The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) this week announced back-to-back milestones on warhead refurbishments intended to preserve the potency of U.S. nuclear submarine and cruise missiles.
On Tuesday, the NNSA said it modified the first W80-1 air-launched cruise-missile warhead under a program launched in 2012 to help keep the weapon suitable for service into the 2020s. The agency finished this first-production unit, officially called the W80-1 Alt 369, on Sept. 30, an agency spokesperson in Washington told Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor this week.
The mod replaced the W80-1’s so-called limited life components. These include neutron generators needed to spark a nuclear chain reaction, batteries, and other non-nuclear components of a warhead that degrade with age.
The W80-1 Alt 369 first production unit completed last month arrived a little later than expected when the program began about five years ago. At that time, the NNSA planned to complete a first production unit in 2014. However, technical difficulties prompted the agency to rebaseline the project’s schedule twice: once in 2014 and again in 2016.
Now, with the first W80-1 Alt 369 production unit complete, the NNSA will begin altering the remaining in-service W80-1 warheads in the same way. According to the most recent estimate from the nonprofit Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists think tank, the U.S. arsenal contains more than 500 W80-1 warheads. Not all of these are deployed, and some would be stripped for parts to refurbish others as part of the Alt 369 program. Officially, and across the entire arsenal, the U.S. state department acknowledges some 1,400 warheads deployed on 660 long-range delivery vehicles.
The W80-1 entered service in 1982 atop the Air Force’s air-launched cruise missile: a 1980s-vintage missile that is still in service but will be replaced in the late 2020s by the new Long-Range Standoff weapon being built by Lockheed Martin and Raytheon under a Pentagon contract awarded in August.
The next-gen cruise missile will use a refurbished W80-family warhead called the W80-4. The interagency Nuclear Weapons Council selected the W80 for use on the next-generation missile in 2014, after which the NNSA began a life-extension program on the warhead expected to produce the first W80-4 in 2025.
NNSA contractor Consolidated Nuclear Security does Alt 369 work at the agency’s Pantex Plant near Amarillo, Texas.
Spending on the W80 stockpile is set to climb, with the Trump administration for fiscal 2018 seeking about $68 million million for the program, which received about $65 million in the 2017 appropriations bill that was signed into law in May.
Meanwhile, the NNSA also announced this week that it had finished critical non-nuclear systems required to upgrade the W76 warhead. That warhead is used on the U.S. Navy’s submarine-launched ballistic missile, the Trident II D5.
The W76 joined the arsenal in 1978 with a 20-year design life. The Department of Energy (DOE) in 2000 approved the current life extension program, which is set to run through 2019 and aims to extend the warhead’s useful life to 60 years. The NNSA delivered the first refurbished W76 warhead to the Navy in 2009.
While the Trump administration in May requested a small increase for the W76 life extension program — about $225 million for fiscal 2018, or $1.25 million more than the 2017 appropriation — spending on the program is trending down, according to DOE.
In 2016, the NNSA received almost $245 million for the W76-1 life extension. Included in that was $20 million to procure W76-1 parts and components for the Kansas City National Security Complex, which specializes in manufacturing the non-nuclear parts of U.S. nuclear weapons.
The Los Alamos and Sandia national laboratories designed the original W-76 warhead. Much of the hands-on work for the warhead’s life extension is done at the Pantex Plant in Texas: the NNSA’s main warhead assembly-and-disassembly hub. The Y-12 National Security Complex on the Oak Ridge Reservation in Tennessee, with its uranium enrichment and refinement capabilities, also contributes.
