There may soon be a double vacancy at the top of the National Nuclear Security Administration, the agency that watches over the second-largest stockpile of nuclear warheads in the world.

Donald Trump has not asked Frank Klotz and Madelyn Creedon, the respective undersecretary and deputy administrator of the NNSA, to stay in their posts after the inauguration, Gizmodo reported last week, nor has he named new people for the positions. On Wednesday, Sen. Martin Heinrich, a Democrat from New Mexico who sits on the Armed Services Committee, urged the new president to keep the NNSA chiefs in place.

As a result, the NNSA will lose its top two leaders on January 20 with no replacement.

“This has never happened before. It’s bizarre,” Jeffrey Lewis, a scholar at Center for Nonproliferation Studies, told The Outline.

Furthermore, these are not easy spots to fill. It took the Obama administration eight months to nominate Klotz after the previous NNSA undersecretary Tom D’Agostino left in 2014, and another eight months before he was sworn in.

The Trump transition team and the NNSA did not answer questions about the transition plan, which suggests there still isn’t one. So what happens if the agency responsible for managing America’s 7,100 nukes loses its top two leaders?

What does the NNSA do?

Today, the NNSA manages an annual budget of $12.5 billion, which it uses to achieve its four main goals: management of the nuclear stockpile, non-proliferation, developing nuclear propulsion for the Navy, and emergency response. Nearly three-quarters of the NNSA’s budget is earmarked for “weapons activity,” which is largely focused on updating and sustaining our aging nuclear arsenal.

The average age of a warhead in the US stockpile is several decades old.

The US stopped designing new warheads in 1989, and the last new warhead produced was delivered in 1991. Estimates from 2016 suggest that roughly 4,500 of the US’s nukes are stockpiled. The rest are either activated and deployed (about 1,300) or waiting to be dismantled (around 2,500).

Hans Kristensen, the director of the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists, told The Outline he estimates that about one-third to one-half of the stockpiled nukes are inactive, which means they don’t have the critical components, such as power sources or neutron generators, installed that are required to turn the warhead into a weapon of mass destruction.

Still, it is the NNSA’s job to ensure that these stockpiled nukes are kept in good shape and updated periodically so that they can be deployed if needed. Given that the average age of a warhead in the US stockpile is several decades old, this is no small task.

How to care for your nuclear stockpile

All of the activities associated with maintaining the aging nuclear stockpile are lumped together in the Stockpile Stewardship Program, which was created by the Department of Energy in the 1990s to make sure that the US did not lose its nuclear capacity as its weapons aged. Shortly after the creation of the Stewardship program, underground testing of nuclear warheads was banned in the United States.

The problem, of course, is that if you can’t test warheads by blowing them up underground, it’s hard to tell if they’re in good enough condition to be effectively deployed. This led the NNSA to shift to running computer simulations.

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, one of the two main nuclear research facilities in the US, hosts the Sequoia supercomputer, once considered the most powerful computer in the world. (It is now the third.) Capable of running 20 petaFLOPs (that’s 20 quadrillion operations per second), Sequoia is dedicated to running classified simulations that allow the NNSA to effectively maintain the nukes in the stockpile in lieu of blowing them up underground.

That lab is also home to the National Ignition Facility, which performs experiments on fusion ignition and thermonuclear burn. Fusion ignition refers to a moment when a fusion reaction generates more energy than was required to start the reaction, which has yet to be accomplished but could become a new source of “boundless clean energy.” Thermonuclear burn is a way of inducing nuclear fusion through extremely high temperatures. To do experiments in these areas, the NIF must be capable of creating conditions that might be found in an exploding nuclear bomb — in other words, replicating temperatures up to 100 million degrees and pressures that are 100 billion times higher than Earth’s atmosphere. Although these are done with miniscule amounts of material and are considered safe, these experiments are critical to validate the results from the simulations produced by the Sequoia supercomputer.

Then there’s the task of updating the warheads in the stockpile, which is done in accordance with the needs of the Department of Defense. The most recent NNSA budget names a number of specific warheads that it will be updating, including the W76, which is the most numerous warhead in the stockpile and used on submarines, and the B61-12, a gravity bomb that is built using components from previous B61 models but updated to increase guiding accuracy.

Aside from maintaining the stockpile, the NNSA must also work toward dismantling its nuclear arsenal, in accordance with the New START treaty signed by the US and Russia. According to Kristensen, there are currently 2,800 warheads that are waiting to be dismantled. At the current rate, this won’t occur until 2026, but the new NNSA budget declares that it wants to improve the dismantling rate by 20 percent.

“Normally it takes a long time to dismantle and properly dispose a nuclear warhead,” Kristensen said. “When warheads have to be dismantled, there is a long process of designing procedures and tools before it even gets on the table. Actual dismantlement is relatively quick, but then the various components get shipped to other facilities for destruction or storage. That process can take months.”

Tensions with Congress

As Kristensen points out, the NNSA oversees a web of facilities known as the NNSA nuclear security enterprise. These consist of the experimental laboratories like Lawrence Livermore, testing sites, and weapon production sites, none of which are actually run by the NNSA but are outsourced to contractors that oversee the sites. This essentially makes the NNSA a bureaucratic management machine caught between the Department of Energy, to which the undersecretary directly reports, and dozens of contractor-operated sites over which it has limited control.

This puts the NNSA in a position of impotence and is part of the reason why undersecretary of the NNSA is “the worst job in Washington, and no one wants it,” Lewis said.

“The labs are very closely connected to their members of Congress, so the Hill doesn’t really care what NNSA thinks,” Lewis said. “NNSA administrators are often disliked by Congress because they’re often in the position of telling senators or members of Congress that they can’t have more money.”

“Normally it takes a long time to dismantle and properly dispose a nuclear warhead.”

Members of Congress have their own agendas when it comes to the US nuclear complex. For example, there is a contingent of lawmakers intent on reinstating nuclear testing, despite the sufficiency of computer simulations for maintaining the stockpile. Then there are the concerns about Rick Perry overseeing the Department of Energy, where he will have significant sway over the NNSA, the first non-physicist to be secretary of energy in the NNSA’s history. It also doesn't help that according to reports, Perry didn't really understand the responsibilities of the job before accepting the role.

In short, the complexity of the job of undersecretary of the NNSA, coupled with the new political climate at work under the Trump administration, makes the lack of a transition plan all the more troubling.

“It’s a really hard job overseeing the nuclear weapons complex,” said Lewis. “It’s unwieldy, spread out all over the country, and has all sorts of political implications. [When searching for a replacement], the best you’re going to do is get somebody like Frank Klotz, so why go through the trouble? It can only get worse.”

Trump still has time to ask the two leaders to stay on. If he does not, the positions will temporarily be filled by the next people in the NNSA leadership hierarchy who would serve as acting undersecretary and deputy administrator. This would likely be one of the deputy administrators in the NNSA’s Defense, Nonproliferation, or Naval operations wing. This would only temporarily solve the problem, however, and it’s unclear what the reason would be for letting two seasoned leaders go.