MCLEAN, Va. — The U.S. National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) plans to help defray cost overruns on two nuclear-weapon refurbishments by stripping features out of the planned warhead for the Air Force’s next land-based intercontinental ballistic missile, a senior agency official said Thursday.
The features to be cut, however, are not mission-essential requirements for the planned W87-1, according to Charles Verdon, deputy administrator for defense programs at the semiautonomous Department of Energy agency. Rather, they are what designers might call desirements: things that are are good to build into a system “if you can,” but ultimately “within the tradespace” of features that could be comfortably omitted from the warhead’s design, Verdon said here during a nuclear modernization seminar hosted by the George Washington University and MITRE Corp.
Verdon did not say exactly which features will be stripped from the W87-1, which the Pentagon has selected to tip planned Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent (GBSD) intercontinental ballistic missiles. The warhead has not even crossed the NNSA’s Critical Decision 2 milestone yet, meaning it has neither an official cost nor schedule estimate. By the time it gets those, the scrapped features will be long off the drawing board.
The Air Force expects the GBSD to cost about $100 billion over its lifetime into the 2080s. The service plans to procure some 600 missiles, providing spares and test systems for the 400 or so that will be placed into silos starting in 2030.
The W87-1 and the planned W80-4, a warhead intended for future Long-Range Standoff air-launched cruise missiles, have been tapped as bill payers to keep the B61-12 gravity bomb and W88 Alt-370 submarine ballistic-missile warhead refurbishments on schedule. Verdon did not discuss details of where savings might be found on the W80-4.
The B61-12 and W88 Alt-370 are looking at combined overruns of $850 million, compared with earlier NNSA estimates. That would push the agency’s projected share of B61-12 costs to $8.7 billion over 20 years, rather than the $8 billion, and its share of W88 Alt-370 costs to a little under $3.2 billion over a decade, rather than $3 billion.
The agency admitted in May it would have to throw out capacitors planned for use in the B61 and W88 because the off-the-shelf components cannot be counted on to work correctly for the decades of extra service life the NNSA is building into the rebooted weapons.
The W88 is the larger of the Navy’s two submarine-launched ballistic-missile warheads. It can tip Trident II submarine-launched ballistic missiles. The W88-Alt 370, which will replace the arming, fusing, and firing systems of the W88, needs between $120 million and $150 million in extra funding, following the capacitor switch.
The B52 bomber, and eventually the F35-A and planned B-21 Raider, will carry the B61-12. The gravity bomb, an ongoing homogenization of four different versions of the oldest deployed nuclear weapon, has the larger shortfall: $600 million to $700 million, Verdon told a House Armed Services Committee panel in September.
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.
Besides removing features from W87-1, Verdon said the NNSA will pay for overruns on the two refurbishments by applying manufacturing and program management “efficiencies” the agency worked out during the refurbishment of the W76-1 submarine-launched ballistic missile that wrapped up in late 2018.
“Some of it is literally just the number of development cycles that are needed to produce a component,” Verdon said Thursday. “We’ve identified ways to reduce the number of cycles, so that’s time and effort within the plants.”
The overruns for B61-12 and W88 Alt-370 will not affect the Energy Department’s funding needs until 2021, meaning further details might wait until the agency files its budget request for the upcoming 2021 federal fiscal year. Those budget requests are nominally due in February.
A compromise National Defense Authorization Act approved by the House on Wednesday authorizes the requested levels of 2020 spending on all four of the weapons programs caught up in this year’s funding tradeoff: more than $790 million for B61-12; a little over $300 million for W88 Alt-370; about $110 million for W87-1; and some $900 million for W80-4.
