In 1997, Victor Reis, assistant secretary for Defense Programs within DOE and SSMP chief architect defended the program telling the U.S. House Armed Services Committee that NIF was "designed to produce, for the first time in a laboratory setting, conditions of temperature and density of matter close to those that occur in the detonation of nuclear weapons. The ability to study the behavior of matter and the transfer of energy and radiation under these conditions is key to understanding the basic physics of nuclear weapons and predicting their performance without underground nuclear testing."Statement of Dr. Victor Reis, Assistant Secretary for Defense Programs, Department of Energy, before the Senate Armed Services Committee, March 19, 1997 (retrieved July 13, 2012, from http://www.lanl.gov/orgs/pa/Director/reisSASC97.html ) In 1998, two JASON panels, composed of scientific and technical experts, stated that NIF is the most scientifically valuable of all programs proposed for science-based stockpile stewardship.
