WASHINGTON — The Los Alamos National Laboratory’s plan to produce 30 nuclear weapon cores annually by 2028 satisfies current military needs, the head of U.S. Strategic Command said here Friday.
That date, given earlier in the summit by the head of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, “meets my needs in that regard for W87-1” Gen. Anthony Cotton, commander of United States Strategic Command said at the Exchange Monitor’s annual Nuclear Deterrence Summit. Cotton spoke via video.
The W87-1 warhead will eventually be used on the Sentinel missiles Northrop Grumman is building to replace the current Minuteman III fleet some time after 2030. The warhead will be a newly made copy of a W78, one of two used on Minuteman III, but with a fresh pit cast at Los Alamos. The first Sentinels will use a W87-0 warhead taken from Minuteman III missiles.
In the coming months, Los Alamos plans to start building what could become the first W87-1 pits, John Benner, the lab’s associate director for weapons production, said Thursday during a panel discussion at the summit.
“War reserve builds for the stockpile are planned to commence in the late spring,” said Benner. The first of these to roll off the assembly line is called the first production unit. That pit will be examined to make sure it meets the standards of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which designed it, and the needs of the military.
But subsequent builds of the same pit will roll off the assembly line about as soon as the first one is done, Robert Webster, Los Alamos’ deputy director for weapons, told the Monitor on Thursday.
The National Nuclear Security Administration’s review of the first production unit pit should be finished by December, Benner said.
Thomas Mason, director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, told the Monitor on Wednesday at the summit that the lab was working on delivering 30 pits a year in 2028, two years later than once hoped by two years sooner than it appeared it might take last year.
“We are also working to try and pull that forward and we’re also keeping an eye on the budget process, which is trying to pull us in the other direction,” Mason told the Monitor.
Los Alamos, like most of the rest of the federal government, has been funded at 2023 levels since Oct. 1 under a series of stopgap budgets that effectively deferred a raise the pit program would get under permanent fiscal year 2024 spending bills yet to be reconciled in Congress.
In 2023, the Department of Energy signed off on a construction schedule that said the equipment needed to make at least 30 pits a year at Los Alamos would not be installed until 2030 or so. Soon after, Mason said it might still be possible to hit the milestone sooner, closer to the 2026 target the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) officially set in 2020.
Los Alamos will split pit casting duties with a larger factory planned at the Savannah River Site near Aiken, S.C. The Savannah River Plutonium Processing Facility, which NNSA had hoped would come online by 2030 or so, will be built by 2032, NNSA Administrator Jill Hruby said Thursday in a keynote speech at the summit.
Hruby did not say when the South Carolina plant would complete its hot commissioning, or the start of operations with radioactive material.
Last year at the summit, Hruby said the Savannah River plant will almost certainly have to make more than 50 pits a year when it opens.
With pit delays looming, Congress has directed the Air Force to study whether one Sentinel wing should be sunk into their silos with W78 warheads from the Minuteman fleet. The military’s plan had been to put W87-0 warheads on the first Sentinel missiles and W87-1 warheads on later Sentinels.
