Defense contractor Boeing is clear to start production on crucial hardware for the B61-12 next-generation nuclear gravity bomb, the U.S. Air Force announced.
Boeing’s tail kit cleared Milestone C — which in Pentagon program management precedes a project’s construction phase — in late October, the Air Force Nuclear Weapons Center at the Kirtland Air Force Base in New Mexico said in a press release Dec. 7. The service tested the design in 2017 and 2018 using dummy bombs carried by the F-15 fighter jet and the B-2 bomber.
That clears Boeing to start building the tail kit in 2020, the same year the Department of Energy’s semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) expects to produce its first war-ready bomb. The agency started work on the first production B61-12 in October.
While the NNSA will build the bomb’s assembly and explosive package, the Air Force must build the B61-12’s guided tail-kit assembly, which helps control the weapon during free fall. The Air Force is also responsible for integrating the NNSA-made bomb with carrier aircraft, including versions of the B-2, the planned B-21, F-15, F-16, F-35, and the German-made PA-200, according to the Air Force Nuclear Weapons Center.
The B61-12 will be an adjustable-yield gravity bomb that replaces four previous iterations of the old weapon, which was designed by the Los Alamos National Laboratory and first built in 1968. Including Air Force and NNSA work, the weapon with its tail kit will cost between roughly $11.5 billion and $13 billion over about 20 years, according to NNSA and Pentagon documents.
NATO members use the relatively low-yield B61 bomb as a regional deterrent against Russia.
The Air Force expects the guided tail-kit assembly program to cost a little under $3 billion to complete over roughly 20 years, according to a 2016 Pentagon audit. Boeing got its Air Force contract to build the tail kit in 2012.
The nonprofit Federation of American Scientists estimates the NNSA will build 480 B61-12 bombs.
