Todd Jacobson
NS&D Monitor
2/27/2015
A decision by the Nuclear Weapons Council to “refresh” the conventional high explosives (CHE) in the W88 warhead as part of a previously planned replacement of the warhead’s arming, fuzing and firing mechanism will push back the completion of a First Production Unit on the Navy portion of a planned interoperable warhead until 2035, National Nuclear Security Administration weapons program chief Don Cook said in a recent interview with NS&D Monitor. Combined with the planned acceleration of work on a refurbished cruise missile warhead, known as the W80-4, that was laid out in President Obama’s Fiscal Year 2016 budget request, the decision to now perform the CHE refresh as part of the W88 Alt 370 will also help level the workload across the weapons complex, providing a steady stream of work for the NNSA’s laboratories and production plants over the next two decades, Cook said.
Work on an interoperable warhead will be staggered, Cook said, with the FPU for the Air Force portion of an interoperable warhead expected to be completed in 2030 and the Navy warhead slated for a FPU in 2035. A FPU on the W80-4 is expected to be completed in 2025, while the FPU on the refurbished B61-12 gravity bomb is slated to be done in FY 2020, shortly after production on the refurbished W76-1 is expected to wrap up. “I think we’re just getting things in line on the schedule that we need,” Cook said.
NNSA Seeking ‘Steady Level of Work Rate’ for Complex
The plan has been years in the making, and fraught with fits and starts. In 2013, the Nuclear Weapons Council settled on a “3+2” strategy for modernizing the nation’s nuclear arsenal, so named because it involved three interoperable warheads for use on Navy and Air Force ballistic missile systems and refurbishment of the B61 and the W80 cruise missile warhead.
But financial belt-tightening quickly threated to undo the plan. In its FY 2015 budget request, the NNSA deferred work on the first interoperable warhead and proposed delaying the FPU on the cruise missile warhead from 2024 until 2027. The delay to the cruise missile warhead drew strong criticism from Congress, and the FY 2015 National Defense Authorization Act called on the FPU to be moved up to 2025. Delaying the W80-4 for the Air Force’s Long-Range Standoff weapon also would have created a workload gap at the Pantex Plant, Cook confirmed last year, which was one of the major drivers for re-accelerating work on the life extension program. “A very big part of our thinking is getting the efficiencies and keeping a complex working at a reasonable level, not having ramps up and then big ramps down,” Cook said. “We’re just trying to keep a steady level of work rate for the complex.”
‘There is Just Not that Much More Margin Right Now’
With that in mind, the NNSA will begin its defense of the President’s FY 2016 budget request this week, with NNSA Administrator Frank Klotz, Cook, and Principal Assistant Deputy Administrator for Military Application Brig. Gen. Stephen Davis scheduled to appear before the House Energy and Water Appropriations Subcommittee at 1 p.m. March 4. Some people ask, “Where did the ‘3+2’ go?” Cook said. “Our answer is it’s a ‘3+2’ strategy but we’re executing it driven by need. It turns out we’re executing the ‘plus 2’ before we do the ‘3.’ That just catches people by surprise. We have to do it in that order. The ballistic systems are somewhat newer. They can last longer. The B61 was older. The W80-1 is older.”
Cook cautioned that the current modernization strategy must be fully funded or there will be major impacts to warhead work, echoing comments about the “devastating” impact of sequestration on the agency’s weapons budget by Klotz at last week’s Seventh Annual Nuclear Deterrence Summit. “The problem is we’ve really used up any of the float we had in the schedule,” he said. “There is just not much more margin right now. We can’t say we want the present CM to go on beyond because nature doesn’t do that. Having used up that margin, and having a requirements budget, is really important.” He added: “The bill looks big to some people because we’re trying to do this not all at one time but we’re trying to change the entirety of the deterrent … but from the beginning to end it takes about 30 years to change a stockpile.”
‘We Can’t Pay for a Standing Army’
Cook said having the complex in standby mode for a period of time in the 2020s was not a path the Administration wanted to take. Cook previously said it would be more cost effective to maintain the workforce than go through layoffs because of the amount of training that goes into working with nuclear weapons even if there was not enough workload to support steady employment levels. “Just not having the complex do much during that time is not a good use of a workforce,” he said. “We can’t pay for a standing army. Rather than reduce the workforce at Pantex from ’25 to ‘27 and rebuilding it in ‘27, it makes sense for efficiency to have work to do.”
The phased approach to the LEPs also should level the workload at the labs as well, Cook said, addressing problems of too little work and too much work. At Sandia National Laboratories, Director Paul Hommert noted that by 2018, the bulk of Sandia’s work on the B61 and W88 Alt 370 will be completed just as work on the W80-4 ramps up. “That will phase very well with LRSO as it’s currently set up. So for us I’m not concerned,” he said last week at the Nuclear Deterrence Summit. “If you were to move it two years sooner to 2023 then it would become a little bit more difficult in our space but where it is right now we’re pretty confident we can handle that.”
W88 Alt 370 High Explosives ‘Refresh’ to Cost Approximately $530 Million
The delay to the Navy portion of the interoperable warhead was made possible by the decision to replace the conventional high explosives as part of the W88 Alt 370 rather than waiting to do so during a full-scale life extension program. The CHE “refresh” is likely to cost about $530 million, Cook said, bumping up the cost of the W88 Alt 370 from about $1.5 billion to about $2 billion. Cook said surveillance data as well as timing and scheduling issues necessitated the change. In FY 2020, the NNSA projects spending $112 million on the first interoperable warhead, which will cover the Air Force portion of the life extension program. “We’re going to do the Air Force portion first and then the Navy portion later because doing these changes to the W88 is going to buy us some more time so that we don’t have to do them right on top of each other,” Cook said.
The decision also had the support of Vice Adm. Terry Benedict, the director of the Navy’s Strategic Systems Program. “This will significantly extend the weapon’s life,” Benedict said at the Nuclear Deterrence Summit. “I think that’s great. I think that provides further stability for the deterrent as well as the nuclear weapons complex and I think that’s a proper decision to be made at this time as we look forward.”
Cook also said work at the laboratories on the interoperable warhead before its deferral gave him a large amount of confidence that the concept would work. Critics of the strategy have raised concerns about creating life extended warheads that diverge too much from their nuclear testing pedigree. A 120-day study, however, studied the concept and the “confidence we could do that came up a lot,” Cook said. Key to the program is early system integration work and a flight testing plan that would increase confidence. “Since we did the last round of flight testing computational capabilities have improved by more than a factor of a million,” Cook said. “We showed in the 120-day study just how finely we could tune these systems to fly the way they’re supposed to fly, but now as we look forward it’s only reasonable to get some data and want to do some flight testing.”
