STRATCOM Commander ‘Proud’ of W93, Won’t Say Much Else About It

February 28, 2020
By Dan Leone

WASHINGTON — The commander of U.S. nuclear forces would not be drawn into a discussion on details of the planned W93 sea-based warhead in an open hearing Thursday, stoically deflecting questions from a curious lawmaker and declaring the planned weapon makes him “proud to be an American.”

“I think that is one of those things that makes me proud to be an American, right, that we can come up with a program of record like the W93,” Navy Adm. Charles Richard, head of U.S. Strategic Command, said during a hearing of the House Armed Services strategic forces subcommittee.

Richard was responding to a friendly question from Rep. Mike Turner (R-Ohio), the subcommittee’s ranking member, who invited the top nuclear commander to explain why W93 is “not a new nuclear weapon.”

“It uses existing designs, it will use existing stockpile components,” Richard said of the weapon, which the Navy eventually wants to replace both the W76-1 and W88 Alt-370 warheads now used on submarine-launched Trident IID5 ballistic missiles.

The explanation was not enough for the subcommittee’s biggest nuclear attack dog, Rep. John Garamendi (D-Calif.), who tried to back the new STRATCOM commander into a corner about tje W93’s design.

“You said that the W93 is or is not a new weapon?” Garamendi asked.

“The W93 is a new program of record that using existing designs and existing components to address a need that I have,” Richards replied.

“Wait, wait, wait,” Garamendi said. “Let’s answer the question: Is it a new weapon? It is a new program of record. Is it a new weapon?”

“It is a new program of record, sir,” Richards said.

A program of record refers to an acquisition directed by an agency that responds to some mission need. In other words, something that has gone from something an agency might build to something an agency wants to build.

“Does it use a new pit?” an annoyed Garamendi asked, referring to fissile plutonium core of nuclear weapons. The Energy Department’s National Nuclear Security Administration is working to build out a complex to build up to 80 pits per year.

At that, Richard retreated into the weeds of acquisition law and process, demurring that Congress needs to authorize and fund the proposed warhead “before we can answer some of these questions.”

All week, Pentagon leaders threw up their hands, dodged, parried and spun in budget hearings as lawmakers sought details about the warhead, knowledge of which has been carefully curated all February by a contingent of anonymous sources, unidentified Pentagon officials, and nuclear weapon-lab directors who sought to massage the message about the first new warhead design to make it this far in the budget process since the end of the Cold War.

Secretary of Defense Mark Esper danced around W93 questions on Wednesday during a hearing of the full Armed Services Committee.

Rep. Salud Carbajal (D-Calif.) asked the defense secretary why the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) required $53 million for the proposed weapon in 2021, which is two years sooner than the agency thought it would need the funding.

Why, Carbajal asked, is the government rushing to develop a successor to the W76-1, W76-2 and W88 Alt-370 warheads when each of those Trident II D5 tips has either just finished a modernization program, or will soon.

Esper deferred to NNSA officials, who are not due on Capitol Hill for testimony on its budget request until next week.

The W93 first showed up publicly in early February as part of DOD and National Nuclear Security Administration budget requests for the fiscal year beginning Oct. 1. At the ExchangeMonitor’s annual Nuclear Deterrence Summit in early February, the directors of the Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore nuclear weapons laboratories, and Charles Verdon, head of NNSA Defense Programs in Washington, said the W93’s plutonium pit and nuclear explosive package would have to be certifiable by the NNSA for deployment by the Navy without further nuclear testing.

While that might diminish the worst fears of nuclear disarmament advocates, it has done little to clarify whether the W93 pit might come from among those currently or formerly deployed in the stockpile, or whether the W93 might be the next job in the pipeline for planned pit-casting facility at Los Alamos and the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C.

Combined, the NNSA and the Navy seek about $85 million for the W93 in the next budget. If authorized, the weapon would tip the eventual replacement of the current Trident IID5 ballistic missile carried by nuclear-armed U.S. submarines.

The NNSA wants to start early design work on W93 in the coming fiscal year: figuring out the weapon’s military requirements with the Pentagon, and deciding which available pit designs — limited to those that can be certified by the NNSA without nuclear-yield testing — can meet those requirements. Whatever the agencies choose, it will have to fit into the Mk7 aeroshell the Navy is designing to house the weapon.

The Navy, meanwhile, will mostly focus in 2021 on design of the warhead’s planned housing, the Mk7. The service seeks a little more than $30 million in 2021 for this work.

According to the Navy’s 2021 budget request, the service plans to use contractors that were working on the W78/W88-1 Life Extension Program for Mk7. Lockheed Martin Space Systems, of Sunnyvale, Calif., had most of that work, but Peraton of Herndon, Va., and the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md., are also on the project.

The Navy and the Air Force were formerly studying ways to combine elements of their ballistic-missile warheads under a now-defunct Interoperable Warhead program. Now, W93 will take that hypothetical weapon’s place, sailing on the fleet of 12 Columbia-class ballistic missile submarines, which are slated to replace the 14 Ohio-class boats in service starting in the early 2030s. Each Columbia could carry 16 Trident missiles.

The NNSA minted about 1,500 W76-1 warheads as part of that weapon’s modernization program, which wrapped in early 2019.

A source familiar with W93 has said the warhead is being designed to be rapidly upgradeable, in case the military eventually wants to put it on a sea-based weapon other than a ballistic missile.