On Point: Q&A With Brad Wallin

Can you tell us about yourself and how you got where you are?
I’ve been at the lab 28 years. I came with a background in astrophysics and started working on some of the three-dimensional codes—when I first got to the lab—that we use to simulate how warheads behave. Over the course of my career, I’ve also spent time managing our nuclear threat production activities, so things in nuclear non-proliferation, counterterrorism and emergency response, but most of my time has been spent in the weapons program, and in particular, I’ve been in this role for nearly five years.

On the W80-4, how long is the process from the Air Force request to your execution?
This particular program really got going in about 2015, so it’s kind of a more-than-10-year process from the time of really starting to understand the requirements of the new cruise missile to actually having the warhead in full-rate production.

Is that a regular timeframe?
It does vary. But generally speaking, these timelines now are a lot longer than they were during the Cold War, when we were actively, regularly updating the stockpile and had all of our production capabilities up and running. One of the challenges the U.S. is facing now, although making substantial progress, is we’re reinvesting in our production capabilities. 

During the stockpile stewardship era, we invested in incredible scientific tools, and we have a great understanding of how weapons behave, but we didn’t invest as much in production because there wasn’t a need to. So, over the last five and more years, there’s been a substantial reinvestment in the production enterprise, and that’s still coming online. 

Where do you see challenges and opportunities?
One of the biggest challenges we have is just how budgets work. The U.S. government never has a budget at the beginning of the year. We always operate under continuing resolution. So when you’ve got a program like the nuclear weapons program that’s increasing in its effort, increasing its investment, that means there’s always a delay as to when you’re going to get the needed funds. And government shutdowns, of course, is even a step worse. And then this last year was further complicated by reconciliation. 

There was an element added, which ultimately is good for what we’re doing. There was a lot of money put into defense in the reconciliation bill, but there’s a process for making sure all that money gets to the sites to execute it, and that’s still ongoing.

There actually is another category, which is regulation writ large. Of course, regulation is there for a reason. We want to protect the environment. We want to protect the public. We want to protect our workers, and we will always want to do that, and we need an amount of regulation to do that.

The amount of regulation we operate under typically has layers of conservatism on top of that that isn’t additional protection for those key things we want to protect. There’s a target-rich environment for really looking at some of those things and figuring out how we might scale that back and allow us to be able to meet the mission, and also protect the environment, the workers and the public. 

The new political leadership within the Department of Energy is interested in those ideas and wants to work with us.

Editor in Chief George I. Seffers edited the column for clarity and concision from an interview conducted by Senior Reporter Nuray Taylor.