DOE, NNSA, and the Weapons Complex

Donald Trump is firing 300 people of the 1800 in the National Nuclear Security Administration. This is not good, but it is not as bad as this post sounds.

NNSA manages the nuclear weapons complex. That includes Los Alamos, Livermore, and Sandia National Laboratories, the Pantex assembly plant, the Nevada National Security Site, and, I think, a few other sites having to do with weapons component manufacture. That amounts to something like 60,000 people who are responsible for all those good things.

The contractor-heavy structure has to do with the ancestry of the organization, going back to the Manhattan Project and the Atomic Energy Commission. I won’t go into all the history or my strong feelings about the various relationships.

NNSA is a part of the Department of Energy (DOE), and most of its budget. That too has to do with a history going back to when the Atomic Energy Commission split into the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Energy Research and Development Agency, which eventually became the DOE.

I have seen nothing about how the weapons complex is affected by Elon Musk and his merry band, or by Trump’s arbitrary dictates. Project 2025 and many of Trump’s appointees want more nuclear weapons, but Trump said today that he wants to denuclearize – get rid of some or all of our nuclear weapons. I think the latter was just words coming out of his mouth, as they do. Certainly they’re not going to have it both ways, but tonight the reductions seem to be ahead.