The U.S. Air Force said Tuesday it plans to award a contract sometime between July and September 2020 for production of the United States’ next nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missile.
The service plans to buy more than 600 Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent (GBSD) missiles, about 400 of which will go into silos starting around 2028 to replace the aging, Boeing-built Minuteman III fleet. Either Boeing or Northrop Grumman will design the GBSD.
The planned GBSD engineering and manufacturing development contract will have options for five batches, or production lots, of missiles. That will include building and deploying the missile.
Boeing and Northrop are in the final year of a competition, under three-year Pentagon contracts awarded in 2017 and respectively worth about $350 million and $330 million, to design the next-generation missile. The Air Force estimates it will spend between roughly $85 billion and $100 billion to procure the GBSD, according to the Washington-based nongovernmental Arms Control Association.
The GBSD will carry W87-1 warheads provided by the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA). The W87-1 will be a new manufacture of an old design: the W87 warhead used on the Minuteman III.
W87-1 will cost between $10 billion and $15 billion over the 20 years ending around 2040, the NNSA estimated last year. The agency plans to spend $30 billion over several decades beginning this year on specialized plutonium-manufacturing infrastructure needed to produce the pits, or triggers, for the warheads.
The NNSA plans in 2024 to begin producing W87-1 pits at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. The civilian agency then plans to upgrade pit facilities at Los Alamos and build a new pit plant in South Carolina to ramp up production of W87-1 cores to 80 a year by 2030. However, multiple internal studies concluded the agency probably will not hit its target throughput by that date.
House Democrats, meanwhile, want to slow the GBSD program. In defense authorization and spending bills passed this summer, the lower-chamber’s majority proposed funding cuts for both the Pentagon and NNSA side of the program.
