The National Nuclear Security Administration did a generally good job estimating its share of the cost to upgrade the B61-12 nuclear gravity bomb, but the agency has yet to explain a roughly $2.5 billion gap between its forecast and one provided by a nominally independent intra-agency office, according to the Government Accountability Office.
The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) estimates the B6-12 life extension program will cost the agency about $7.6 billion and take until fiscal 2025 to complete. On the other hand, the agency’s internal Cost Estimation and Program Evaluation office said the program will cost around $10 billion to complete by fiscal 2027, according to a May 31 GAO review.
The GAO gathered material for the the report between 2017 and 2018. The costs quoted do not include the Department of Defense’s share of the B61-12 work.
The NNSA’s official estimate aggregates cost and schedule ballparks from contractors at the six agency sites working on B61-12, while the Cost Estimation and Program Evaluation office derived its estimate with a model that calculates total costs based on expenses incurred to date.
The B61-12 life extension program began development and engineering in 2015, but the NNSA and the Pentagon had been studying an upgrade for the aged weapon for years before that.
According to the GAO, the B61-12 program office decided not to change its official cost estimate for the program after meeting with the Cost Estimation and Program Evaluation office.
“NNSA management met with officials from both offices to reconcile the estimates but did not document the rationale for adopting the program estimate unchanged,” congressional auditors wrote.
The B61-12 life-extension program will homogenize four versions of the nuclear-armed gravity bomb into a single weapon, which would be carried by five different Air Force aircraft. The B61-12 life extension program had a nearly $790-million budget in 2018. The White House requested almost $795 million for 2019, and the House and Senate Appropriations committees matched that figure in budget bills approved in May.
