W80-4 undergoes ‘nominal’ flight test, Sandia director says

ARLINGTON, Va. — James Peery, director of the Department of Energy’s Sandia National Laboratories, told the Exchange Monitor Monday that the W80-4 had its first flight test on the Long Range Standoff Missile last week.

Peery spoke with the Monitor after speaking at a panel at the Exchange Monitor’s annual Nuclear Deterrence Summit with Kim Budil, director at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, and Thom Mason, director at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.

“I was waiting for this for a couple of years,” Peery told the Monitor, “and it showed that the design looks good.” 

Peery added it was the first flight test for the W80-4, and that there was a flight test the week before that was also successful. The test was without any special nuclear materials, and that the test was “nominal,” he said. 

Peery also told the room that he was “pretty excited right now” that the laboratory and the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) had worked with the Air Force on testing the warhead on the missile.

John Evans, principal assistant deputy administrator for stockpile management at NNSA, said “that’s on schedule” on a panel regarding the W80-4.

Meanwhile, Dave Hoagland, executive principal deputy administrator for defense programs at NNSA, told the Monitor that the labs were “ahead of schedule” on all elements of the W80-4.

“The team working on that are constantly managing the schedule and looking for any limiting element or supply chain or design or a test element, and constantly moving those to the left,” Dave Hoagland, executive principal deputy administrator for defense programs at NNSA, told the Monitor. “We are ahead of schedule on all of them, now,” he said. 

The W80-4, a life-extension for the current W80-1 air-launched cruise missile warhead, will be used on the Air Force’s planned AGM-181 long range standoff cruise missile (LRSO). The W80-1 now tips a variant of the AGM-86 Air-Launched Cruise Missile.

According to the NNSA’s stockpile stewardship and management plan for fiscal year 2025, which was released in early October, the W80-4 program would complete its final design reviews by fiscal year 2025, which began Oct. 1.

Boeing’s B-52H will be the first aircraft to carry LRSO, which eventually will fly aboard the B-21 Raider bomber that Northrop Grumman is building.