision.

"Whatever it takes to win that argument and however long it takes to make that argument, the president is committed to do that," Tauscher told the audience at the annual meeting of the Arms Control Association.

She said the case for the test ban treaty would consist of three main arguments: that the United States no longer needs to conduct explosive tests to ensure the viability of its nuclear arsenal; that the agreement, once it has entered into force, would obligate all member states not to test; and that the international organization that supports the treaty has a greater ability to catch nations that cheat than it did when the Senate last considered the pact in 1999.

Yet a major proponent of the legally binding prohibition on Tuesday expressed doubt the chamber would act anytime soon.

"In my judgment, we should act before the 2012 elections. I don't have a high degree of confidence that we will," Senator Robert Casey, D-Pa., told the audience earlier in the day.

The ongoing engagement process with the Senate over the treaty "could intensify in the coming months," according to a State Department official, who spoke on background because the formal effort has not yet begun.

"There's no specific time line for a vote. We just want to closely consult with senators before making any choices. We see this as a marathon, not a sprint or even a middle-distance event," the official told Global Security Newswire on Wednesday by e-mail.

A State Department source told Foreign Policy that formal Senate consideration and a decision on the treaty was not expected before the 2012 election.

Casey also speculated that winning the necessary 67 votes for ratification would prove more difficult than during the New START debate.

The U.S.-Russian nuclear arms control treaty was approved in a 71-26 vote of the Senate last December, with 13 Republicans favoring ratification. The agreement entered into force in February.

"I don't think any of us can overlay the votes from New START on this vote. It's going to be a different debate in some ways and, frankly, a more difficult debate," according to Casey, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He referenced the shifting attitudes by members of Congress toward security legislation as a reason why the ratification could prove more perilous.

President Barack Obama shortly after taking office signaled he would seek to ratify the test ban treaty once the New START agreement was finalized; however, the White House has shied away from establishing a time line for winning Senate approval, particularly in the wake of heated Republican opposition to the arms control deal.

Tauscher said Obama could personally help in the push for ratification, as he did with New START, but that administration officials were not counting on his involvement.

The United Nations in 1996 adopted the prohibition on nuclear test explosions, which now has 182 signatory states. Supporters say the pact would help prevent additional nations from developing nuclear weapons.

"Were the CTBT to enter into force, states interested in pursuing or advancing a nuclear weapons program would risk either deploying weapons that might not work" because they had not been fully vetted "or incur international condemnation and sanctions for testing," Tauscher said.

Washington has observed a self-imposed moratorium on atomic bomb blasts since 1992. It has signed but not ratified the test ban treaty.

The United States is one of 44 "Annex 2" countries that must ratify the treaty before it can enter into force. The other holdouts are China, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Iran, Israel, North Korea and Pakistan.

When the Senate took up the pact in 1999, opponents argued it would prohibit tests that might be necessary to verify the reliability of the U.S. stockpile. In March, retiring Minority Whip Jon Kyl, Ariz., reaffirmed his opposition to the agreement .

"I'm not prepared to forever give up our right to [test] with the circumstances that exist in the world today," he said during a discussion at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Nuclear Policy Conference.

Treaty skeptics have also questioned whether treaty states might be able to cheat and conduct low-yield nuclear tests in secret.

Tauscher responded to those concerns by highlighting U.S. detection capabilities and those put in place through the Preparatory Commission for the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. The global lattice of CTBT detection sites is expected to be 90 percent complete before the start of 2013. Today, the network boasts 265 certified monitoring and laboratory installations.

"Taken together, these verification tools would make it difficult for any state to conduct nuclear tests that escape detection," the diplomat said.

She rejected the idea that last year's deliberations on New START hindered chances for CTBT ratification on Capitol Hill.

"I know that the conventional wisdom is that the ratification of New START has delayed or pushed aside consideration of the CTBT," according to Tauscher. "I take the opposite view."

She said that before debate began on the arms control deal "there was not a lot of muscle memory on treaties, especially nuclear treaties, in the Senate." Now, though, the chamber is better versed on such international pacts.

With New START ratified, the administration is "in a stronger position to make the case for the CTBT on its merits," Tauscher told the audience.

She praised the National Nuclear Security Administration's Stockpile Stewardship Program, which works without conducting test detonations to ensure the country's nuclear weapons would perform as expected.

Physicists and engineers inspect weapons in the arsenal to monitor the effects of aging, and carry out computer simulations to anticipate problems and devise fixes. They can then repair or remanufacture aging components without altering warhead design details.

"Our current efforts go a step beyond explosive testing by enabling the labs to anticipate problems in advance and reduce their potential impact on our arsenal -- something that nuclear testing could not do," according to Tauscher.

The diplomat also noted that the National Academies of Science is expected to soon release a separate assessment that many expect will support the pact's ratification.

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Nuclear agency expected to stay open during any government shutdown

Martin Matishak — Fri, 08 Apr 2011 00:00:00 -0400

The government agency that oversees the U.S. nuclear weapons complex would be able to continue operations for a "limited time" following a federal shutdown, the Energy Department announced.

The U.S. Congress has not approved a permanent spending plan for the budget year that began on October 1, 2010. The latest and apparently last of the short-term resolutions that have kept the government operating expires at midnight on Friday.

"In the event that there is a shutdown on Friday, no federal Department of Energy employees or contractors would be furloughed on Monday," department spokeswoman Stephanie Mueller said in a prepared statement. "Unlike other agencies, Department of Energy has some no-year funds that would allow us to continue operating for a limited time."

"Those funds would be available for the federal work force and contractors through funds obligated to existing contracts and financial assistance instruments," she added.

Mueller said the Energy governing directive instructs that should there be a lapse in appropriations the department must continue to perform all activities "at the minimal level possible until all of the carryover funding from prior fiscal years is exhausted."

The department includes the semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration, which manages the U.S. national laboratories, oversees stewardship of the nuclear stockpile and conducts nonproliferation projects around the world.

The Obama administration had proposed the agency receive $11.2 billion in the present budget cycle that began on October 1 . That would have been a 13.4-percent funding hike, a greater percentage increase than planned for any other government branch. The House of Representatives, though, passed spending legislation that would have cut more than $900 million from NNSA weapons and nonproliferation activities.

All week the White House and congressional leaders have held talks in an attempt to avert a federal government shutdown. Hundreds of thousands of government employees, minus those deemed essential, would not be allowed to work once the shutdown begins.

Mueller said the department's carryover funding levels "vary by program" that would ultimately determine how long each office is able to continue operations. She said agency officials were still working out a specific dollar figure and time line for the nuclear agency.

"For a limited amount of time, no program area in Energy will have to furlough workers, but we will have to be prudent with our spending given the budget situation on the one hand and the department's mission needs on the other," she said in the statement.

The National Nuclear Security Administration referred requests for comment on its specific situation to the Energy Department.

It did not appear that there would be any notable impact to the military side of the nation's nuclear-weapon operations.

The Defense Department said that all military personnel would continue to work in the event of a shutdown and that national defense and security activities would be maintained.

"Who is affected comes down to defining what constitutes operations and activities that are essential to safety, protection of human life and protection of our national security," Marine Corps Col. Dave Lapan, a Pentagon spokesman, said in a press statement.

The U.S. Strategic Command, the military operation that executes the nation's nuclear mission, did not respond to requests for comment by press time.

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Lawmakers issue bipartisan call to protect nuclear agency funding

Martin Matishak — Mon, 28 Mar 2011 00:00:00 -0400

Members of a key congressional panel last week unanimously endorsed President Obama's nearly $12 billion funding request for the U.S. National Nuclear Security Administration in the coming budget cycle, Global Security Newswire has learned.

The nuclear agency should also receive all $11.2 billion requested by the White House for the current budget year that began on October 1, according to the 16-member House Armed Services Strategic Forces Subcommittee. Failure to provide sufficient funding now could require large cash infusions for the semiautonomous Energy Department branch beyond even what the administration has proposed for the next budget, panel members wrote in a March 23 letter to Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, R-Wis.

"NNSA's fundamental national security responsibility is to ensure the safety, security, and reliability of the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile and to secure and remove dangerous nuclear and radiological material from around the world," the lawmakers said in the message obtained over the weekend by GSN. "These crucial national security missions must continue with all the resources necessary to be successful."

"We hope we can work with you to resolve this for the FY 2012 budget resolution to ensure the NNSA remains classified as a national defense function and is provided sufficient budget allocation to support its critical national security activities," subcommittee members told Ryan.

Funding for the nuclear agency and other defense-related activities within the Energy Department should be considered national security operations and shielded from cuts, panel members argued. However, the agency was subject to "across-the-board reductions" in appropriations under the proposed H.R. 1, the complete House fiscal 2011 spending bill, which were applied across all department programs "regardless of mission."

To date Congress has failed to approve a permanent funding plan for fiscal 2011, which is nearly half over. Republican lawmakers insist any final budget must contain deep spending cuts to shrink the federal deficit.

Lawmakers this month approved the latest in a series of short-term continuing budget resolutions that kept most NNSA funding at fiscal 2010 levels. The measure would cut $312 million from proposed funding for the agency's weapons programs in this budget and about $600 million from its nonproliferation efforts.

The latest resolution is set to expire on April 8, leaving Congress less than two weeks to come up with a plan to fund the federal government or close the doors.

Ryan's office did not comment. The nuclear agency, meanwhile, does not comment on continuing resolutions.

"We continue to work with our interagency colleagues and congressional leadership to provide the information they need to make informed choices about the resources required to implement the president's nuclear security agenda," NNSA spokesman Damien LaVera stated by e-mail on Monday. "NNSA is not in a position to comment on the ongoing negotiations regarding continuing resolutions, nor would we presume to comment on hypothetical situations related to future votes or proposals."

Even as it struggles with the current budget, Washington is looking toward the next fiscal year.

The White House spending plan unveiled last month calls for the nuclear agency to receive roughly $11.8 billion in fiscal 2012 to maintain the country's nuclear stockpile and conduct nonproliferation activities around the globe.

Of that amount, $7.6 billion would go toward the agency's "weapons activities," which cover all efforts that directly support the warheads in the nuclear stockpile, including refurbishment. That represents an 8.9 percent, or $621 million, boost for those programs from the fiscal 2011 requested level.

However, an additional $312 million might be required for those activities in fiscal 2012 to "restore the shortfall from FY 2011, should H.R. 1 with its cuts to NNSA pass as currently written," warned members of the subcommittee, which is led by Chairman Rep. Mike Turner, R-Ohio and Ranking Member Loretta Sanchez, D-Calif.

Lawmakers pointed to the May 2009 conclusions of the Congressional Commission on the Strategic Posture of the United States that funding increases are required to reverse "the pattern of underinvestment over the last two decades" in the nuclear weapons infrastructure, which the now-defunct group labeled "decrepit."

The nation's nuclear-weapon laboratory directors, in correspondence with the subcommittee last year, "further highlighted warhead aging and other recently identified problems that complicate their ability to certify the safety, security, and reliability of the stockpile," according to the letter. The three-page document did not detail what those issues entailed.

Subcommittee members also wrote that their Senate colleagues, on a bipartisan basis, made clear that their support for the U.S.-Russian New START nuclear arms control agreement "was directly linked to the modernization of NNSA's nuclear weapons facilities and the nuclear arsenal."

The White House has pledged to invest $85 billion over the next decade to build new nuclear research facilities and service aging warheads. The Senate ratified the treaty last December.

The fiscal 2012 budget blueprint asks for $2.5 billion for the agency's "defense nuclear nonproliferation" account, a more than 5 percent, or $138 million, decrease from the not-yet-enacted fiscal 2011 request. The program has oversight of the agency's varied global efforts to prevent the spread of nuclear material.

The latest plea assumes funding of the full $2.7 billion fiscal 2011 request for the agency's nonproliferation work, the missive points out. "Should the cuts in H.R. 1 be sustained, an additional $600 million may be required in FY 2012 to make up" for that shortfall, the subcommittee said.

"We would ask that you account for the NNSA funding increase in the ... budget function for national defense so that we do not again have to make trade-offs between national security activities of the NNSA and nonsecurity programs in the DOE, as was the result of HR.1," lawmakers told Ryan.

"We recognize the demands such significant investment will place on our budget, particularly in these challenging economic times, but we also know that cannot allow these crucial national security activities to be deferred any longer without increasing the risk to the safety, security and reliability of our nuclear deterrent, and without jeopardizing nonproliferation efforts to reduce the risk of nuclear terrorism," panel members added.

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Senior lawmakers wary of nuclear agency budget increase

Martin Matishak — Wed, 02 Mar 2011 00:00:00 -0500

Budget constraints might make it difficult to grant the Obama administration's request to increase spending for operations to ensure the safety and performance of the nation's nuclear arsenal, leaders of a key congressional panel indicated Tuesday.

The White House blueprint for the next federal budget calls for the National Nuclear Security Administration, a semiautonomous branch of the Energy Department, to receive a 5 percent funding hike to $11.8 billion.

Of that amount, $7.6 billion would go in fiscal 2012 toward the agency's "weapons activities," which cover all efforts that directly support the warheads in the nuclear stockpile, including refurbishment. That represents an 8.9 percent, or $621 million, boost for those programs from the proposed fiscal 2011 request.

However, "in the fiscal environment that we are now facing, that request is unlikely to be met," House Appropriations Energy and Water Development Subcommittee Chairman Rodney Frelinghuysen, R-N.J. said in his opening statement during a hearing on the agency's weapons operations.

"New resources will not be available unless they come from existing accounts," the GOP lawmaker added.

Ranking subcommittee Democrat Ed Pastor of Arizona noted that the appeal marks the second consecutive year the nuclear agency has been picked for a budget plus-up.

"The NNSA must provide this subcommittee detailed information on how you plan to execute this expanded program," he said.

Fiscal 2012 begins on October 1 of this year.

Congress has not passed a final spending plan for the current budget year, and Republicans are pressing for significant spending rollbacks. A continuing resolution passed by the House reversed a previous proposal that would have cut $1.1 billion in NNSA funding for the fiscal cycle that ends on September 30.

The latest stopgap measure is due to last only two weeks, to March 18. The Senate approved the bill today. It now goes to the president for his signature.

Thomas D'Agostino, NNSA administrator, told the panel he is aware of the "acute financial challenges" facing the country at the moment. He described the spending plan as a down payment on the administration's commitment to invest $85 billion over the next decade to build new nuclear research facilities and service aging warheads.

The coming budget cycles represents a "pivotal set of years for the enterprise. If we miss this opportunity, I believe the ability to recover is going to be difficult," the NNSA chief warned.

After briefly discussing fiscal restrictions at the start of the hearing, subcommittee members and nuclear complex officials largely focused on the details of the latest spending request, including warhead dismantlement and efforts to prolong the service lifetime of particular weapons. The programs would respectively receive nearly $57 million and $481 million in next budget cycle, documents show.

The nuclear agency requested slightly more than $257 million for fiscal 2012 to support the ongoing refurbishment of the W-76 warhead, which is deployed on the Navy's Trident D-5 submarine-launched ballistic missile. That is an $8 million bump from the fiscal 2011 request.

Refurbishment generally involves overhauling or replacing corroded metal parts and other aging weapons components. Work on the W-76 takes place at the Pantex Plant in Texas and the Y-12 National Security Complex in Tennessee and is likely to last until 2017, Don Cook, NNSA deputy administrator for defense programs, said during the hearing.

The agency also proposed more than $223 million to begin engineering and design for the overhaul of the B-61 gravity bomb. Those operations would be carried out at the Los Alamos and Sandia national laboratories in New Mexico, starting in 2017, D'Agostino told lawmakers.

D'Agostino said agency officials have begun to focus on refurbishment plans for the W-78 warhead used on Air Force Minuteman 3 ICBMs and the Navy W-88 warhead carried on submarine launched ballistic missiles. Both systems will need "some attention" over the next decade, he added; work would begin in 2021 at the Lawrence Livermore and Sandia national laboratories.

In fiscal 2011 the Obama administration requested that Congress appropriate $26 million to study what it would take to launch a joint program to refurbish the two warheads. Although both were designed for use on ballistic missiles, they were meant to fly on different delivery vehicles and do not share a common command and control system.

Warhead Dismantlement

D'Agostino and other officials also had to explain why the agency's Weapons Dismantlement and Disposition budget would shrink from slightly more than $96 million in fiscal 2010 to less than $57 million in the upcoming budget year.

The program is intended to eliminate retired weapons and their components and to reduce the security and maintenance burden of legacy warheads and bombs. The exact number of warheads the agency intends to take apart in the next budget year is classified.

The 2010 figure represented a "one time increase" that accelerated safety studies for the W-84 warhead and allowed the agency to purchase special tools to disassemble the B-53 warhead, according to D'Agostino. The B-53 was originally built during the 1950s and carried by the B-52 bomber. The W-84 was formerly used on ground-launched cruise missiles.

It takes "many weeks to take apart just one" weapon from the B-53 stockpile, he told the panel.

Pastor was particularly curious why budget documents show that after the proposed decrease for fiscal 2012, "out year funding" for the dismantlement efforts hover between $43 million and $56 million for the ensuing four budget cycles.

That baseline allows the agency to carry out a classified plan for the anticipated number of weapon dismantlements over the next 10 years, according to D'Agostino.

He said the agency could have hired more engineers to work on disassembly projects, but asserted that such a move would have created an employment "bubble" and slowed dismantlement operations for secondary systems, the second stage of thermonuclear weapons, at Y-12.

The NNSA head predicted the agency would complete dismantlement of existing retired weapons before the 2022 date set in the plan. Officials are wary of deciding to revise that strategy, preferring to continue "under promising and over delivering," he told lawmakers.

D'Agostino and other nuclear complex officials appeared before the subcommittee again today to discuss the proposed $2.5. billion budget in fiscal 2012 for the agency's nonproliferation activities.

Correction: A March 2 version of this article should have stated that NNSA weapons activities would receive an 8.9 percent boost in the coming budget cycle from the proposed fiscal 2011 request.

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Obama seeks more money for NNSA, less for key nonproliferation efforts

Martin Matishak — Tue, 15 Feb 2011 00:00:00 -0500

The Obama administration on Monday put forth a spending plan that would boost funding for the U.S. National Nuclear Security Administration to nearly $12 billion in the next fiscal year .

It marks the second year in row that the nuclear agency has been selected for a cash infusion.

The agency, a semiautonomous branch of the Energy Department, would receive roughly $11.8 billion in fiscal 2012, to maintain the country's nuclear stockpile and conduct nonproliferation activities around the globe, according to the White House funding request.

In December, lawmakers approved a short-term continuing budget resolution that keeps most NNSA funding at fiscal 2010 levels, leaving out a requested $320 million funding boost for the agency's nonproliferation initiatives. The resolution is set to expire on March 4. Congress can pass another resolution or a full budget by that date or risk seeing the federal government close its doors.

Arms control has been near the top of the administration's policy agenda since the president gave a speech in Prague in April 2009 that called for a world free of nuclear weapons. Last year he convened a two-day summit in Washington in which top officials from almost 50 nations made plans to secure the global stores of loose nuclear material within four years.

"The fact that the president's budget does show strong support for these activities is the beginning of the message from the administration that there is an urgency to these activities, even as the administration is cognizant of the need to address the deficit," NNSA Deputy Administrator Anne Harrington told reporters Monday.

Agency officials "feel pretty good that we have a strong case to be made for all the activities for which we are requesting funding," she added during a late afternoon conference call.

The newly minted appeal seeks $7.6 billion for NNSA "weapons activities," which ensure the safety and performance of the nation's atomic arsenal. That amount is an 8.9 percent, or $621 million, bump from the fiscal 2011 request.

Most of those new funds would go toward stockpile maintenance, according to NNSA Administrator Thomas D'Agostino

Another $2.5 billion would be funneled into the agency's "defense nuclear nonproliferation" program, a more than 5 percent decrease from the present budget cycle request. The program has oversight of the agency's assorted efforts for halting the spread of nuclear material.

The amount represents a down payment on $14.2 billion over the next five years to reduce the global threat posed by unsecured nuclear and radiological materials, the NNSA chief said during the same conference call.

Taken together, the fiscal 2012 budget blueprint marks the first step in administration's commitment to invest $85 billion over the next decade to build new nuclear research and production facilities and overhaul aging warheads, according to D'Agostino. The Obama administration pledged to beef up spending on the nuclear complex during its ultimately successful effort to draw sufficient GOP support for ratification of the New START nuclear arms control pact with Russia.

The remaining dollars would be steered to other agency efforts, including its national laboratory network and the naval nuclear reactor program.

Weapons Activities

A bulk of the $7.6 billion for NNSA weapons activities, nearly $2 billion, would be devoted to directed stockpile work at the agency's network of facilities. The new figure is an increase of less than $100 million from the request for this budget year.

The operations encompass all activities that directly support weapons in the nuclear arsenal, including maintenance and day-to-day care as well as planned refurbishments.

Funding would support ongoing life-extension programs for the W-76 warhead, which is deployed on the Navy's Trident D-5 submarine-launched ballistic missile, and the refurbishment of the B-61 gravity bomb, according to the text of the spending request.

Those dollars would also bankroll an ongoing study to evaluate future options for maintaining the W-78 warhead carried by Minuteman 3 ICBMs.

Another $1.65 billion from the weapons activities account would go toward science, technology and engineering "campaigns," budget documents show. Those programs consist of multiyear efforts to develop and maintain the capabilities needed to assess the safety and reliability of the nuclear arsenal without underground testing.

The combined appeal for the campaigns is a roughly $50 million increase over the fiscal 2011 request.

Meanwhile, $2.7 billion would be spent on agency infrastructure, including final design and construction work on the Chemistry and Metallurgy Research Replacement site at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and the Uranium Processing Facility at the Y-12 National Security Complex in Tennessee.

Both projects are set to achieve 90 percent "design maturity" late in the next budget cycle, which is when the nuclear agency will finalize the baseline construction cost and schedule for each.

Nuclear Nonproliferation

As the nuclear agency's weapons activities would experience a boost from the last fiscal year, its nonproliferation work would drop from $2.7 billion sought for the 2011 budget to $2.5 billion for the funding year beginning Oct. 1.

The program most affected by the new spending plan would be the Global Threat Reduction Initiative, which would see its funding drop from a proposed $559 million in fiscal 2011 to slightly more than $508 million.

The initiative aims to secure and remove "high-priority" vulnerable nuclear material, such as highly enriched uranium, at overseas sites. It also converts HEU-fueled research reactors to use proliferation-resistant low-enriched uranium fuel.

The threat reduction program will see a drop off because it was "front-loaded" in the last budget request to meet the president's goal of securing the world's loose nuclear materials within four years, according to D'Agostino. The program was to have ramped up by $225 million from the $334 actually appropriated in fiscal 2010. That, though, has yet to occur amid the continued budget standoff.

In addition, several projects under the initiative were completed or nearly wrapped up last year, added Harrington. She cited HEU-removal operations in Kazakhstan, Ukraine and Belarus.

"There was a real significant increase in our operational tempo in the latter half of the year," Harrington told reporters.

The agency also did not request funding for the Plutonium Management and Disposition Agreement that calls for Russia and the United States to each eliminate no less than 34 metric tons of excess nuclear-weapon material beginning in 2018 .

Another effort that would see less money in fiscal 2012 is the International Nuclear Materials Protection and Cooperation program, which is responsible for enhancing the security of vulnerable stockpiles of nuclear weapons and weapon-usable nuclear material in other countries and improving states' ability to detect the illicit trafficking of those materials. The program, which was to receive $590 million in fiscal 2011, would receive $571 million in the new budget cycle, roughly the same amount as 2010.

Yesterday, the NNSA chief dismissed any suggestion the White House was backing off its pledge to lock down all nuclear materials around 2013. His statement came after a coalition of nuclear security organizations and specialists last week called for Congress to approve all requested fiscal 2011 funds for programs aimed at safeguarding sensitive materials around the world.

"We are highly committed to the president's goal of securing material in four years. Period. Bar none," D'Agostino told reporters. He noted the initiative has successfully removed highly enriched uranium from 19 nations and is working with 16 additional countries to remove the last of their materials.

This article originally appeared in Global Security Newswire, produced independently by National Journal Group under contract with the Nuclear Threat Initiative, a nonprofit, nonpartisan group whose mission is preventing the spread of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons.

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White House, scientists discuss biological threats

Martin Matishak — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0400

The Obama administration recently convened the first in what could be a series of meeting with dozens of biological scientists and research analysts in an effort to bolster the White House's evolving strategy on bioterrorism, Global Security Newswire has learned.

The Aug. 13 meeting at the White House Conference Center brought together roughly 40 participants to discuss "policies to prevent intentional biothreats," according to one international analyst who attended the session and spoke on the condition of anonymity.

The discussion was led by Laura Holgate, the National Security Council's senior director for WMD terrorism and threat reduction, and James Petro, a top official in the office, one expert told GSN early last week.

Participants said the discussion focused on three broad themes: biological threats to the nation, existing international initiatives used to combat bioterrorism, and the role nongovernment organizations could play in the administration's strategy.

The conversation also addressed ways the White House could approach the Biological Weapons Convention and its 2011 review conference, including reaffirming adherence to the principles of the treaty or finding pragmatic alternatives to the compact.

"The administration is trying to think through what the agenda will be for addressing the challenges of bioterrorism," Brian Finlay, a senior associate at the Henry L. Stimson Center who attended the meeting, told GSN.

The large number of government and independent reports and executive orders about biological threats means "there's just a lot of grist for the mill," another biological research expert said. The discussion was not intended to address specific plans for biological defense, she said.

"It was not about how much should be put into [Project Bioshield] or anything at that level," the expert added, referring to the program intended to promote development of countermeasures against weapons of mass destruction.

However, the summit left some attendees wondering when the administration's strategy for dealing with the threat of biological terrorism -- the intentional release of disease-causing materials such as anthrax or smallpox --would be settled or what it would look like.

"I didn't get the sense they had a clear, definitive policy direction, but I think they're trying to get one down," the international analyst said. The administration's goals were not discussed at the meeting, he added. Finlay said he believes the White House has the "broad parameters of a new plan" but is not sure what it will ultimately entail.

"The focus of the conversation was on the prevention of biothreats, so I believe that is their general strategy," according to the research expert. The White House "may have an expansive definition, but their emphasis was on prevention instead of crisis management."

Crisis management, which was emphasized by the Bush administration, is generally defined as the ability to detect a biological event in process and to reduce its scope. Prevention emphasizes actions that could be taken to stop an attack before it occurs.

There was a general sense that the meeting was important outreach to the nongovernment community, the analyst said.

"The last eight years have been sort of tough" as the Bush administration rejected a draft protocol for the Biological Weapons Convention, leading to the collapse of an effort to strengthen the treaty with formal compliance measures, he said. "It's good that we have open avenues to discuss now."

Domestic Dangers and International Activities

Conversation on domestic issues emphasized oversight of the life science community, including biosafety and biosecurity, the analyst said.

Biosafety is generally defined as measures intended to prevent the release of infectious agents within a laboratory or the outside environment. Biosecurity involves active methods to avert biological terrorism or other disease breakouts.

The conversation was a "meeting of the minds" in which policy experts heard from scientists on the effects that changes in policy have on their work, according to Finlay.

Concerns regarding certain research have grown since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and the anthrax mailings that followed. Several projects in recent years have raised security concerns, including the recreation of the lethal 1918 influenza virus and an analysis of the use of botulinum toxin to taint the country's milk supply.

The National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity, a federal panel of science and security professionals, defined "dual-use research of concern" as "research that based on current understanding can be reasonably anticipated to provide knowledge, products or technologies that could be directly misapplied by others to pose a threat to public health, safety, agricultural crops and other plants, animals, the environment or materiel."

The discussion of the bioscience community, though, "was very much a waste of time," according to the international analyst.

At one point during a participant made an "innocuous" comment about the need to educate scientists about the potential dangers of their research, he said.

"Fifty percent of the room was bioscientists. They went ballistic," he told GSN. "We spent a half-hour listening to why the world should not blame bioscientists for biothreats."

He added: "Having a majority of people being bioscientists -- at one level -- makes sense, but on another level it skewed the discussion. I don't think that a similar conference devoted to the chemical-weapon threat would have had 50 percent chemists."

The meeting also highlighted existing international biodefense initiatives, according to the analyst.

Participants discussed what role the United Nations or NATO might play in stemming bioterrorism, Finlay said.

They also considered whether the U.S. State Department's Global Initiative to Combat Nuclear Terrorism could be used as a model for an international biological preparedness system, the analyst said. That program is designed to "prevent the acquisition, transport, or use by terrorists of nuclear materials and radioactive substances or improvised explosive devises using such materials, as well as hostile actions against nuclear facilities." Participants also offered their opinions on the Biological Weapons Convention and its upcoming review conference, in which member states will review the operations of the pact.

The treaty, which entered into force in 1975 and today has 162 member nations, prohibits development, production, stockpiling and use of weaponized disease agents such as anthrax, smallpox or plague, as well as equipment and delivery systems intended for hostile use. The treaty has no provisions for verification or for monitoring compliance.

Talk of how the administration could approach the pact "was a one-way dialogue," according to Finlay. "It was not about information sharing. It was more 'Let's bring these individuals together so we can get a temperature reading.'"

"There was no dialogue going the other way," Finlay said.

The biological research expert said the conversation of the treaty revolved "more along the lines of universal adherence" to the rules laid out in the compact.

Besides reaffirmation of the treaty's principles, it was suggested that U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, or another high-ranking State Department official, attend the 2011 review conference to stress the importance of the treaty, she said.

The potential role of nongovernment entities in implementing the administration's bioterrorism strategy was particularly generalized, Finlay and the other attendees told GSN.

"At the end of the day, you get that many people in the room, it's less about coming up with innovative ideas" and more about each participant promoting their own area of expertise, another biological research expert who attended the meeting said.

Finlay said it was made clear to the participants there will be similar conferences in the future. The meeting "at the macro level, was designed to open the door for a longer discussion," he said.

Petro did not return repeated phone calls for comment. A spokeswoman for the National Security Council did not respond to questions.

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