For US nuclear stocks, Jill Hruby of the Department of Energy said, "this is the most demanding moment in the history of our nation's nuclear enterprise since the Manhattan Project."
December 02, 2022
Seemingly overnight in the spring of 2021, a network of roads and regularly-spaced buildings sprung up on an expanse of barren gravel near Yumen, China. The structures match the appearance of missile silos under construction in other locations in China, and analysts believe the complex is intended to house the DF-41 intercontinental ballistic missile, according to Planet. (Photo: June 9, 2021. Planet)
WASHINGTON — The Energy Department’s semi-autonomous nuclear security organization has launched a new effort to develop technology to bolster future arms control agreements, and is seeking innovative concepts from industry, according to a senior Biden administration official.
The National Nuclear Security Administration (NSSA) “has established a new arms control advancement initiative to invest in next generation arms control capabilities. This initiative will allow new ideas for warhead monitoring and verification, including the establishment of a testbed and purposeful stewardship of expertise within the complex,” Jill Hruby, DoE undersecretary for nuclear security and NNSA administrator, said Thursday.
“We want to make sure we’re getting new ideas with new technologies. The technologies currently deployed or monitoring and verification are pretty old,” she added in an online interview with the Advanced Nuclear Weapons Alliance (ANWA).
Hruby said that NNSA is looking to industry to provide innovative solutions across a multitude of technologies. These include satellite-based monitoring capabilities, “big data,” artificial intelligence and robotics, as well as “secure communications of different types.”
She explained that the plan is to build a testbed to try out proposed solutions “so that we can compare apples-to-apples on these things,” as well as bring in a wide variety of potential vendors.
Another goal of the new initiative is developing a next-generation workforce.
“Arms control comes and goes, but we need to maintain the workforce that ‘gets it’ — meaning understanding missiles, understanding weapons, understanding how they’re stored, all kinds of things,” she said. “So, we’re taking a page, frankly, from the science-based Stockpile Stewardship Program, to say: ‘What do we need to do to maintain expertise and knowledge and the arms control program?'”
Seemingly overnight in the spring of 2021, a network of roads and regularly-spaced buildings sprung up on an expanse of barren gravel near Yumen, China. The structures match the appearance of missile silos under construction in other locations in China, and analysts believe the complex is intended to house the DF-41 intercontinental ballistic missile, according to Planet. (Photo: June 9, 2021. Planet)
WASHINGTON — The Energy Department’s semi-autonomous nuclear security organization has launched a new effort to develop technology to bolster future arms control agreements, and is seeking innovative concepts from industry, according to a senior Biden administration official.
The National Nuclear Security Administration (NSSA) “has established a new arms control advancement initiative to invest in next generation arms control capabilities. This initiative will allow new ideas for warhead monitoring and verification, including the establishment of a testbed and purposeful stewardship of expertise within the complex,” Jill Hruby, DoE undersecretary for nuclear security and NNSA administrator, said Thursday.
“We want to make sure we’re getting new ideas with new technologies. The technologies currently deployed or monitoring and verification are pretty old,” she added in an online interview with the Advanced Nuclear Weapons Alliance (ANWA).
Hruby said that NNSA is looking to industry to provide innovative solutions across a multitude of technologies. These include satellite-based monitoring capabilities, “big data,” artificial intelligence and robotics, as well as “secure communications of different types.”
She explained that the plan is to build a testbed to try out proposed solutions “so that we can compare apples-to-apples on these things,” as well as bring in a wide variety of potential vendors.
Another goal of the new initiative is developing a next-generation workforce.
“Arms control comes and goes, but we need to maintain the workforce that ‘gets it’ — meaning understanding missiles, understanding weapons, understanding how they’re stored, all kinds of things,” she said. “So, we’re taking a page, frankly, from the science-based Stockpile Stewardship Program, to say: ‘What do we need to do to maintain expertise and knowledge and the arms control program?'”
Hruby made clear, however, that the focus of the initiative is firmly on the far future, because at the moment any hopes the Biden administration had for nuclear arms control are on life support.
“We recognize that regrettably current geopolitical conditions do not lend themselves to the establishment of new arms control agreements in the near term, either bilaterally or multilaterally,” she said.
“China’s nuclear expansion and Russia’s pursuit of novel nuclear capabilities; North Korea’s ongoing missile tests and Iran’s willingness to enrich uranium far above the levels permitted by the JCPOA [Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action], all indicate that at this time these nations are not interested in new agreements, or even in productive dialogue. However, that is no reason to sit idle and wait for favorable conditions present themselves,” she said.
Further, Hruby said that the downhill slide of geopolitical stability — in particular, US relations with both Russia and China — makes any US moves toward nuclear disarmament inconceivable, and the need for modernization across the nation’s nuclear arsenal all the more important.
Overall, the Biden administration’s fiscal year 2023 budget proposal includes $50.9 billion on nuclear weapons programs, with $34.4 billion for the Pentagon, which leads in building nuclear delivery systems, and $16.5 billion for the NNSA, which builds and maintains nuclear warheads.
“In the aftermath of the Cold War our enterprise shifted from a design, test and deliver methodology to a sustainment model centered on science-based Stockpile Stewardship. It made sense to take that approach during a period of strong nuclear disarmament cooperation, relative geopolitical stability, and because we had a weapons stockpile that was within its design lifetime,” she explained.
“Unfortunately, the increasing age of our weapon systems makes this approach unsustainable, without degrading confidence in our stockpile,” she continued. “And it is not considered practical to disarm under the current world conditions, maybe ever. Our nuclear weapons and their delivery systems were designed to last for a long time, but not forever.”
Hruby stressed that the “blunt truth” is that “this is the most demanding moment in the history of our nation’s nuclear enterprise since the Manhattan Project,” noting that NNSA is “in the early stages of recapitalizing our physical infrastructure to enable the execution of five weapons modernization and life extension programs.”
Meanwhile, DoD is facing a budget bow wave as it attempts to simultaneously modernize its nuclear weapons triad of intercontinental ballistic missiles, submarines and bombers. The Congressional Budget Office in May 2021 estimated the price tag for the total DoD triad modernization effort at $405 billion from 2021 through 2030, up from the $238 billion it estimated in 2019.
No comments:
Post a Comment