The head of Air Force Global Strike Command is not concerned that the next-generation warhead for the next-generation nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missile will be delayed because of a projected delay with one of the two plutonium pit-production plants that will supply the new warhead’s core.
In a webcast address to the public and press Thursday morning, Gen. Timothy Ray said he foresaw no delay for deploying the planned Ground Based Strategic Deterrent (GBSD) silo-based ICBMs with W87-1 warheads: a type that will require new plutonium pits to be cast at a pair of factories planned by the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA).
The NNSA last week, in its fiscal year 2022 budget request, said the larger of the two planned pit plants, at the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C., will not be ready until 2035, instead of 2030 as previously hoped, and will cost about $11 billion to start up instead of the roughly $4.5 billion previously forecast.
Ray said the service and the NNSA can “fix” any issues that crop up if the South Carolina pit plant is delayed as forecast. Before the projected delays to the Savannah River plant, the NNSA planned to make 30 pits annually at Los Alamos starting in 2036 and 50 annually at Savannah River by 2030 for a total of 80 annually by 2030. Both planned pit plants are supposed to be able to temporarily cast 80 pits annually, the NNSA has said.
The Air Force plans to start replacing the current fleet of Minuteman III ICBMs with GBSD missiles starting in 2030. W87-1 and its new pits will not have to be ready by then because the first crop of GBSD missiles with use W87-0 warheads: weapons from the current Minuteman III fleet that will be qualified for use aboard the replacement missiles.
Ray declined to say when the first qualification flights for GBSD with W87-0 might be, though an Air Force officer has previously said qualification flights could start in the early 2020s.
Meanwhile, the Air Force and the Navy are not presently collaborating on designs for a planned nuclear-tipped sea-launched cruise missile, Ray said Thursday. In its 2022 budget request, the NNSA published a plan for supplying warheads for the sea-launched cruise missile — a plan that assumes the proposed delivery vehicle uses a variant of the W80-4 warhead slated for use on the Air Force’s next air-launched cruse missile, the Long Range Standoff weapon. The Air Force’s missile is supposed to deploy around 2030 or so.