LAB COMPLETES B61-11 SURVEILLANCE TEST
NS&D Monitor
1/17/2014
Sandia National Laboratories successfully completed an impact test of a B61-11 earth penetrator in late November, a key milestone for the National Nuclear Security Administration’s enhanced surveillance program. The test involved pulling a randomly chosen weapon from the stockpile, replacing its nuclear package with an inert dummy, and slamming it into a concrete target at Sandia’s Coyote Canyon test facility.
Located in a mountainous area at Kirtland Air Force Base in New Mexico, the remote Coyote Canyon site is equip-ped and instrumented for a wide variety of environmental test activities, including burn tests used to certify nuclear packaging. Among its equipment is an aerial cable “pull- down” facility that uses small rockets to drive high velocity impact experiments. Similarly rigged tests are conducted at Tonopah in the Nevada desert by actually dropping test systems from aircraft, but the Sandia facility allows much more precise experimental control and more detailed data gathering. The test article is hung facing down with a cable attached to its nose. A rocket attached to the cable is fired, pulled the bomb downward at high velocity with precisely timed cable cutters fired to free the bomb and send it crashing into what was, in this case, a concrete target.
An Important Milestone in Facility’s Comeback
The B61-11 is a modified version of the old B61-7 nuclear bomb. It entered the stockpile in 1997, intended to add the capability of slamming into hardened targets with its firing systems and physics package intact so that it could still detonate. Pictures of the latest test, published in Sandia’s internal Lab News, show the test article literally burrowing straight into the hardened target, disappearing with only its tail fins still showing.
The shot was an important milestone for Sandia, the first pull-down test since the lab’s environmental testing pro-gram was shut down in 2008 because of safety concerns, after an accident in which a rocket sled motor detonated accidentally, breaking a worker’s leg and causing first and second degree burns. Testing was shut down for more than four years while the lab went through a safety review that some officials had privately suggested might end the program forever (NW&W Monitor, Vol. 17 No. 6). The enhanced surveillance program, which funded the shot, successfully negotiated the recently completed congressional budget process. Senate appropriators had proposed cutting $8 million from the administration’s $54.9 million request for the program, but the final spending plan approved by Congress gave the program the full requested amount.
