The Department of Defense plans to ramp up spending on modernization of all three legs of the nuclear triad in fiscal 2021. Here, you’ll find a snapshot of the Pentagon’s effort, featuring year-over-year comparisons between enacted appropriations for 2020 and requests issued Monday for the budget year that begins Oct. 1.
For the Columbia-class ballistic missile submarines, the boats that will replace the current Ohio-class fleet, the Pentagon requested just under $4.5 billion, more than double the roughly $1.8 billion the service sought last year. Prime contractor General Dyanmic Electric Boat is set to start assembling the first Columbia-class sub this year at its shipyard in Groton, Conn.
Columbia, like Ohio, will carry Trident II D5 missiles tipped with either W76-1, W76-2 low-yield, or W88 nuclear warheads provided by the Department of Energy’s semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration. Columbia is planned to patrol the seas into the 2080s and will eventually carry the Trident’s planned successor missiles, presently undesignated, notionally to be tipped with the W93 warhead in the early stages of planning at the NNSA.
For the next-generation nuclear-tipped, air-launched cruise missile, the Long-Range Standoff (LRSO) weapon, the Pentagon seeks $474 million: down about 33% from the 2020 appropriation, as the program winds down a design contest between Raytheon and Lockheed Martin. The Pentagon wants to start fieldingthe missiles by 2030 and plans to buy about 1,000 of them, the non-profit Federation of American Scientists estimates.
The Boeing-built B-52H will carry LRSO initially. The missile will use W80-4 warheads: a refurbished version of the W80-1 warheads that tip the current fleet of AGM 86-B cruise missiles. The B-21 Raider being designed by Northrop Grumman eventually will be the only carrier of U.S. airborne nuclear weapons.
For the B-21 Raider stealth bomber that Northrop Grumman is developing, the Pentagon requested some $2.8 billion, up from just over a $2 billion appropriation in 2020 for the Long-Range Strike Bomber. The aircraft eventually will carry all airborne nuclear weapons.
For the Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent (GBSD) silo-based, intercontinental ballistic missiles, $1.5 billion, or more than one-and-a-half times the 2020 appropriation of just over $555 million. The program — to replace the 400-strong Minuteman III fleet with built-from-scratch, solid-fueled, next-gen missiles — is moving out of its competitive technology development phase and into an engineering and manufacturing development phase.
Northrop Grumman looks like the favorite to win the GBSD competition this summer. Boeing, the only rival for that business, dropped out of the bidding last year. It cited an unfair cost disadvantage because Northrop Grumman owns its own solid-fueled rocket-motor business: the former Orbital ATK. The Air Force plans to buy 666 GBSD, including test articles and spares to keep in reserve behind the 400 deployed missiles.
The service wants to start sinking GBSD into silos beginning in 2031. The contract to build and field the missiles will be worth about $25 billion, the Pentagon estimates. The program will have a roughly $100 billion life-cycle cost into the 2050s.
The GBSD will carry W87-1 warheads, which will require new plutonium pits cast to be cast in planned NNSA plants at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and the Savannah River Site in South Carolina. The NNSA estimates the two-state pit complex will cost about $30 billion over 50 years or so, and that the W87-1 warhead will cost a little over $12 billion.
The NNSA believes it will begin producing W87-1 pits in 2024 at Los Alamos’ Plutonium Facility at a rate of 10 per year. By 2026, the agency wants to ramp that up to 30, then supplement the output with 50 pits a year at Savannah River for a total of 80 fissile warhead cores annually by 2030.
If the NNSA achieves that output by then — and the agency has acknowledged that will be major challenge — it could crank out enough pits for the entire GBSD acquisition by the mid-2030s, assuming the pit complex casts only W87-1 cores in that span.
