WASHINGTON —It will cost as much as $850 million to replace commercial capacitors deemed unsuitable for use in two refurbished nuclear weapons, a senior National Nuclear Security Administration official told lawmakers here this week.
For the B61-12 gravity bomb, an ongoing homogenization of four different versions of the oldest deployed nuclear weapon, the costs will range from between $600 million to $700 million, Charles Verdon, the agency’s deputy administrator for defense programs, said Wednesday at a hearing of the House Armed Services strategic forces subcommittee. That would bring the National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) share of the B61-12 costs to around $8.7 billion over 20 years, rather than the $8 billion or so estimated in the agency’s 2020 Stockpile Stewardship and Management plan.
For the W88 Alt-370 program, which will replace the arming, fusing, and firing systems of the larger of the Navy’s two submarine-launched ballistic-missile warheads, new costs could range between $120 million and $150 million, Verdon told panel Chairman Jim Cooper (D-Tenn.). That would put the bill for the W88’s major alteration at a little under $3.2 billion over 10 years, rather than $3 billion as most recently estimated in the latest stockpile stewardship plan.
The NNSA had planned to use commercial-off-the-shelf capacitors that cost about $5 each, but now will have to use different capacitors that cost around $75, Verdon said. Capacitors store electrical charges and can be used in detonation systems. The NNSA discarded the cheaper ones after a series of tests showed the components could not perform to spec over 20 or 30 years.
To fund the capacitor swap, Verdon said the NNSA wants to take money from two life-extension programs that are not as far along as the B61-12 and W88 Alt-370: for the W80-4 cruise missile warhead, and the W87-1 silo-based, intercontinental ballistic missile warhead.
Unspecified “design simplifications” the NNSA made to the W80-4 and W87-1 programs would make the funding shuffle possible, Verdon said. The change in planned funding levels for the programs should show up in the agency’s 2021 budget request, nominally due to be published in February, said Verdon. The W87-1 and W80-4 programs are not yet at the point in their program management cycles that the NNSA has set formal cost and schedule baselines.
The NNSA plans to create some 480 B61-12 bombs, and about 350 W88 Alt-370 warheads, according to the Washington-based Federation of American Scientists.
The Air Force is planning to buy about 1,000 Long Range Standoff weapon cruise missiles, each of which will be tipped with a W80-4. Deployment would notionally begin in 2025 or so. The services plans to buy some 600 Ground Based Strategic Deterrent Missiles, 400 of which it will sink into silos and tip with W87-1 warheads.
Rep. Doug Lamborn (R-Colo.) asked Verdon whether, in light of the problems with commercial components, the NNSA itself manufacture all future non-nuclear weapons components.
“It’s a question we’ve been asking ourselves,” Verdon said, pointing out that during the Cold War, DOE and its predecessor agency made about 70% of needed non-nuclear components, leaving outside vendors to provide the other 30%. Today, that ratio is reversed, with vendors providing about 70% of the non-nuclear components being used to refurbish the active nuclear arsenal.
“We’re going to look at it on a part-by-part basis,” Verdon said, adding that the NNSA might end up bringing more manufacturing work in-house.
