By John Fleck And Michael Coleman
Journal Staff Writer
The Obama administration Monday proposed major increases in the U.S. nuclear weapons budget, including money for a new plutonium research complex at Los Alamos National Laboratory that could cost more than $4 billion.
Los Alamos would see a 22 percent budget increase next year if Congress approves the spending plan, while Sandia National Laboratories would see its budget rise 14 percent. Overall, the budget for the National Nuclear Security Administration rose to $11.2 billion, a 13 percent increase over this year.
The labs would see small increases in energy research, but the bulk of the money would expand their work designing and maintaining U.S. nuclear bombs and warheads.
The spending is critical in a state where the U.S. nuclear weapons program is one of the largest employers and a major economic engine in the Albuquerque and Santa Fe-Los Alamos areas. Los Alamos and Sandia together employ some 20,000 people.
The National Nuclear Security Administration budget increase makes good on an implied promise President Barack Obama made in a speech last April in Prague: To pursue a world with zero nuclear weapons, but in the meantime to maintain a strong, if smaller, arsenal.
"Make no mistake," he said in the Prague speech. "As long as these weapons exist, the United States will maintain a safe, secure and effective arsenal to deter any adversary, and guarantee that defense to our allies."
To keep that promise, Energy Secretary Steven Chu told reporters Monday, more money must be spent on the people responsible for maintaining U.S. nuclear weapons and on the facilities they use.
"The NNSA budget is increasing, and it's absolutely necessary if we are going to bring down our stockpile and still make sure it is safe, secure and reliable," Chu said. "We have a responsibility to the Department of Defense to maintain the safety, security and effectiveness of our arsenal without underground testing. If we are going to decrease the number of weapons — as we will — then we still have to guarantee the safety, security and reliability of weapons."
Chu said the budget reflects the fact that the NNSA has an "aging work force" that must gradually be replaced with younger, capable scientists who can perform the exacting science required of effective stockpile stewardship.
"We have to re-engage and start to recruit the scientific talent for this job," Chu said. "We have to, unfortunately, rebuild a scientific infrastructure that has been decaying for the last decade or even more."
Early leaks of the basic spending package preceded Monday's formal budget release. But the administration also signaled the importance of the issue by rolling out its proposed nuclear weapons spending increase ahead of time with a high-visibility gesture in the form of an op-ed column last week in the Wall Street Journal signed by Vice President Joe Biden. It is unusual for the nuclear weapons budget to receive such high-level public attention from an administration.
Critics charged the spending was political, a move by an administration afraid to look weak on an issue important to Republicans.
"They don't want to leave any possibility that they can be accused of being soft on defense," said Greg Mello, director of the Albuquerque-based Los Alamos Study Group, an anti-nuclear weapons organization. "They're covering their rears with plutonium."
Stephen Younger, a nuclear weapons analyst with the Union of Concerned Scientists, questioned whether the proposed budget contributes enough to the first part of the goal outlined by Obama in Prague: the elimination of nuclear weapons.
"In Prague, recognizing that nuclear weapons are now a liability rather than an asset for U.S. security, the president set the goal of a world free of nuclear weapons, but was clear that until that goal was reached, the United States would maintain its nuclear deterrent," Young said in a statement. "This budget invests substantially in the deterrent, but does little to move us toward the first goal."
Key to the administration's approach is the decision to push simultaneously for two large new projects, a uranium building at the Y12 weapons plant in Tennessee and a replacement for Los Alamos's Chemistry and Metallurgy Research building complex.
Both buildings date to the early years of the Cold War and need to be replaced, National Nuclear Security Administration chief Tom D'Agostino told reporters during a briefing Monday afternoon.
Preliminary estimates put the cost of the Tennessee uranium building at between $1.4 billion and $3.5 billion and the Los Alamos plutonium building at as much as $4 billion. Some observers had expected the projects to be done one at a time because of the high cost, but the budget request calls for beginning both simultaneously.
The budget also launches a major refurbishment of the B61, a nuclear bomb designed by Los Alamos National Laboratory that first entered the U.S. stockpile in 1968.