The U.S. Air Force officially ended the B52-H’s mission to carry nuclear gravity bombs late last year, according to an updated operating military manual making the rounds online this week.
Air Force Instruction 91-111, dated Sept. 5, calls for “removal of B61-7 and B83-1 from B-52H approved weapons configuration.” Hans Kristensen, the Washington-based director of the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists, linked to the Air Force document on Twitter on Monday.
The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), the semiautonomous Department of Energy branch in charge of nuclear weapons, omitted the B52-H from a list of approved B61 carrier craft listed in its 2017 budget request. The B52 first flew in the 1950s and has been upgraded multiple times since.
Just under 50 aged B52-Hs will still carry the AGM-86C nuclear-armed, air-launched cruise missile, Kristensen estimated. However, September’s Air Force instruction would leave the B2 bomber as the only active carrier of gravity bombs — at least until the service certifies the F-35 Block 4 aircraft to carry a pair of refurbished B61-12 gravity bombs. That will take at least until the mid-2020s, according to the service’s 2019 budget request.
The megaton-class B83 gravity bomb is in semi-retirement, though the Donald Trump administration has opted to keep the powerful weapon in war-ready shape until the NNSA and the Air Force deploy the B61-12: a homogenization of four existing versions of the oldest deployed U.S. nuclear weapon.
The NNSA had planned to start delivering the new version of B61, which is supposed to have a modest earth-penetrating capability, in 2025, but the date may slip now that the agency has discovered problems with capacitors needed for the weapon. The capacitor problem will delay the bomb’s first production unit — a sort of final draft of the intended war-usable design that will be taken apart to prove it is ready for mass production — by a year or more, to 2021 or 2022.
Kristensen estimates the NNSA will build 480 B61-12 bombs.
