ARLINGTON, Va. — It could take a decade to build the low-yield, nuclear-tipped, sea-launched cruise missile (SLCM) demanded by the Donald Trump administration, and development might not start until the Pentagon finishes a separate nuclear missile, a senior Defense Department official said here Thursday.
The 2018 Nuclear Posture Review called on the Departments of Defense and Energy — the latter the civilian steward of U.S. nuclear warheads — to study a SLCM the United States could deploy “in the longer term.” The Trump administration said the weapon could match and check similarly powerful Russian weapons.
But the Pentagon is already working on a next-generation air-launched cruise missile called the Long-Range Standoff Weapon (LRSO). Former Navy officer Peter Fanta, now deputy assistant secretary of defense for nuclear matters, said a similarly capable sea-launched cruise missile might tie up the infrastructure needed to create LRSO.
In considering the planned SLCM, “we are looking at the production capacity and capability of both the DOD complex and what time that missile might be available so we don’t disturb other things we are building right now,” such as LRSO, Fanta said here Thursday at the ExchangeMonitor’s annual Nuclear Deterrence Summit.
Fanta said it takes about a decade “to build a highly sophisticated cruise missile” like LRSO. Raytheon and Lockheed Martin started maturing competing LRSO designs in 2017 under five-year contracts worth a little under $1 billion each. The Air Force plans to start deploying the missile, with W80-4 warheads provided by DOE’s semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration, in the late 2020s. The LRSO’s planned W80-4 warhead could have an adjustable yield of between 5 kilotons and 150 kilotons, the Washington-based Federation of American Scientists has said.
“LRSO shows up some time in the late next decade,” Fanta told Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor from the sidelines of the conference. “I understand how long that production time frame is, and [a] sea-launched cruise missile, we should not expect that to be any different.”
Fanta hastened to add that the low-yield sea-launched cruise missile would not necessarily be the LRSO, or even an adaptation of that planned missile.
Whether the eventual low-yield SLCM bears any resemblance at all to LRSO will not be clear until after DOD completes an analysis of alternatives tentatively slated to begin in 2020. The White House had not released a formal fiscal 2020 budget request at deadline Thursday, but the Department of Energy in November said it would support the Pentagon’s analysis of alternatives for the low-yield SLCM in 2020.
Fanta would not say exactly when work could start on the low-yield SLCM. He also would not say which Department of Energy-provided warhead would be available to tip the missile. However, he is confident a nuclear warhead will be available by the time the future SLCM is ready.
“[I]f you realistically align when the next cruise missile of that capability would be available to be built, we have pretty much determined that there is an availability of [Department of Energy] infrastructure to produce the weapon that would be associated with it,” Fanta said.
