The Air Force officially ended the B52-H’s mission to carry nuclear gravity bombs late last year, according to an updated operating military manual making the rounds online this week.
Air Force Instruction 91-111, dated Sept. 5, calls for “removal of B61-7 and B83-1 from B-52H approved weapons configuration.” Hans Kristensen, the Washington-based director of the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists and compiler of annual reports on U.S. and other nuclear arsenals, linked to the Air Force document on Twitter on Monday.
The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), the semiautonomous Department of Energy branch in charge of nuclear weapons, omitted the Boeing [Ba]-built B52-H from a list of approved B61 carrier craft years ago, in the agency’s 2017 budget request.
The aged B52-H —Boeing‘s [BA] big toe-hold in the nuclear triad if it does indeed lose out on significant work building the Ground Based Strategic Deterrent — will still carry AGM-86C air-launched cruise missile and its replacement, the Long Range Standoff Weapon.
However, September’s Air Force instruction would leave the B-2 bomber as the only active carrier of gravity bombs — at least until the Air Force certifies F-35 Block 4 aircraft to carry a pair of refurbished B61-12 gravity bomb. That will take at least until the mid 2020s, according to the service’s 2019 budget request.
The B83 gravity bomb, a megaton class weapon, is in semi-retirement, though the Trump administration has opted to keep the powerful bomb in war-ready shape until the NNSA and the Air Force deploy the B61-12: a homogenization of four existing versions of the oldest deployed U.S. nuclear weapon.
The NNSA had planned to start delivering the new version of B61, which is supposed to have a modest earth-penetrating capability, in 2025, but the date may slip now that the agency has discovered problems with capacitors needed for the weapon.
The capacitor problem will delay production of the bomb’s first production unit — a sort of final draft of the intended war-usable design that will be taken apart to prove it is ready for mass production — by a year or more to 2021 or 2021, senior managers at NNSA headquarters in Washington disclosed last year.
Kristensen estimates the NNSA will build 480 B61-12 bombs.