Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD)

STATEMENT OF ADMIRAL FRANK L. BOWMAN
DIRECTOR
NAVAL NUCLEAR PROPULSION PROGRAM

Thank you for inviting me to testify on the implementation of the provisions of Title XXXII

of the FY2000 National Defense Authorization Act, which establishes the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) and includes the Office of Naval Reactors as one of the three Programs of the NNSA.

Naval Reactors is a centrally managed, single-purpose organization with clear lines of authority and total responsibility and accountability for all aspects of Naval Nuclear Propulsion.  As the Director of Naval Reactors, I have direct access to the Secretary of the Navy and to the Secretary of Energy.  Naval Reactors' principal mission is to provide militarily effective nuclear propulsion plants to the U.S. Navy and to ensure their safe, reliable, and long-lived operation.

Under the visionary leadership of Admiral Hyman G. Rickover, Naval Reactors was organized in the late 1940's with the concept of cradle-to-grave responsibility.  Upon Admiral Rickover's retirement in 1982, President Reagan signed Executive Order 12344 with the express purpose of           ". preserving the basic structure, policies, and practices developed for this program in the

past.."  The FY 2000 National Defense Authorization Act specified the Executive Order as the charter for the Deputy Administrator for Naval Reactors and, similar to the FY 1985 National Defense Authorization Act, mandated that ".the provisions of the Naval Nuclear Propulsion Executive Order remain in full force and effect until changed by law."  The charter, as incorporated within Title XXXII, maintains my responsibility for all aspects of the Program, including the following:

-       Research, development, design, and construction;

-       Operation, operator selection and training, maintenance, and disposal; and

-       Administration (e.g., security, nuclear safeguards, transportation, public information, procurement, and fiscal management).

Operating within the tenets of the Executive Order, the Naval Reactors Program has a flat organization with clear, simplified lines of authority and a culture of technical, managerial, and fiscal excellence.  The longevity of its senior managers and staff ensures continuity of expertise through the extremely long lives of the nuclear propulsion plants it builds and supports.  The Program has compiled an unparalleled record of success, including the following:

-       Nuclear-powered warships have safely steamed over 119 million miles-equivalent to nearly 5,000 trips around the Earth.

-       Naval Reactors is responsible today for 103 operating nuclear reactors.  For perspective, this is equal to the number of licensed commercial power reactors in the United States.  In addition, over the years, we have accumulated over twice the operating experience of the U.S. commercial power industry.  Naval reactor plants have accumulated over 5,100 reactor-years of operation, compared to about 2,400 for the U.S. commercial industry.  In addition, our operating experience is about half that of the entire commercial power industry worldwide (our 5,100 reactor-years compared to about 9,200 worldwide-including the United States).

-       Naval Reactors' outstanding (and fully public) environmental record enables our ships to visit over 150 ports around the world-critical to our Nation's forward-presence strategy and ability to project power.

Both former Senator Warren Rudman and Admiral Henry G. Chiles recognized the importance of Naval Reactors' organizational structure to its success and to national security in testimony before the full Senate Armed Services Committee last June.

Senator Rudman stated:   

We called for the integration of the DOE Office of Naval Reactors into the new agency for nuclear stewardship.  We recommend this because we believe the ANS [now NNSA] should be the repository for all defense-related activities at DOE.  However, we believe the Office of Naval Reactors must retain its current structure and legal authority, under which its director is a dual-hatted official, both a four-star admiral and a part of DOE.

Admiral Chiles also advised the Committee:  

.I want to state emphatically that Naval Reactors, the DOE arm of the Naval Reactors Program, is carrying out its mission in an exemplary manner.  Therefore, I strongly recommend you retain Naval Reactors' authorities, responsibilities, and structure.  A most important point is [that it is] crucial to ensure Naval Reactors remains outside the Department of Defense so the program can continue to successfully carry out its regulatory responsibility.  I can personally attest, based upon my long and direct experience, to the success of the Naval Nuclear Propulsion Program.  This program is a model of how a defense activity should be carried out within the Government. 

Today's Navy operates 83 nuclear-powered warships and 1 nuclear-powered research submarine.  Nuclear power enhances a warship's capability and flexibility to sprint where needed, and arrive ready for sustained power projection.  The Navy has repeatedly employed the unique capabilities inherent in nuclear propulsion.  Sustained high speed (without dependence on a slow logistics train) enables rapid response to changing world circumstances, allowing operational commanders to surge these ships from the U.S. to trouble spots or to shift them from one crisis area to another.  Nuclear propulsion helps the Navy to stretch available assets to meet today's worldwide commitments.

-       Nine of twelve aircraft carriers are nuclear-powered-growing to eleven of twelve when CVN 76 and CVN 77 enter the Fleet.  Nuclear-powered carriers can transit to a crisis area unsupported at sustained high speed and arrive fully ready to launch the awesome firepower of the airwing.  Then, they can sustain that presence and response without immediate replenishment of combat consumables, and with tactical mobility and flexibility, free from the need for propulsion fuel replenishment.  The future carrier, CVNX, will continue to provide these benefits.

-       The 56 U.S. nuclear attack submarines possess inherent characteristics such as stealth, endurance, mobility, firepower, and multimission flexibility.  These characteristics afford unfettered access to contested battlespace 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, for as long as required.  Once there, submarines can surveil new or emerging adversaries undetected and provide timely insight on their intentions and capabilities to policymakers without risk of political escalation-particularly valuable because many potential adversaries understand their vulnerability to satellite reconnaissance, and often employ deceptive methods to defeat it.  The usefulness of these traits has resulted in the near doubling of Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) tasking requirements over the last 10 years while submarine force levels have been reduced by nearly 40 percent.  Should tensions escalate, submarines can also execute Tomahawk strikes from undisclosed locations without warning, often from inside an adversary's defensive umbrella.

Additionally, within its Research and Development (R&D) programs, the Navy is investing the R&D dollars necessary to equip submarines with new and dominant technologies.  The Navy is developing offboard sensors (such as unmanned undersea vehicles) to facilitate a clearer picture of the battlespace, and is leveraging the explosion in information systems technology to more readily share this insight with other naval and joint forces in a timely and useful manner.  The Navy is working to increase payload capacity and enhance multimission flexibility.  These technologies will be integrated into VIRGINIA Class submarines as they are built, and backfitted into earlier submarines, where appropriate.  The Navy is also pursuing electric drive technology, which will dramatically improve our acoustic stealth and provide the power density required for revolutionary advances in sensors and weapons.

Finally, it is worth noting that the Joint Staff, in conjunction with our unified warfighting CINC's, recently completed an exhaustive study of attack submarine missions and force structure.  The study reconfirmed that submarines are far from being Cold War relics.  They provide unprecedented multimission capability and will continue to be of significant value as we execute the national security strategy in the challenging decades of the 21^st century.

-       The 18 nuclear-powered OHIO Class ballistic missile submarines are the most survivable and cost-effective leg of the Nation's strategic deterrence triad.  These reliable, stealthy ships also carry more strategic warheads than the other two legs of the triad combined.  These ships use only 34 percent of our strategic budget and are manned by less than 1.5 percent of our naval personnel.

NNSA IMPLEMENTATION

The Office of Naval Reactors within the Department of Energy transferred into the NNSA on

1 March 2000.  The efforts expended for this transition ensured that there have been no interruptions in Program operations or support for the Navy.  Naval Reactors' smooth transition can be primarily attributed to:

-       The hard work of the Congress and their staffs in invoking and preserving the Naval Reactors' Program charter, Executive Order 12344, in Title XXXII; and

-       The unique nature of the Program, which has a single-mission focus with laboratories and field offices solely dedicated to naval nuclear propulsion.

Naval Reactors' Executive Order provides the Program with the tools necessary to ensure the continuation of its historical technical and managerial excellence.  For example, because the Program maintains total responsibility for administration and because the Director has a mandated long term (8 years), I can ensure that areas essential to our Program's success (such as radiological controls, nuclear safety, environmental safety and health, and security) remain mainstreamed into all aspects of our daily work.

The Naval Nuclear Propulsion Program has a strong security program.  Nevertheless, because of current concerns over security, the Program is conducting a detailed review of our protection methodology.  We are looking beyond the written security policies.  We are evaluating all potential methods of loss of technology to ensure that our security program is able to provide the right level of protection for our critical information

CONCLUSION

The Naval Reactors Program recently moved into its second half century of successfully supporting the Nation's national security with safe and effective nuclear propulsion plants for the Navy's most formidable forward-deployed ships.  At no time in the history of our Program has the value of nuclear propulsion been more clear.  As the Navy diligently works to more efficiently meet increasing worldwide demands with decreasing assets, naval nuclear propulsion eases the strain.

Nuclear-powered warships' long lives, ability to surge to meet emergent requirements, and fast transits allow our Nation to ensure that American forces are in place when needed.  No other nation has this capability.  To a large extent, the credit for this capability belongs to the wisdom of the Congress, which has consistently supported our Program, our ideas, and the way we conduct business.

Naval Reactors, working with the Navy and the DOE, is committed to maintaining this record of excellence and ensuring that our technology meets the rigorous demands of the 21^st century.  Your support will continue to be needed and appreciated.