Morning Briefing - February 12, 2020
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February 12, 2020

National Lab Directors Hint at Competition on W93 Sea-Based Warhead

By ExchangeMonitor

ALEXANDRIA, Va. — The directors of the Department of Energy’s Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore national laboratories on Tuesday each declined to say whether their shop would design the planned sea-based W93 nuclear warhead.

Asked which of the two nuclear weapons design labs would handle the W93, if Congress approves it, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Director William Goldsmith said, “good question.”

Los Alamos Director Thomas Mason was similarly evasive.

“There’s always competition,” Mason said from the same dais where he and Goldstein spoke alongside Sandia National Laboratories Deputy Director Dori Ellis during a panel discussion at the ExchangeMonitor’s annual Nuclear Deterrence Summit.

Mason later joked that Los Alamos, which designed the Navy’s current W76-1, W76-2, and W88 submarine-launched ballistic missile warheads, was the “Los Alamos Naval Laboratory.” He also told the Weapons Complex Morning Briefing, in a brief interview from the conference floor, that it was his job to make sure Los Alamos wins the competition to design the W93.

Los Alamos is the design agency for the NNSA’s current ongoing nuclear weapon refurbishments — the B61-12 gravity bomb and the W88 Alt-370 submarine ballistic missile warhead. Livermore is the design agency for the two major refurbishments planned after that — the W80-4 cruise missile warhead and the W87-1 intercontinental ballistic missile warhead.

The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) is requesting a so-far unspecified amount of funding in fiscal  2021 to begin “concept and Assessment Refinement activities” for W93.

The proposed warhead is based on a design that was tested at full yield before the U.S. pulled the plug on full-up nuclear explosive tests in the 1990s, Charles Verdon, the agency’s deputy director for defense programs, said during a morning panel Tuesday. 

W93 would notionally begin its life as the nuclear tip of the next-generation submarine-launched ballistic missile that will eventually replace the Trident II D5 and be carried aboard future Columbia-class submarines that are slated to patrol global seas from the 2030s through the 2080s.

A source with knowledge of the proposed weapon said the W93 could be rapidly upgraded for use on other sea-based delivery vehicles, and that the weapon could be serviced at locations other than the NNSA’s Pantex Plant in Amarillo, Texas. Each of the 12 planned Columbia boats would have 16 missile tubes with one missile each.

In its 2020 Stockpile Stewardship and Management Plan, the NNSA estimated the civilian agency’s share of the W93 work at roughly $14 billion, with a notional first-production date of 2034.

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