The Department of Energy will probably deliver the first nuclear warhead for the next U.S. air-launched cruise missile a year later than the agency’s official fiscal 2025 forecast, according to an internal report.
The department’s semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) is “highly unlikely” to complete the Long-Range Standoff Weapon’s W80-4 warhead — a refurbished version of the W80 used on current air-launched cruise missiles— by that target date, the NNSA’s nominally independent Cost Estimating and Program Evaluation (CEPE) office stated in an eight-page memo dated January 2019.
A 2026 first production unit is “more likely” for the W80-4, according to the CEPE memo. Starting delivery then would still allow the NNSA to deliver the first of the warheads in time to meet the Air Force’s goal of developing a war-ready Long-Range Standoff Weapon by 2030, the office said.
The memo says the NNSA is overly optimistic about how long it will take to manufacture certain non-nuclear W80-4 components, given that it took the agency years longer to churn out similar parts for the B61-12 nuclear gravity bomb that is now nearing the end of a planned 20-year life extension.
According to CEPE, the NNSA thinks it will take about six years to finish the W80-4’s firing set assembly and warhead control unit, which are respectively two years and one year longer than it took the agency’s Honeywell-managed Kansas City National Security Complex to finish similar components for the B61-12.
Meeting the accelerated schedule for W80-4 would require “a rate of program execution that has not historically been demonstrated by the complex and is therefore highly unlikely,” the CEPE office said in the memo, a copy of which the NNSA provided to Weapons Complex Morning Briefing. The non-nuclear components described in the report are different from the balky commercial-off-the-shelf components that have delayed B61-12’s first production unit beyond NNSA’s scheduled fiscal 2020 date.
