Boeing [BA] has received a roughly $125 million contract modification to procure some long-lead components for the guided tail kit the company is making for the B61-12 nuclear gravity bomb, the Department of Defense said Friday.
The contract for tail-kit parts is now worth a total of about $130 million, according to a Pentagon procurement notice. The service cleared Boeing to start building the B61-12 tail kit in December after about six years of development, including flight tests.
After procuring these components for the war-ready tail kit, Boeing will start assembling the tail kit itself in 2020: the same year the Department of Energy’s semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) expects to produce its first war-ready B61-12 bomb. The agency in October started work on the first production unit of the gravity bomb, a homogenized version of four older B61 variants.
The NNSA will build the bomb’s assembly and explosive package, but the Air Force must build the B61-12’s guided tail-kit assembly, which helps control the weapon during free fall. The Air Force is also responsible for integrating the NNSA-made bomb with carrier aircraft, including versions of the B-2, the planned B-21, F-15, F-16, F-35, and the German-made PA-200, according to the Air Force Nuclear Weapons Center.
Including Air Force and NNSA work, the bomb will cost between roughly $11.5 billion and $13 billion over about 20 years, according to NNSA and Pentagon documents.
The nonprofit Federation of American Scientists estimates the NNSA will build 480 B61-12 bombs.