A Government Accountability Office report published recently roughs out the National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) timeline for producing a refurbished intercontinental ballistic missile warhead by roughly 2030.
The NNSA would begin studying options for a W78 replacement between April and June 2019, nail down a cost and schedule baseline by June 2022, and produce the first war-ready unit by December 2030, according to an agency graphic included in the Nov. 30 Government Accountability Office (GAO) document.
The Donald Trump administration wants to reverse its predecessor’s plan to create a so-called interoperable warhead that could essentially replace the W78 and 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 semiautonomous 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 of next year.
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 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.
The number of warheads covered in the refurbishment program has not been released. The nonprofit Federation of American Scientists estimates there are about 600 W78 warheads in the U.S. arsenal, including reserve warheads not installed on the Minuteman III fleet.
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.
Upgrades to pit infrastructure at Los Alamos have already started. The lab is supposed to start pit production in 2026 and ramp up to roughly 30 a year by 2030. Savannah River is due to produce 50 warhead cores annually by 2030, but that date is in flux, as it depends on the NNSA’s ability to convert the unfinished Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility into a pit plant in time to meet the deadline.
The NNSA in October canceled the contract to build that would-be plutonium disposal plant in October, but the agency has been sued over the decision in federal court by the state of South Carolina and the plant’s contractor.
