Inside America’s newly revealed nuclear ballistic missile warhead of the future
By Aaron Mehta , Defense News, February 24, 2020
An unarmed Trident II D5 missile launches from the Ohio-class ballistic missile submarine Rhode Island off the coast of Cape Canaveral, Fla., on May 9, 2019. (John Kowalski/U.S. Navy)
MINOT AIR FORCE BASE, N.D. — When the Trump administration’s budget request rolled out Feb. 10, eyebrows shot up within the nuclear community at the mention of a previously unknown warhead, listed in documents as the W93.
Now the Pentagon is revealing details about the weapon, what it will replace and when it might be deployed.
The labeling of the warhead as the W93 is important. Since the introduction of the W88 in the 1980s, all upgrades to warheads have been described as variants — for instance, the collapsing of several versions of the B61 gravity bomb into the B61-12. According to a senior defense official, the reason for the new designation comes from the reality that the warhead is largely a new design.
“The W93 doesn’t [currently] exist. And so this is not a simple life extension,” said the official, who spoke to Defense News on condition of anonymity while traveling to Minot Air Force Base last week.
Right now, there are two submarine-launched nuclear warheads in the arsenal: the W88 and the W76. The latter, which just completed a service life extension program, now comes in two varieties, the traditional W76-1 and a lower-yield W76-2. The W88, meanwhile, is in the early stages of a modernization effort.
However, each of those two systems will likely require additional modernization in 15-20 years, and their cores are increasingly older, even with efforts led by the National Nuclear Security Administration. Given that, the Pentagon believes now is the time to begin developing a future replacement.
“These things take time. And so now we’re beginning the normal process,” the official said. “We start now in a seven-phase process, from concept design to production and delivery. And we’re starting now.”
The goal for the W93 is to base it “on existing designs,” according to the official. But other than that, all options that will work with the Trident II submarine-launched missile are on the table. The Nuclear Weapons Council, which includes a number of Department of Defense principals, is leading the analysis of what the W93 may look like.
“You might move the secondary to where the primary was, move this around, you’ll have new conventional components, you’re going to make it safer,” the official said. “It's going to be based on currently tested designs and components that are already in the stockpile. But it'll be safer.”
The government’s goal is to have the new design, which in size would be somewhere between the two existing ballistic missile warheads, fielded by 2040.
The idea of a follow-on submarine launched warhead is not entirely new. In FY20 budget documents, the NNSA referred to a “Next Navy Warhead,” but estimated that the weapon would not need funding until 2023. Why the agency moved the timeline forward by two years is unclear, but it comes at a time that the NNSA received a major increase in its budget request, increasing almost 20 percent from FY20 levels.
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