Two Senate hearings on nuclear weapons this week showed that the Obama administration’s charge toward a smaller—and hopefully cheaper—arsenal is headed for some choppy waters as it navigates the budget process.  

On Tuesday, the Senate Energy and Water Appropriations Subcommittee held a hearing on the 2010 budget request of the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA). NNSA maintains the nuclear weapons stockpile in addition to the laboratories and research centers known as the nuclear “complex.” The $6.4 billion portion of the budget request for weapons research and technology contains some mixed messages. On one hand, the fact that the request is essentially in line with Bush administration budgets begs the question of whether the NNSA and the new occupant at the White House are on the same page. Bush’s plan to revamp the aging complex, known as “Complex Transformation,” was short on details (and actual transformation) and long on costs, while President Obama’s recent pledge to eradicate nuclear weapons would seem to take the agency in a newer and smaller direction.  

Another school of thought holds that the budget is actually too small, as represented by Senator Jeff Sessions (R-AL) at Wednesday’s hearing of the Senate Armed Service’s Strategic Forces Subcommittee. After stating that “any reductions of our current stockpile should be tied to some sort of modernization plan,” Sessions asked NNSA administrator Thomas D’Agostino whether he agreed that “a modernization program should result in weapons being more reliable,” to which D’Agostino replied “absolutely.” This sounds like code for the Reliable Replacement Warhead , a multi-billion dollar program to produce new nuclear warheads that was beaten back by Congress and finally killed by Obama. Sessions doubted that the flatline budget would allow NNSA to maintain a nuclear deterrent, while Senators Byron Dorgan (D-ND) and Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) worried back in the appropriations hearing that the budget’s failure to increase spending on science programs would lead to a “brain drain” of lab scientists.

So is the nuclear complex going to shrink, grow or churn water until someone comes up with a plan–or Congress determines the direction by pulling purse strings? D’Agostino said last month that the budget should maintain the status quo until December’s release of the Nuclear Posture Review, a document that will establish our grand strategic plan for nuclear weapons. Yet he testified on Tuesday that NNSA is moving forward with several old “transformation” projects because “b asic functional capabilities are “needed whether we have a few warheads, or a few thousand,” he said. We disagree that projects such as the Chemistry and Metallurgy Research Replacement Facility at Los Alamos National Laboratory constitute a basic functional capability. What does is the pivotal question for the new nuclear era.