A Government Accountability Office report published Friday roughs out the National Nuclear Security Administration’s timeline for producing a refurbished intercontinental ballistic missile warhead by roughly 2030.
The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) would begin studying options for a W78 replacement between April and June 2019, nail down a baseline by June 2022, and produce the first war-ready unit by December 2030, according to an agency graphic in the GAO report.
The Donald Trump administration wants to reverse the Barack Obama administration’s plan to create a so-called interoperable warhead that could essentially fly on both the Air Force’s ground-launched ICBMs and the Navy’s submarine-launched ballistic missiles. The White House laid out that goal in February in its 2018 Nuclear Posture Review, which also called for beginning a life-extension program for intercontinental ballistic-missile warheads by 2019 instead of 2020, as planned under the Obama administration.
The NNSA would not formally restart the W78 replacement program, which the Department of Energy agency is now calling W87-1,until after it delivers a congressionally mandated report about the program’s estimated cost, the GAO said. The final report is due Jan. 19, after being ordered up in the fiscal 2019 appropriations bill that funds the NNSA through Sept. 30, 2019.
Congress in September appropriated $53 million for what is still, in the NNSA’s 2019 spending bill, titled Interoperable Warhead-1.
To prepare for an eventual W78 life-extension program, the NNSA appointed a W78 program manager in 2017, and has started reviews of the nuclear- and non-nuclear components components that would have to be replaced or refurbished over the decade-plus program, congressional auditors said. Non-nuclear components in need of replacement include gas delivery mechanisms, parts of the non-nuclear battery that powers the warhead’s detonation system, and radiation-hardened electronics.
Plutonium pit infrastructure will also be factors in any life-extension program that does not rely on reusing parts of existing, surplus nuclear weapons, the report says. Under the NNSA’s current plans, the refurbished W78 would receive brand new plutonium warhead cores made at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C.
The nonprofit Federation of American Scientists estimates there are about 600 W78 warheads in the U.S. arsenal, including reserve warheads not installed on missiles.
