A non-government group using commercial satellite imagery believes it caught the start of structural construction on a new, highly-secure nuclear-weapon storage facility at F.E. Warren Air Force Base in Wyoming.
“A satellite image taken in August and obtained from Maxar shows construction is well underway of the underground [Weapons Generation Facility (WGF)] as well as several supporting facilities,” Hans Kristensen, director of the Federation of American Scientists’ Nuclear Information Project, wrote this week.
The planned 90,000-square-foot, reinforced concrete structure will replace the current Weapons Storage Area.
Fluor Corp., Irving, Texas, is building WGF under a roughly $145-millionm firm fixed price contract awarded by the Army Corps of Engineers in December 2018. The company beat out four other bidders for the work. According to a 2019 press release from Warren Air Force Base, construction should wrap in September 2022 or so: about two-and-a-half years later than the Air Force thought when Fluor’s contract went out.
“The primary interior walls of Maintenance and Storage Area are 4-foot thick reinforced concrete (RC) elements with 4-foot thick RC roof slabs,” the Air Force wrote in a June, 2016 environmental assessment. “The primary wall and roof elements are surrounded by a 20-foot thick soil layer which is contained by a 3-foot thick RC wall and roof element layer.”
Warren Air Force base said it held a ground-breaking ceremony for the WGF on May 21, 2019.
“Soil digging did begin in 2019, but the actual structures didn’t appear until spring 2020,” Kristensen wrote Monday. “Winter probably had something to do with it.”
Currently, the Minuteman IIIs in F.E. Warren 150 missile silos carry both W87 and W78 warheads. The Air Force plans to replace the Minuteman III fleet starting in 2030 or so with Ground Based Strategic Deterrent Missiles to be built by Northrop Grumman, under a nine-year, $13-billion engineering and manufacturing development contract.
The successor missiles will carry both W87-0 warheads and W87-1 warheads. The latter, newly manufactured copies of the W87 design, but with brand new plutonium pit triggers, might be the National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) most expensive nuclear-weapons modernization program yet, the Government Accountability Office recently reported.
The semiautonomous Department of Energy nuclear weapons agency thinks it could cost $14.8 billion to build W87-1, the Government Accountability Office wrote in a summary of its report.
A version of this story first appeared in Weapons Complex Morning Briefing affiliate publication, Defense Daily.
