HEALTH OF W78, W88 WARHEADS PUSHES BACK INTEROPERABLE WARHEAD EFFORT

Recent surveillance work on the W78 and W88 warheads has revealed that the warheads can be sustained until 2030, allowing the National Nuclear Security Administration to delay work on an interoperable warhead, NNSA weapons program chief Don Cook said yesterday on the sidelines of the Nuclear Deterrence Summit. Cook would not comment directly on the delay in the interoperable warhead program, which NW&M Monitor previously reported would be pushed back in favor of continuing work on the W76 and B61 refurbishments as well as a replacement for the air-launched cruise missile warhead. The main reason appears to be that an interoperable warhead that could be used on the ground-based W78 and sea-based W88 warheads is not needed as soon as previously believed. “They are aging, and we know the issues because we have a good surveillance program and there are always challenges in the budget to do the full amount of surveillance we would like to do,” Cook said. “We certainly have enough surveillance data, and we get it every year, we go through an annual cycle, to determine that we have confidence in those two systems, that we’ll have confidence for a bit of a longer period of time.”