The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) still plans to produce the first copy of a refurbished Navy submarine warhead in 2021, and the first copy of a refurbished nuclear gravity bomb for the Air Force in 2022, a senior official with the civilian nuclear-weapon agency said Wednesday.
Those were the new dates, announced in February, for the first production units [FPU] of both the W88 Alt-370 submarine-launched ballistic-missile warhead and the B61-12 nuclear gravity bomb, as the refurbished weapons will be known.
“They’re still on those new dates,” Charles Verdon, NNSA deputy administrator for defense programs, said during a video conference with reporters and the public.
An FPU is a proof-of-concept article that NNSA personnel disassemble and examine to prove that both the design and the factory — which for nuclear weapons is the Pantex Plant in Amarillo, Texas — are ready for mass production.
The NNSA in 2019 pushed the FPU dates on both weapons back by more than a year after acknowledging, in 2019, that commercial capacitors stockpiled for the refurbishments of an estimated 350 warheads and 460 bombs probably would not last 30 years in the field. The estimates come from the Washington-based Federation of American Scientists.
The NNSA deciding to scrap the off-the-shelf capacitors it had stockpiled and has since selected replacement units the agency believes will increase the combined cost of the refurbishments by $850 million. That brings the total combined expense of the programs up to somewhat under $16 billion, compared with $15 billion before the snafu.
B61-12 will cost an estimated $12 billion over 20 years, including NNSA’s $8-billion share of the bill, plus the Pentagon’s share. The NNSA and the Defense Department estimate the W88 Alt-370 will cost about $4 billion over roughly 10 years, including up to $3 billion in NNSA expenses.
The replacement capacitors “have passed the test that gives us confidence that they work, meet requirements, and will continue to work for the 20-30 year system life time,” an NNSA spokesperson said Thursday.
Capacitors store electrical charges needed to power certain weapon components. The NNSA has not identified which components need the new capacitors, but the agency spokesperson did say Thursday they are required for three W88 Alt-370 components and six B61-12 parts.
All the components that need new capacitors also have to be rebuilt to work seamlessly with the systems. The NNSA has not yet achieved an FPU for the three replacement parts for W88 Alt-370, but the work is “ahead of schedule,” the spokesperson said. Meanwhile, the agency had already completed an FPU for one of the six B61-12 components that require the new capacitors, at deadline.
The W88 is the larger of the Navy’s two submarine-launched, ballistic-missile warheads. The Alt-370 will refurbish the weapon’s conventional high explosives, which trigger its nuclear detonation, and replace other components of its detonation system.
The B61-12 is a homogenzied version of four previous iterations of the only deployed U.S. nuclear gravity bomb, including one legacy version with moderate earth-penetrating capability. The Air Force eventually will carry the weapon aboard the B-2 bomber, the F-35A, the F-15E, and eventually the planned B-21 Raider bomber being developed by Northrop Grumman.
W80-4
Verdon spoke less than a week after the Government Accountability Office said the NNSA should either delay by a year its promised delivery date for the proof-of-concept unit of the next-generation nuclear cruise-missile warhead, or justify why it won’t.
Citing congressional requirements and Pentagon schedule demands, the NNSA promised to deliver the first production unit of the W80-4 in 2025 — even after the agency’s own schedule risk analysis for the program pointed to a 2026 delivery.
Therefore, the Government Accountability Office stated in the report, the NNSA should “adopt a W80-4 program [first production unit] delivery date based on the program’s schedule risk analysis, or document its justification for not doing so.”
In its reply to the Government Accountability Office, the NNSA disagreed with the recommendations over “a fundamental difference in philosophy regarding the use of risk analysis.”
Essentially, NNSA Administrator Lisa Gordon-Hagerty wrote in her reply to the report, the risk analysis the Government Accountability Office studied is out of date and contains a significant amount of necessary guesswork about when the W80-4 would be ready.
“While the initial risk analysis clearly defines certain inherent risk areas to be managed, the probabilities are still highly speculative and not informed by mitigation strategies to be developed as part of on-going program planning,” Gordon-Hagerty wrote.
Among other things, the NNSA has said it can use additive manufacturing — sometimes called 3D printing — to manufacture W80-4 components more quickly
So, with the wonky, broad-brush steadfastness that has marked her two-plus years leading the DOE branch, the administrator repeated that the joint Pentagon-DOE Nuclear Weapons Council — the interagency nuclear-weapons acquisition group — wants the warhead ready in fiscal 2025.
Gordon-Hagerty did say the “NNSA is committed to transparency” about the W80-4’s development cycle, and will update the Government Accountability Office about the warhead’s cost and schedule in a baseline report due “early” in fiscal 2022, which begins Oct. 1, 2021.
The W80-4 is the intended tip of the planned Long-Range Standoff Weapon cruise missile slated for deployment around 2030. It will be a refurbishment of the W80-1 now used on AGM-86b air-launched cruise missiles. Based on its classified Weapons Design and Cost Report report, the NNSA estimates it will cost about $11.2 billion from 2019 through 2031 to build all the W80-4 warheads needed for the new cruise missile. The Air Force plans to buy about 1,000 missiles.
Verdon, meanwhile, said the NNSA already has some contingency plans in place, if for some reason the W80-4 first production unit has to change.
COVID-19 was not an issue years ago, when the agency committed to cranking out the first-draft W80-4 in 2025, “but we always worked to make sure that they [DOD] understand that there could be a slip,” Verdon said Wednesday. “If COVID becomes worse such that things do slow down, we’ll already have kind of courses of action in place … but right now, we don’t see a reason to take our foot off the gas.”