ARLINGTON, VA. — The Navy and the National Nuclear Security Administration will make their design choices about the W93 submarine-launched ballistic missile warhead next year, an admiral said here at an industry conference Tuesday.
“Next year most likely we will do the downselect to understand what are the key military requirements that [U.S. Strategic Command] and others have laid upon us and what’s the solution that we want to now go into design on to go do that,” Adm. Johnny Wolfe, the Navy’s director of strategic systems programs, said at the Naval Submarine League’s annual symposium.
W93 will be built from a nuclear explosive package that the Department of Energy tested at full yield before the U.S. ceased doing nuclear explosive tests in 1992. With its new Mark VII aeroshell developed by the Navy, it will be the first new U.S. warhead built since the end of the Cold War.
Counting retirement and dismantlement, the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) splits a nuclear weapon’s development cycle into seven phases. W93 entered phase two — the feasibility study — some time in 2022, Wolfe said at the symposium. Mass production happens in phase six.
“Last year we worked through our phase one with the Department of Energy,” Wolfe said in response to a question after his speech to the symposium. “And we went back to the Nuclear Weapons Council earlier this year to give them that report. And based on that report, we actually got authority to enter into what we call phase two, which is where we are now.”
The timetable Wolfe gave Tuesday is consistent with the public schedule the NNSA has shared for the weapon, which as Wolfe said will be “the first truly all new warhead that this nation has done in 40 years.”
W93 will cost about $9.4 billion, in 2021 dollars, to build. That includes a little more than $9 billion for NNSA’s work on the warhead and $1 billion for the Navy’s share of the work on the aeroshell, according to NNSA’s latest Stockpile Stewardship and Management Plan.
W93 will eventually replace the W76-1 and W88 Alt-370 warheads on the Trident II D5 submarine-launched ballistic missiles. The existing warheads either have been or will be serviced to remain in the field well into the 2030s, at least.
In December 2018, NNSA finished the W76-1 program, which extended the life of that warhead to 60 years from 20 years. The first W76 entered service in 1978, according to NNSA. The agency is also in the process of replacing the arming, fuzing and firing system in the W88, which will give that crucial subsystem 30 more years of life in the field, NNSA has said. W88 has been in the field since 1989. The non-government Federation of American Scientists group estimates that the U.S. has 384 W88 warheads.
Richard Abbott of Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor affiliate publication Defense Daily contributed to this report from Arlington.
