Management Failures the Norm for Bloated Nuclear Complex

On the radar: 10 projects, $16 billion over budget, 38 years behind schedule; Iran reduces uranium stockpile; Navy wants a sub bailout; the Iran & Syria nexus; Missile defense in the rust belt; and What the Nazis knew about the Manhattan Project.

September 13, 2013 | Edited by Benjamin Loehrke and Alyssa Demus

Breaking - Iran’s nuclear chief, Ali Akbar Salehi, announced on state TV yesterday that Iran has significantly reduced its 20% enriched uranium stockpile and is converting its remaining stocks into reactor fuel. According to Salehi, 20% LEU stocks have already been reduced to 140 kg from the 185.5 kg shown in the IAEA safeguards report last month. AP has the story. http://bit.ly/1eLj8ci

Bloated & mismanaged - The nuclear weapons complex “has racked up $16 billion in cost overruns on 10 major projects that are a combined 38 years behind schedule...Other projects have been cancelled or suspended, despite hundreds of millions of dollars already spent, because they grew too bloated,” write Jeri Clausing and Matthew Daly for AP.

--"Unfortunately for the taxpayer ... cost overruns, schedule delays and technical failures are the rule, not the exception," said Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO). The nuclear complex is “cited regularly in a GAO report of agencies considered "high-risk" due to their vulnerabilities to fraud, waste and mismanagement or because they are most in need of broad reform,” notes AP.

--The story catalogues the National Nuclear Security Administration’s chronic failures - including a nonfunctional $213 million security system at Los Alamos, the tenfold cost increase of the B-61 bomb upgrade and the soaring price tag for the Uranium Processing Facility in Tennessee. http://n.pr/15XwiSG

Capsizing the budget - The Navy fears that the proposed fleet of 12 new ballistic missile subs - costing $100 billion to acquire - will bust its shipbuilding budget, crowd out other ships and disrupt the defense industrial base. So they want someone else to pay for building the subs - asking Congress to create an annual $4 billion supplemental fund for 15 years beginning in 2019.

--Under that plan, the Navy controls the program, gets its subs, and shanghais budgets from elsewhere in the Pentagon. Or, as Rear Adm. Richard Breckenridge put it, “The Navy's view is that without devastating the shipbuilding account we are going to need to come up with a resource solution . . . that's not competing with our other assets in the shipbuilding account." From Inside Defense. (Paywall) http://bit.ly/1awDOlA

Tweet - @nukes_of_hazard: "The post-Cold War nuclear warhead complex has become a gigantic self-licking ice cream cone for contractors" http://t.co/Uuu4XLVGVB

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Iran signals - "Regarding the Iranian nuclear issue, we want the swiftest solution to it within international norms," new Iranian president Hassan Rouhani told Vladimir Putin on the sidelines of a regional national security summit. He stipulated: "I declare that only if there is political will, if there is mutual respect and mutual interest, and only if the rights of Iran's people are ensured, can we guarantee the peaceful character of Iran's nuclear program,” reports Alexei Anishchuk at Reuters. http://ow.ly/oQsRm

Test case - The outcome of the diplomatic proposal to Syria’s chemical weapons will have important ramifications for the fate of U.S. talks with Iran said Robert Einhorn former US negotiator, at a symposium on Iran. “If the Syrians in the end show bad faith ... [or] the Russians are unable to deliver’ the implications for an Iran nuclear deal would be ‘very, very negative.’” On the other hand, “a successful diplomatic outcome to the chemical weapons crisis in Syria” could be good news.

--Recent efforts by Iran’s new leadership are intended to “show the world this new team is more flexible and reasonable [so that the world will] give Iran the benefit of the doubt...and avoid further sanctions,” said Einhorn. Iranian expert Haleh Esfandiari also speaking at the event added that with Rouhani “we have a return to normalcy’ in Iran after eight years of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s dysfunctional administration, but “we can’t expect him [Rouhani] to perform miracles.” Barbara Slavin with Al-Monitor has the full story. http://ow.ly/oQuV2

Boondoggle nominees - The Pentagon announced five possible sites for a new missile defense deployment, which the Pentagon hasn’t decided to build but knows would be “extraordinarily expensive.”

--Potential locations for unwanted expensive system: Ft. Drum, NY; Camp Ethan Allen, VT; Portsmouth, ME; Camp Ravenna, OH; Ft. Custer, MI. Reuters has the story. http://reut.rs/1eLqpJ8

--None of those sites won the contest by Al Kamen of The Washington Post from June 2012, where readers submitted Accident, MD; Pork Barrel Pond, MA; and Syria, VA. http://wapo.st/19OSo79

Speed reads:

--”B61-12 Nuclear Bomb Triggers Debate in the Netherlands” by Hans Kristensen at the FAS Strategic Security Blog. http://bit.ly/18iyFiI

Events:

--”Unthinkable: Iran, the Bomb, and American Strategy” Discussion with author Kenneth Pollack on his new book, with Tamara Cofman Wittes and Robin Wright. September 16 from 2:30-4:00pm at Brookings. http://bit.ly/18Xath8

--“Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety” Conversation with author Eric Schlosser on his new book. Sept. 19 from 12:15-1:30pm at the New America Foundation. http://bit.ly/1gawAo0

--Javad Zarif, Iranian Foreign Minister and Catherine Ashton, EU foreign policy chief resume talks on Iran’s nuclear program. Week of September 23. United Nations.

Dessert:

Tweet - @Cirincione: Noticed the skull & atom logo on my Twitter page? It's the cover of my new book, Nuclear Nightmares, out in October. http://bit.ly/1aHt8Ek

History lesson - Did allied efforts to shroud the Manhattan Project in secrecy work, or did the Germans know about the work on the bomb? After combing through declassified transcripts, nuclear historian Alex Wellerstein concludes: “the Allied atomic bomb probably did come as a genuine surprise of immense magnitude. But there are enough hints there to suggest that various bits and pieces were out there amongst their foreign intelligence officials.” http://ow.ly/oQzzO