In the National Nuclear Security Administration’s world of warheads and bombs, the big question of 2019 is: will the newly divided Congress quash the newly funded W76-2 low-yield, submarine-launched ballistic missile warhead?
The GOP-controlled government last year funded the weapon to the tune of $65 million for fiscal 2019, over the loud protests of congressional Democrats who now control the House. In particular, newly installed House Armed Services Committee Chairman Adam Smith (D-Wash.) has vowed to introduce legislation to kill the W76-2.
The proposed weapon, to be built on the same production lines now wrapping up a decades-long program to extend the service life of the existing W76 by 30 years, is one of the notable changes the Donald Trump administration made to the nuclear arsenal modernization-and-maintenance regime started by the Barack Obama administration.
Smith has staked his chairmanship to reshaping that whole regime, not just the W76-2. In his first official statement as House Armed Services Committee chairman, Smith said Thursday he wanted the United States to “move towards a responsible approach to nuclear weapons.”
House Democrats can in theory produce authorization and appropriations bills that would halt the W76-2 program in its tracks, but Republicans still control the Senate. There, Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman James Inhofe (R-Okla.) not only authorized the W76-2 last year, but struck down committee Ranking Member Jack Reed’s (D-R.I.) attempt to prohibit development of the weapon during debate over the 2019 National Defense Authorization Act.
The White House says the U.S. needs a low-yield nuclear weapon that can penetrate enemy territory quickly and reliably, to prevent Russia from using similarly capable weapons to win a war it starts, but cannot finish, with conventional weapons.
According to the NNSA’s latest stockpile stewardship and management plan, the W76-2 would not be fully deployed on the Trident II-D5 missiles carried by the U.S. submarine fleet until 2024 or so. The weapon will cost at least $125 million over two years, according to Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), a notable nuclear dove who carries some of Capitol Hill’s only living memory of the atomic bombings of the Second World War.
Still, whatever happens with the W76-2 in 2019 will happen on the margins of a nuclear modernization program that is marching forward with momentum.
This year should mark the end of the modernization of the existing W76 warhead, which after its refurbishment will be known as W76-1. W76-1 planning began in 1999, and the NNSA delivered the first war-ready weapon to the Navy in 2008.
In 2019, the NNSA expects to deliver the last W76-1 for service on a Trident II D5 missiles carried. All told, the W76-1 program will cost roughly $4 billion in 2018 dollars, according to the NNSA’s stockpile stewardship and management plans from 2018 and 2019.
As of 2018, more than 98% of the total weapons production run of the W76-1 Life Extension Program has been completed. #twelvedaysofchristmas #YearInReview https://t.co/QlKk0LuBHx pic.twitter.com/aE1L7dIDQF
— NNSA Administrator (@LGHNNSA) December 27, 2018
The nonprofit Federation of American Scientists estimates the NNSA will modernize some 1,500 W76 warheads.
As W76-1 rolls out of the pipeline, the agency is gearing up to modernize the oldest weapon in the stockpile, the B61 gravity bomb. The agency capped 2018 by authorizing production of a homogenized version of that venerable weapon, of which there are currently four variants in the arensal. The NNSA started planning the B61-12 program in 2009 and plans to wrap it up in fiscal 2025. The agency will begin building the first war-ready bomb in September, with an eye toward delivering it to the Air Force sometime in the 2020 fiscal year, which begins Oct. 1.
The B61-12 program will cost about $7.5 billion in 2018 dollars, the NNSA estimated in its 2019 stockpile plan. The agency’s internal price-checker, the Cost Estimation and Program Evaluation office, has warned that B61-12 expenses might actually come to about $10 billion. The NNSA, in response to a Government Accountability Office probe last year, stuck to its lower estimate.
The Federation of American Scientists estimates the NNSA will build some 480 B61-12 bombs.
Aside from warheads and bombs, the agency has one more thing to modernize in 2019: its senior leadership.
Trump’s administration has filled three of the four politically appointed NNSA leadership slots so far: administrator; deputy administrator for defense programs; and deputy administrator for defense nuclear nonproliferation.
Only the NNSA principal deputy administrator position remains vacant, after the Senate narrowly missed confirming William Bookless, a former Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory physicist approved for the job in December by the Senate Armed Services Committee. The Senate this week returned Bookless’ nomination to the White House after the start of a new legislative session, and the White House had not sent it back at deadline Friday for Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor.
