Nuclear threats from China, Russia drive work on W93 for submarine-launched missiles by 2030s.
The United States is building the first new nuclear warhead in 40 years but will do so without nuclear testing, Energy Department officials told Congress on Wednesday.
The W93 warhead will be used on submarine-launched ballistic missiles and is being built with $19.8 billion requested by the National Nuclear Security Agency, or NNSA, for weapons in fiscal 2025, according to Senate testimony by Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm and NNSA Administrator Jill Hruby.
The W93 has been in an early phase of feasibility and design at Los Alamos National Laboratory since May 2022 and is "on track" for production beginning in the mid-2030s, the two officials said in prepared testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee.
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2024/apr/18/pentagon-speeding-work-first-new-nuclear-warhead-4/

Dec. 1942 formation of Manhattan Project. Aug. 1945 drop bomb on Hiroshima. Has nuclear bomb development become that much more difficult in 80 years?

Someone will be along shortly to repeatedly and aggressively inform you that all the old white guys who used to work on this stuff are either retired or have been fired and the severely handicapped, mentally ill diversity hires that replaced them can't be trusted to change a light bulb. Much less assemble a strategic weapons system.

I have seen the memo but 10+ years from development to production?

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After it goes 4 times over budget you'll get nothing and like it!

Such is what happens when the military-industrial complex rots away.

Probably should rename it the The DEI warhead.

You might seem smug and snarky now, but you try to develop a green, biodegradable, carbon neutral, ethically sourced, organic, farm to table, not tested on animals, 100% from recycled materials, thermonuclear weapon.

This will end well.

Compare deliver methods from 1945 and 2024, as well as bomb yield and physical size.

Thats exactly what I was wondering. If we have a couple of hundred old-school hydrogen style nukes (more powerful than Hioshima) on their way to an adversary, so that 2, 3  or 10 get thru their defense, that doesn't kill them good enough?

Look at thr havoc just 2 collapsing buildings in NYC did to  our society!

They can model it off of the Bezos’ rocket ship

2030s?

WW3 will be over by then.

These will be the replacements for the ones used.

That is super cool.

Has more to do with grift and money laundering. The scale of grift and money laundering is directly proportional to the increase in the length of development time. You know, the military industrial complex.  

I'll be surprised if the human species makes it another 100 years.

One of the things that most Americans don't know is that Slick Willy stopped the production of nuclear weapons.  He transitioned the objective of the nuclear weapons complex from one that were producing and upgrading the weapons to that and an Environmental cleanup  project.

The only things the DOE have been doing is to maintain the existing stock and dismantling the complex.  That is why it will take several years to get back into production.

People say this a lot. But killing every singe human on Earth demands a methodical nature that I don't even think AI can manage. You don't get to the top of the Darwinian heap by being a complete pushover.

Moreover just because big parts of modern civilization are consciously committing suicide that doesn't mean everyone will.

It will be obsolete by the time it goes into production.
How can we ever win a war if it takes so long to build/replace everything?

Yes. We're no longer satisfied with a 10k lb physics experiment that has to be hand assembled before use and has zero safeguards.

Then throw in the nonsense of trying to build one of the most complicated pieces of engineering in human history that has to work perfectly without ever actually getting to test it in real life.

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No live testing?


Jesus H. Christ.    

that true just about everywhere with every thing, sorry your girl lost!

The journalist that wrote this must have a macabre sense of humor.

In 1941, the US imposed an oil embargo on Japan, which was heavily dependent on imports for its energy needs. This, along with Japan's aggression in Asia, including the occupation of French Indochina (now Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia), led to the infamous attack on Pearl Harbor.

Fast forward to today, and US Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm is in Japan, now a strong ally, exploring clean energy solutions like liquefied hydrogen carriers that we can supply.

Meanwhile, the Washington Times reports that the US is working on a new nuclear warhead for the first time in 40 years. It's a stark reminder of the past, when the US dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The irony is not lost here. We've gone from being adversaries to allies with Japan, but the challenges remain elsewhere.
Nuclear weapons have played a significant role in diplomacy, serving to preserve the supremacy of the US dollar and American standard of living.

It doesn't take that long to design a weapon.  

We had a 150 lb (give or take) atomic demolition charge in the late 40's only a few years after the gadget was tested.

Just curious how old our current warheads are - I have my doubt they are less than 40 years old.  What is the shelf life of all the components.  I know a 40 year old jeep is not going to run no matter how you set it aside for storage.

2077 can't get here soon enough.

It would be pretty damn easy to build a nuke (or most anything) if it's never going to be tested.

That or we just aren't dedicating enough money to the process.......gotta fund the FSA

To be fair we lost the ability to do much in space too.



Hell, people can't even figure out what gender they are anymore!

Plenty of good reading on the topic if you were actually interested.

https://discover.lanl.gov/publications/national-security-science/2021-summer/w93/

And they'd probably be right.

Which used sensitive high explosive and had zero PAL or USG or other safeguards to the design. So not remotely anything like current nukes.

This is like saying, "hell, it only took 117 days for the P-51 to go from the drawing board to first flight, what's taking that 6th Gen fighter so damn long?!"

WW4 will be fought with sticks and stones...

I'm not seeing 50....

I disagree.   We already understand and use insensitive explosives and permissive action links in existing weapons.  We don't need to invent them again.

Edit:  Your link is dead.  If they are as good at designing a weapon at Los Alamos as a web page I understand why it is taking so long.

2nd edit:  Here is a link to info on the W93 that works.

https://armscontrolcenter.org/the-w93-warhead/

True, but you left out vegan and gluten free.

The current stockpile is cared for and curated like swiss watches getting service. Limited life components are serviced regularly, and there is a very active stockpile test program that monitors and ensures the non-limited life components are still functioning as designed and built.

Remember, these warheads are built with literally gold wiring and circuitry so they are less susceptible to corrosion or degradation of conductivity over time.

It wouldn't be tested on animals. Its not 1953 anymore.

Nuclear tech is very carbon neutral. Depending on what scientist you talk to.

Also it seems likely that these will be built from the enduring stockpile. So they would be recycled from old bombs.

Its not going to be organic though.

The % of those guys has dropped massively, as has the general industrial capacity, skilled workers for same , work ethic for much of the country , being able to supply the war machine with war materials very questionable, not to mention supply enough combat troops, 1/2 the eligible citizens who could serve would be in Canada the day after a draft was announced, and it would take a draft to fight any serious war make no mistake.

Would that conflict really be World War Four? Or would it be the Unga Tribe trying to slaughter the Bunga Tribe over possession of a waterway or an idol or some other moronic reason?

World Wars demand sailing ships at the least. Its been argued that the Seven Years War was the first world war. Full on industrialisation seems to be more conducive with supplying the resources needed for a full on global conflict.

I was literally looking at the link before I posted it...and I'm looking at it again right now to verify. Any inability to see it is on your end, not LANL's.

https://discover.lanl.gov/publications/national-security-science/2021-summer/w93/

The examples of IHE and PAL and USG were to show that your example of the timeline required for devices that were created in the years after Trinity have nothing to do with LANL's current design-to-field timeline.

Gun type uranium fission warheads, - about 15 KTs
Implosion type plutonium warheads - about 22 KTs
Boosted fission warheads - about 120 to 400 KTs
Staged nuclear weapons - first proof of design went 10 MT, but with a mass to large to move. Later engineered to small MIRV sizes after alot of designing and testing
TZAR Bomba went 50 MT, could have been 100 MT. 1961 design so big that it required the Tupolev bombers fuselage to be cut away.

No testing meant that most of the Polaris A1 missiles that went to sea on the George Washington subs were DUDS.

It's not that straightforward to get the various physics demons to play together. The NORKs can testify to that.

Los Alamos actually had the fewest fizzles.

Stupid.

As we tell everyone else they can’t have one.

BRB…Getting a can of beans and hot sauce. Shouldn’t be long now.

ETA: Don’t know if it will be ethically tested. I will test weapon on my cats that like to sit under  my chair when I eat. If they run away I will consider it a success.

62.5# if you are just talking nuclear explosive package. That was the W54-0. There was a test article that was lighter. (And, I wonder what just the physics package of the W79-1 weighed. You cut all the extraneous shit off of that, that was simply an amazing system.)

It does take that long to design a weapon that meets 2024 and beyond specifications. To purely put mouse to CAD and come up with something? No, the weapon intern program does that each class. The problem is, the way legacy weapons were designed and put to production was that they were coming up with stop-the-presses innovations as fast as they could get them out of the door. No one I read about or talked to would have expected a certified design outside of the benchmark systems would be around in ten years, much less fifty.

The current iteration is being designed to be around... forever, and that's a mighty long time, I'm here to tell you.

I am also here to sadly inform you this is not a new design. There are three parts to a US special weapon. All they are doing is taking a previously-certified secondary design and mating it to a previously-certified primary design. This is how they end-run not full-scale testing in hot and cold weather. It's a sham.



No one can truthfully answer that outside a few.

There, again are three parts to a US special weapon. There is the primary, the secondary, and then Everything Else. The last certified design was the W90 in about 1998. All the upgrades they have done have been in the Everything Else department. The LEP (Life Extension Programs) have been... problematic. They cannot make pits or certain components of the secondaries without dozens of waivers and other end runs.

The US has not made a qual-1 pit since 1992. (You were going to say, 1989 when Rocky Flats was wrongfully shut down; did you know they decided the best way to clean it out was to finish their backlog of material-in-process? Years later lol).

The US made a handful (number not size) of pits at LANL for one program. Whatever happened there, it was so bad they never really resumed production. They SAY they are, but they have basically according to everything they are putting out are in hot dress rehearsal mode.

So, you may be staring at a row of w80-1's. The case may be from the 70's. The electronics may have been refurbished at kansas city / honeywell once or twice in the last two decades. The secondary is probably the same one stuffed into it at pantex, with some new Oak Ridge Y12 non-nuclear ingredients because they can't figure out how to deal with moisture and migration of certain materials over the course of decades. Primary is the same one beat in essentially an iron mill, rolled, blanked, cupped, plasma coated then welded up in Colorado. New explosives though, they make that on site at px now.

Essentially, would you fuck Dolly Parton, something grown in the Old Days with a lot of new bolt ons, because that's what's in those nose cones.

what was the question again?



lol

It is amazing how the papers and their cleared writers discuss UGT before and after they had full-scale testing taken from them. They still cannot simulate an entire end-to-end thermonuclear burn in 3d. Not enough computing power. Any of them that tell you they can at least do segments with high fidelity ask them what 'twiddling knobs' are, and why are they still necessary.

Corrosion and migration is a serious problem. Old timers can tell you all about cleaning spalling and exudate in second gen US specials. Materials morphing in constant radiation fields is yet another. Even with TERRAZO, no one knows what an aged pit is going to really do.



mmmmmm

the W47... yeah. You are right.

I do not believe NK has fired a legit nuke yet. Tired of arguing it though. I absolutely agree if you have the material, (and that's simple enough to get if you have a research reactor), and the time, and not worrying about a tomahawk coming through your window, yes, low to medium margin weapons designs are very well within anyone's grasp. Almost.

LANL had the fewest because they fearfully clung to 'round is beautiful'. All the most elegant, amazing, mindbending designs (like the w79) came from LLNL and people who dared to dream like Johnny Foster Jr.



It's... fucking genius.

You aren't a Real Country unless you have a nuke. Made dozens of places give up the relatively easy BW/CW programs and beg for nuke production stuff, zillions of dollars they didn't have, sent their kids to the US to nuc school so we'd know who was working on what...

Countries that come close get bought off. Taiwan. Brazil. sud africa. Why haven't we seen real chemical attacks? Ten thousand times easier to do. Because that's bush league shit. Nuke or nothing.