The Biden-Harris administration announced early this year that Sneha Nair would become a special assistant in the Energy Department’s National Nuclear Security Administration, which is the government agency charged with building the nation’s nuclear warheads and maintaining its nuclear stockpile.
What the National Nuclear Security Administration does is one of the most critical elements—and technically highly specialized—of the national security architecture that has helped keep the U.S. out of another major armed conflict since World War II.
Historically, Nair is an unusual choice for the NNSA, which she joined in February. She has advocated expanding the role of “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” known as DEI, in nuclear security.
Nair suggested that DEI can help mitigate the “threat posed by some white supremacist groups” to our nuclear arsenal. She also has written about how “queering nuclear weapons” not only “strengthens security” but “reshapes disarmament.”
This is not a position that requires Senate confirmation. A special assistant within a Cabinet agency, such as the Energy Department, however, may lead initiatives for a principal within the department. How much power Nair and other special assistants wield depends on who that principal is. Special assistants may be quite influential, or not at all.
There is nothing at all wrong with “queer” people working in the nuclear field; they—like otherwise qualified Americans—deserve to serve our nation. But Nair’s position that “queer theory is also about rejecting binary choices and zero-sum thinking, such as the tenet that nuclear deterrence creates security and disarmament creates vulnerability” seems diametrically opposed to the stated mission of the National Nuclear Security Administration.
Nair also has written that “queer theory helps us not only see the bad of a world with nuclear weapons, but also imagine the good of a world without them.”
Papers examining “gender-sensitive approaches to nuclear weapons policy” and “gender mainstreaming” are regularly published in academia and presented at international conferences. However, it is odd to see someone who argues that “we need to continue our work to build a world free of nuclear weapons” given a position within NNSA, which shouldn’t be engaged in abstract theory but rather in the very real work of building the U.S. nuclear arsenal.
Unfortunately, this work is woefully behind, which puts America at risk as hostile powers such as China, Russia, and North Korea accelerate their nuclear weapons programs while Iran continues its progress toward becoming a nuclear power.
NNSA’s administrator recently said the United States wouldn’t hit production rates for new nuclear warheads before 2035—years beyond when the agency is supposed to be able to build new plutonium pits and warheads at scale. So it’s worth asking; why is NNSA putting an advocate for nuclear disarmament with a focus on queer theory in its headquarters as a special assistant?
Indeed, given the bipartisan concern over the National Nuclear Security Administration’s ability to stay on schedule as the U.S. modernizes its nuclear arsenal, one would assume NNSA would be hiring program managers and senior leaders who are focused like a laser on getting the nuclear modernization program back on track—not hiring those who advocate nuclear disarmament on the basis of spurious academic theories.
It’s almost enough to make Americans wonder if the National Nuclear Security Administration is truly serious about ensuring that the U.S. is able to field a nuclear arsenal that credibly can deter the nuclear-armed autocrats in Beijing, Moscow, and Pyongyang, let alone the nuclear aspirants in Tehran.
Or is the Biden-Harris administration bent on imposing its radical social agenda on every element of the U.S. government, even the NNSA, at the cost of America’s national security?
