ARLINGTON, Va. — It could take 18 months longer than thought to finish a pair of crucial nuclear weapon refurbishments, a senior National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) official said here Wednesday.
The first production units of the B61-12 gravity bomb and the W88 Alt-370 submarine-launched ballistic-missile warhead are “going to be delayed by approximately 16 to 18 months,” Charles Verdon, NNSA deputy administrator for defense programs, said in a question-and-answer session at the 2019 Defense News Conference.
That would push production of the first war-usable B61-12 to 2021 or 2022 from 2020, and production of the first refurbished W88 to 2020 or 2021 from 2019.
The delay for the W88 Alt-370 might actually be “a few months” shorter than the delay projected for the B61-12, Verdon said. He declined to say whether the delay on the NNSA’s end might affect the date the military can actually deploy the weapons.
“That’s actually for the DOD to discuss,” Verdon said when pressed on the issue. “We’re working closely with them, and we are minimizing the impact to those dates, as to the best of our ability. So right now, that’s still under assessment by the Department of Defense.”
Both refurbs were slated to end in fiscal 2025, but those schedules are now under “revision,” according to the annual 2020 Stockpile Stewardship and Management Plan the NNSA published in late July.
The NNSA plans to build some 480 B61-12 bombs and has roughly 350 W88 warheads, the nongovernmental Federation of American Scientists estimates.
The delays to the weapon refurbs are not news, but their projected duration is.
In May, NNSA Administrator Lisa Gordon-Hagerty admitted the first production units of the refreshed weapons would be delayed for an unspecified length of time by problems with commercial-off-the-shelf capacitors to be used in the weapons. The agency could not prove the electrical components, which store energy and can be used in firing systems, would perform as expected over decades of service.
Including the NNSA’s $8 billion share of the bill, B61-12 is estimated to cost about $12 billion in civilian and Petagon funding over 20 years.
W88 Alt-370 aims to replace parts of the electric detonation system that triggers the newer and larger of the Navy’s two submarine-launched ballistic-missile warheads. The NNSA and the Pentagon estimate that this so-called major alteration, which also involves replacing the warhead’s conventional high explosives, will cost about $4 billion over roughly 10 years, including up to $3 billion in NNSA expenses.
