NNSA Administrator Jill Hruby's remarks for the 17th Annual Symposium on Strategic Weapons in the 21st Century - Nuclear Deterrence at the “Inflection Point”

Good afternoon.  It is a pleasure to be at the 17^th Annual Strategic Weapons in the 21^st Century Symposium.  Thank you to the Lawrence Livermore and Los Alamos National Laboratories for organizing today’s event and for continuing to host this one-of-a-kind symposium for the nuclear community in the United States including ally participation and perspectives.

Last May at SW21, we spoke about the changing geopolitical landscape and the new policies of the Biden Administration.  Russia’s invasion of Ukraine had occurred a few months before and we were worried about fighting in and around nuclear zones. We were also concerned about North Korea’s cadence of missile testing and the possibility they would conduct a 7^th underground nuclear test, and still hopeful we could restore the Iran Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. Brief unclassified summaries of the Nuclear Posture Review had been released with the debate underway on a few key issues including SLCM-N. We were in the early phases of the Presidential-directed AUKUS consultation with Australia and the United Kingdom in response to the growing concerns in the Indo-Pacific. 

Unfortunately, the geopolitical environment is worse now than it was then. The war in Ukraine continues along with a growing list of nuclear norm-breaking behavior by Russia that includes not only an unprovoked invasion of a non-nuclear weapon state and takeover of a Ukrainian nuclear power plant but also suspension of the only treaty that limits the number of nuclear weapons and the announced intent to move nuclear weapons into Belarus. The analysis of China’s nuclear program suggests they could achieve peer status within a decade. The pace of North Korea’s missile testing is mind-boggling, and negotiation with Iran seems impossible with Uranium being enriched there to a higher level and at a faster pace than ever before.  Each of these behaviors is destabilizing.  Together, they represent a new, more dangerous nuclear landscape.  There is no doubt we are at a nuclear inflection point.

However, it’s not all bad news.  North Korea has not conducted a nuclear test.  The AUKUS consultation period ended with a practical agreement to move forward together including a strong commitment to non-proliferation and responsible behaviors.  The Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant has been operated in standby mode for long enough to lower the potential for a large-scale release.  Due to great work by many of the institutions represented in the room today, we have better equipped the Ukrainians to prevent, monitor, and respond to nuclear emergencies.  We have supplied portable diesel generators and extra fuel for protection from the continuous Russian attacks on the power grid and the loss of cooling capacity at nuclear power plants.  There are IAEA inspectors at all the Ukrainian power plants to help with understanding the safety and security status and to deter additional aggression. 

At NNSA, we have continued to modernize our weapons and infrastructure.  Two weapon programs are in full-scale production, delivering on time.  Three other weapon programs are advancing with one more weapon slated for full scale production in the 2020s and two weapons, set to go into production in the early- to mid-2030s.  We have made over 40 developmental plutonium pits at Los Alamos, the Uranium Processing Facility has completed nearly all its procurements and is moving toward construction completion, and there are infrastructure upgrades across the entire complex. We successfully established a domestic producer of Moly-99, an isotope used in over 40,000 medical procedures each day, without using highly enriched uranium and we successfully removed the highly enriched uranium from the Yayoi research reactor in Japan.  Our hiring is strong, and our workforce is growing.  The NNSA enterprise made history by being the first to achieve fusion ignition in a laboratory, and we will bring the first exascale computer for national security on-line this year. 

I am extremely proud of our successes. However, I want to be clear, against the complex international nuclear landscape, the nuclear security enterprise must increase our responsiveness.  We need to take advantage of the good in our culture and the appreciate the things we did right in the past, but we must also look for every opportunity to accelerate progress and modernize approaches.  There is room to improve design, production, construction, technology deployment, and science.  The last several decades of searching for flaws and seeking complete understanding of an aging stockpile needs to transition to problem-solving and timely deployment of a new stockpile.  This is a big shift in mindset and a change in focus, but the work will be rewarding, and the outcomes are needed.

We need to do this while further extending our improvements on integrated safety, security, and environmental stewardship.  We were lucky to have had time to improve our operations and simultaneously improve data quality and products, and now the concepts must be embedded in the way we do business.  We have no intention of cutting corners as we accelerate, rather we must find efficiencies and eliminate non-value-added work. 

In short, this is the time to combine the 1960 to 1990 era of stockpile development with the recent era of stockpile stewardship and operational improvement to produce the era of the present – maybe we should call it the era of responsiveness.

Investments made over the last 30 years have readied us for this.  We have the resources and political support we need.  We must create a responsive enterprise that is flexible and resilient characterized by the ability to scale operations up or down, move faster, take appropriate risks, decrease burdensome processes, understand tradeoffs, keep the long game in mind, and deliver in the here and now. 

There is another opportunity for NNSA right now, and it is to integrate more fully across our weapons activities and our non-proliferation, counterterrorism, and emergency response activities to create a sustained, holistic deterrence model with appropriate dependencies.  Our Naval Reactors program is also more integrated with NNSA than ever before as we increase our strategic thinking about nuclear materials, nuclear capabilities, nonproliferation, and integrated deterrence.  This is the other inflection point to realize, the true value of integration.  NNSA should be a subset of the type of integration needed throughout the defense community in this country.

With the introduction of responsiveness and integration as key inflection points for the NNSA enterprise, let me turn to providing an update on the three elements in the Nuclear Posture Review that are front and center for NNSA – nuclear deterrent risk management, production-based resilience, and science and innovation initiative.

Nuclear Deterrent Risk Management Strategy

First, the nuclear deterrent risk management strategy.  As you know, there is a new level of coordination and risk management needed between NNSA and DoD as we modernize all three legs of the nuclear triad with both new delivery systems and refurbished or new warheads.  In addition, we are simultaneously recapitalizing the NNSA’s captive production complex and the U.S. defense industrial base.  To align resources, schedules, goals, and efforts, the Nuclear Weapons Council in dialogue with other relevant stakeholders, is developing a Deterrent Risk Management Strategy.  The overarching purpose of the Strategy is to make sure our nuclear deterrent is always safe, secure, reliable, and effective.

The Nuclear Weapons Council Requirements and Capacity Working Group has developed detailed requirements and associated planning documents to manage the current triad sustainment and modernization that focus on avoiding future deterrence gaps.  To do this successfully, the future of deterrence must be conceptualized.  As a wider array of adversaries advance capabilities, as technologies emerge, and as the geostrategic realities change, building more weapons cannot be the only answer and could be the wrong answer.  Integrated deterrence, net assessments, and disruptive technologies are being examined to maintain a U.S. advantage over our adversaries.  As a result of this thinking, NNSA is initiating two Phase One studies, and looking at ways to streamline warhead modernization in a world where we expect requirements to be less linear.  Ideas such as warhead modularity, shorter weapon lifetimes, advanced technologies, and a clean sheet review of the phase X process are being considered.

Production-based Resilience

The second pillar is production-based resilience.  The idea for production-based resilience was developed to reimagine the enterprise for the world going forward.  In the 1990s, the NNSA envisioned, and took concrete steps to realize, an enterprise that was less expensive and expansive.  We closed some production facilities, consolidated production activities, idled many facilities, and rebuilt parts of the complex for a much smaller capacity.  Today, thirty years later, we are again envisioning a new enterprise.  This enterprise is meant to be flexible and scale more readily.  It is meant to be more resilient to outages and failures.  And it is meant to have modern capabilities to attract the best talent, to be efficient, and to deliver the highest quality products.

At this point, we are exclusively using existing sites for the enterprise we envision.  This adds some complexity due to things like adding and improving basic utilities such as power and water and tearing down old buildings.  It is also merging labs and plants on a more substantial scale than has been done before.  And, we would also like to have a smaller carbon footprint and be a model for Department of Energy deployment projects.  Our responsive approaches already include production facility and research facility co-existence that can shift the balance of work as needed, and we will likely continue to do more of this as needed for resilience and flexibility. 

Most importantly for production-based resilience, we must take advantage of the revolutions in manufacturing, metrology, information technology, engineering, physics, chemistry, biology, and more in the last three decades to incorporate new technologies and processes into our production complex.  We must re-build the Enterprise’s capacity to produce plutonium pits and secondaries.  We must expand our capacity for non-nuclear components.  And we must be prepared for the next challenges.  We are already anticipating explosives and enriched uranium needs for the needs in the 2040s and beyond.  We will work closely with the DoD on explosives capabilities, and closely with the private sector on uranium enrichment.  New technologies should also improve the safety, security, and survivability of the nuclear stockpile, stockpile management, hedging, and risk mitigation without over reliance on a single type of warhead or the maintenance of a large stockpile reserve.

I would like to use some of our current activities as real-world examples of production-based resilience.  Let’s start with plutonium pit production.  The ability to produce additional pits was lost when the Rock Flats facility was closed in 1992.  Because we have made significant strides in understanding pit aging through our Stockpile Stewardship Program, we recognized that pits don’t last forever, and we needed to re-establish a production capability.  Congress mandated NNSA produce no fewer than 80 pits per year by 2030.  Although we will not meet that target, the infrastructure to produce 80 pits as close to 2030 as possible is our highest construction priority.  We are fully committed to a two-site pit production strategy at Los Alamos National Laboratory and the Savannah River Site.  The two-site pit production strategy has built-in resilience in the event of something that halts production at either site.  The baseline plan is to produce 30 pits per year at Los Alamos and at least 50 pits per year at Savannah River.  The Los Alamos facility is designed to allow other plutonium research and operations in the same facility.  If we need fewer than 80 pits per year, Los Alamos could expand research activities.  At Savannah River, we have included “white space” in the design to allow for the incorporation of future technologies or a second production line.  This two-site solution eliminates a single point of failure, allows for flexible production scaling to match mission need, commits to long-term research in plutonium, and provides capacity margin beyond the present mandate.  The commitment to this strategy has resulted in the announced transition of the Savannah River Site from Environmental Management stewardship to NNSA stewardship beginning in 2025. 

Now, as an example of technologies and approaches, I would like to provide an example from the Uranium Processing Facility, UPF, at Y-12.  UPF is one of our largest infrastructure projects in decades and is meant to reduce mission dependency on Building 9212 at Y-12, which is over 75 years old.  It will provide for the long-term viability and security of processing uranium that has already been enriched.  One key technological change at UPF is the incorporation of electrorefining to provide purified uranium metal.  This replaces a high-hazard chemical process and improves worker safety and environmental stewardship.  To manage mission risk during the transition process, NNSA has executed a service contract with a private company, Nuclear Fuel Services, for converting uranium oxide to metal.  In this way we can incorporate new technologies and mitigate mission risk while confronting the issues currently facing large-scale construction projects around the nation like supply chain bottlenecks and labor shortages.

There are other examples as well and the list will grow as we continue modernizing.

That brings me to my final point on infrastructure, the need to accelerate construction. After coming out of Covid, we realized we had new construction challenges.  Supply chain delays, inflation, worker productivity, and especially worker shortages were being realized even without the Covid pandemic restrictions.  One focus has been on finding high productivity craft workers.  We have expanded nationwide recruiting with labor unions and provided pay, transportation, and housing incentives as needed by geographic area.  We also established new pipeline programs for technicians and skilled craft trades like the pipelines we have been building for our STEM workforce and the first awards for this program were distributed in February 2023.  Along with these actions, we have reevaluated our current construction portfolio and chosen to delay three planned projects to focus personnel and resources on our most pressing needs.  While these delays are disappointing, we intentionally decided not to compete with ourselves and to prioritize completion of projects on-schedule and -budget.

Finally, we must not let our science infrastructure and capability degrade while we rebuild our production enterprise.  It is hard to overstate the success of our science-based Stockpile Stewardship program.  Over the past 30 years, we have maintained confidence in the safety, security, reliability, and effectiveness of our weapons and our people through use of world-class modeling on specially designed high-performance computers, specially designed new experimental capabilities highly diagnosed like NIF, and specialized high-fidelity lab- and flight-experiments.  We have not conducted an underground explosive test and our plan is to never do so again.  The core facilities must be sustained as world-class, and we must invest in select leapfrog capabilities to stay ahead.

Science and Technology Innovation Initiative

This leads to our third pillar, the Science and Technology Innovation Initiative, focused on integrating science and technology throughout the design and production phases of the nuclear weapon lifecycle where it is needed most.  This initiative will also accelerate technology maturation.

It is hard to overstate the success of our science-based Stockpile Stewardship program.  Over the past 30 years, we have maintained confidence in the safety, security, reliability, and effectiveness of our weapons and our people through use of world-class modeling on specially designed high-performance computers, specially designed new experimental capabilities highly diagnosed like NIF, and specialized high-fidelity lab- and flight-experiments.  While we comply with Presidential guidance regarding test readiness, we have not conducted an underground explosive test since 1992 and our plan is to never do so again.  The core facilities must be sustained as world-class, and we must invest in select leapfrog capabilities to stay ahead.

The technological shifts of the last decade have been astonishing not only for their breadth but for their rapid pace.  We must continue to make concrete, meaningful investments in our science programs if we want to take advantage of the changes and stay competitive in the technologies of tomorrow.  It is important that we embrace the technical challenges we have, not the solution we have.  Emerging and disruptive technologies such as the bioeconomy, AI, quantum computing, nanotechnology, and advanced semiconductors are the industries that will power and lead the world into tomorrow.  I want to make sure NNSA is at the forefront of these efforts.  It is clear there is a virtuous cycle in recruiting, training, and retaining personnel and sustaining, recapitalizing, and upgrading our scientific infrastructure.  Doing this right must always be a high priority.

Non-Proliferation, Counterterrorism, and Arms Control

Before concluding, I want to come back to the inflection point of integration.  Although many levels of integration are needed, we must start with meaningful integration of our NNSA programs and priorities to provide more holistic deterrence.

We will continue to evolve our responsibilities in the technical and policy elements of non-proliferation, counterterrorism, and arms control.  Without highly effective programs in this area, even with a modernized and effective deterrent, we will not obtain strategic stability.  And the goal of integration of nonproliferation with weapons activities is to unlock new ideas more likely to be successful in the future. 

Our non-proliferation and counterterrorism efforts in the U.S. and around the world remain active and focused on eliminating or minimizing the most dangerous nuclear and radiological materials, detecting the movement of radiological materials, responding to and attributing any nuclear incidents, and working with the IAEA on effective safeguards and security for peaceful nuclear uses.  We recognize the need to improve the safeguards and security of large-scale nuclear power plants because of Russia’s actions in Ukraine, and we also recognize the need to work with industry and the international community on effective safeguards and security programs for new technologies such as small modular reactors and new fuel technologies.  In the interest of staying ahead, we will develop, steward, and advance bio capabilities for national security. 

We have started two activities in our defense nuclear nonproliferation portfolio with direct overlap with weapon activities.  One is the use of the Pantex plant for an arms control testbed.  We want to use realistic facilities and real people who work in them to get new ideas and to engage in evaluation.  The other is the use of the Nevada Nuclear Security Site for improving geological models to detect underground tests and to be a place to do work associated with nuclear counterterrorism.  The use of our Nevada site for this work keeps our capabilities sharp and takes advantage of its location and capabilities.

Finally, because of the complexity in nuclear construction, we need to think at least thirty years ahead to plan for capabilities.  We will never be done with modernizing the enterprise.  If there is one thing we have learned over the last 5-10 years, it is that restarting capabilities is much harder than not stopping them.  New capabilities such as uranium enrichment is being integrated across Defense Programs, Nonproliferation, Naval Reactors, Nuclear Energy, and the industrial sector.

Conclusion

To conclude, I am confident and hopeful we will find opportunities at this inflection point.  In the NNSA, the two inflection points that feel important right now are responsiveness and integration.  We must take advantage of this difficult moment to create new ideas for a secure world.  Working together I know we can do this.

Thank you and I look forward to your questions.