The Pentagon is preparing to build its first new nuclear warhead in 40 years as a means to “keep pace with future adversary threats” as tensions continue to rise around the world.
The W93 warhead, which will be designed to be launched from submarines, is part of a $19.3 billion budget requested by the National Nuclear Security Agency in 2025. Production will begin in the mid-2030s.
The disclosure came as part of prepared remarks by Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm and NNSA Administrator Jill Hruby in Senate testimony this week.
Feasibility studies on W93 have been underway since 2022 at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, the birthplace of the atomic bomb. All American warheads begin their lives there, in a plutonium pit built by engineers in the 1980s.
The new warhead is based on existing designs and will therefore not need to be tested before being put into action. President George HW Bush signed an order in the 1990s banning underground nuclear testing.
The W93 will be carried on the Navy’s new Columbia-class submarines, as well as the existing Ohio-class submarines, shown here. The new ships that cost a total of 109.8 billion dollars
Unarmed D5 missile launched from USS West Virginia
“The program is being carried out in parallel with the UK Warhead Replacement program and continues our coordination through the US-UK Mutual Defense Agreement,” Granholm said.
The W93 will be carried on the Navy’s new Columbia-class submarines, as well as existing Ohio-class submarines. The new ships, 12 in total, will cost $109.8 billion.
Among the more sophisticated features of the warhead are the insensitive high explosives used for firing. It will also have a longer range than the current W76 and W88 warheads.
In addition to the W93, DOD will spend nearly $3 billion modernizing other warheads currently in the military arsenal.
The United States will spend more than $750 billion over the next 10 years replacing nearly every component of its nuclear defenses, including new stealth bombers, submarines and land-based ICBMs in the country’s most ambitious nuclear weapons effort since the Manhattan Project. .
It has been nearly eight decades since a nuclear weapon was fired in war. But military leaders warn that peace may not last.
They say the United States has entered an uncomfortable era of global threats that include a nuclear weapons buildup by China and Russia’s repeated threats to use a nuclear bomb on Ukraine. They say America’s aging weapons need to be replaced to ensure they work.
‘What we want to do is preserve our way of life without fighting major wars,’ Marvin Adams, director of weapons programs at the Department of Energy, said in 2023.
US Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm pictured with National Nuclear Security Administration head Jill Hruby, the pair announced the development of the W93 this week.
Since 2022, feasibility studies on W93 have been carried out at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, the birthplace of the atomic bomb.
“None of our tools really work to deter aggressors unless we have the foundation of nuclear deterrence.”
By treaty, the United States maintains 1,550 active nuclear warheads and the government plans to modernize all of them.
At the same time, military missile technicians, scientists and teams must ensure that older weapons remain functional until new ones are installed.
The new program has also drawn criticism from experts and nonproliferation advocates who say the current arsenal, though weathered, is sufficient to meet U.S. needs. Upgrading it will also be expensive, they say.
“They are going to have extreme difficulty meeting these deadlines,” Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, a nonpartisan group focused on nuclear and conventional arms control, said in 2023.
“And the costs are going to increase.”
He warned that the extensive improvements could also have the unintended effect of pushing Russia and China to upgrade and expand their arsenals.
In February, U.S. officials expressed concern that Russia was developing a type of nuclear weapon that could disable U.S. satellites in outer space.
Analysts who follow Russia’s space programs say the space threat is likely not a nuclear warhead but rather a high-powered device that requires nuclear power to carry out a series of attacks on satellites.
These could include signal jammers, weapons that can blind imaging sensors, or, a more serious possibility, electromagnetic pulses (EMP) that could burn out the electronics of all satellites within a given orbital region.
The Kremlin has rejected accusations that it is developing this type of weapon.