House Committee's NNSA Budget Funds Low-Yield Warhead, Doesn't Fund S.C. Pits

摘要

The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) would get the $65 million it seeks in fiscal 2019 for a low-yield nuclear warhead, but nothing for a new warhead-core factory in South Carolina, under a budget bill approved this week by the House Appropriations Committee. The bill, voted to the floor Wednesday 29-20 along party lines, also would steer the NNSA away from designing an interoperable nuclear warhead that in the future could fly on both Air Force and Navy missiles. Instead, the legislation directs the NNSA to look into options for extending the life of the W78 warhead that now tips the Air Force’s intercontinental ballistic missiles, and which the interoperable warhead proposed by the Barack Obama administration would have replaced.