The customer could easily be Russia, U.K., China, France, India, Pakistan, or some other country with nuclear weapons. Not North Korea, though, because Cray/HPE probably can't do business with North Korea.
If the customer was the Government of France, the line “the customer has nuclear weapons” would be factually accurate irrespective of whether the particular work was on, or even remotely related to, nuclear weapons.
It might not be relevant, but then, even if the work is on a nuclear weapons program, “the customer has nuclear weapons” doesn’t seem relevant to the discussion. Really, short of the case where the customer prefers to motivate software developers with the threat of nuclear annihilation rather than feature bounties, it seems a complete non-sequitur no matter what the work is.
They are obviously not the masters of the domain they think they are, but that happens sometimes in bureaucracies.