Germany’s Federal Ministry of Defense wants to buy American for the future of the country’s nuclear security-sharing mission with the United States, urging lawmakers to approve the purchase of 30 Boeing F/A-18 aircraft to carry future B61-12 nuclear gravity bombs.
The German publication Der Spiegel on April 29 reported that Defense Minister Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer informed Secretary of Defense Mark Esper of the ministry’s preference on April 15. Germany could buy 45 F/A-18 in total: 30 for the nuclear mission and 15 for electronic warfare.
Germany is one of several NATO allies on whose territories the United States. keeps B61 gravity bombs. From the perspective of the alliance, keeping the weapons there is a strategy to prevent potential adversaries from launching attacks on Europe.
The Bundestag, Germany’s federal parliament, would have to approve the purchase of the aircraft, which would replace the Tornado manufactured by Panavia Aircraft GmbH: a joint venture supported by Germany, the United Kingdom, and Italy.
Kramp-Karrenbauer’s announcement caught her partners in Chancellor Angela Merkel’s coalition government by surprise, Der Spiegel reported. The defense minister’s Christian Democratic Union party shares power with the Social Democratic Party, and Kramp-Karrenbauer did not inform her party’s coalition partners about the request to Esper for F/A-18 Super Hornet aircraft, according to Der Spiegel.
The F/A-18 would be an alternative to a European choice, the Typhoon. Like the Tornado, the Typhoon is made in Germany by a pan-European coalition. Should the Bundestag ultimately approve the Super Hornet, it would give Boeing another toehold in a nuclear deterrence mission that is rapidly leaving the once-ubiquitous aerospace contractor behind.
Boeing got muscled out of the competition to build the next U.S. intercontinental ballistic missile, the Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent. Northrop Grumman, with a captive rocket-propulsion business that Boeing said gave it an unfair cost advantage, is the only bidder for the $25 billion Air Force contract to build and deploy the new missiles, which will replace the Boeing-built Minuteman III fleet.
Northrop Grumman also manufactures the B-2 bomber and will make the B-21 Raider, both of which will eventually replace Boeing’s B-52H as the primary carrier of air-launched U.S. nuclear weapons.
But Boeing is tied closely to the B61 gravity bomb, holding an Air Force contract to develop the guided tail kit that will give the weapon what the Pentagon calls a “modest” capacity to strike targets not directly overflown by carrier aircraft. Boeing is designing the guided tail kit under a four-year, $215 million Air Force contract definitized in 2019.
The civilian National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), part of the Department of Energy, is making the B61-12 itself. The new iteration of the oldest deployed U.S. nuclear weapon, will homogenize four previous versions of the bomb, including the B61-11 and its modest earth-penetrating capability.
However, B61-12 was delayed between one and two years after the NNSA in 2019 announced that commercial capacitors planned for use in the weapon would not last the additional decades over which B61-12 is supposed to remain in the field after the refurb. That pushed the civilian agency’s first production unit milestone — a proof-of-concept article that demonstrates the design is ready for mass production — to the first quarter of 2022 from 2020.
Including the NNSA’s $8.6 billion to $8.7 billion share of the bill, the B61-12 is estimated to cost more than $12.5 billion in civilian and Pentagon funding over 20 years. That includes the cost of the recent delays to the program, which the NNSA pegged at $600 million to $700 million over roughly two years. The civilian agency plans to build some 480 B61-12 bombs, the nongovernmental Federation of American Scientists estimates. Los Alamos is the design agency for B61-12, which is supposed to be deployed to the field starting early this decade, and remain deployed until at least the mid 2040s.
