Tri-Valley CAREs’ Analysis of the National Nuclear Security Administration’s Fiscal Year 2027 Budget Request – Part Three, Livermore Lab’s New Warheads
The Administration released its Fiscal Year 2027 budget request to Congress on Friday, April 3rd. Our initial analysis focused on the historically unheard of $1.5 trillion for “national defense” for a single year and its major elements. Our second analysis covered Livermore Lab’s site-wide budget request. In part three, we dig into three specific weapons in the National Nuclear Security Administration budget and the agency’s plutonium pit production plans.
Introduction
As part of the Trump Administration’s Fiscal Year 2027 budget request, the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) recently posted its Nuclear Weapons Activities budget request, although a few portions of the agency’s budget are yet to become public. Fiscal Year 2027 will begin on October 1, 2026. Congress will debate the budget in committee and on the floor in the coming weeks and months.
Already we see a stark contrast, with people-centered programs on the chopping block to make way for more funding for the Pentagon and nuclear weapons in the NNSA and its weapons labs. In this analysis, we focus on three of the new warheads being designed at Livermore Lab, as well as NNSA’s plans for new plutonium bomb cores, or pits.
Please read on, and use the information provided here in your communications with your members of Congress, other decision makers, your community, and beyond. Together, we can build a stronger movement for peace and environmental justice – and make a difference.
The W87-1: A New Warhead for the New Land-based Sentinel Missile
This will be the first new-design warhead with all new components to be developed since the end of the Cold War and the cessation of nuclear explosive testing in Nevada in 1992. Livermore Lab is the “Lead Lab,” meaning it is the weapons lab in charge of the warhead design. The W87-1 is intended for the new Sentinel Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) being designed by the Pentagon (and already famously over budget).
The NNSA’s Fiscal Year 2027 budget request will fund the W87-1 to continue its Development Engineering activities (called phase 6.3 or phase 3). In this phase, a design has been selected and the now the Lab and its Pentagon counterparts conduct experiments, tests, and analyses to further develop and validate the chosen design. Moreover, Livermore will produce “hardware” in this phase, a term that includes manufacturing actual warhead components for testing.
The Fiscal Year 2027 budget request for the W87-1 warhead is nearly $1 billion dollars; to be precise, $913 million, which is an increase of more than 40% over the current year. The Fiscal Year 2027 budget request’s anticipated “outyear” costs are $14 billion for the next four years, Fiscal 2028-2031.
As astounding as those costs are, the FY 2027 budget request contains a broad hint about a problem with the current development phase that could create additional cost increases in future years. In the request, NNSA says the W87-1 needs to undergo a “re-alignment” and an “alternate qualification strategy” with its Mk21A reentry vehicle, which is the part of the weapon system that separates and reenters the atmosphere to deliver the warhead on target.
The budget documents do not give specifics, but other sources suggest that Livermore Lab and the Pentagon are designing the W87-1 and its reentry vehicle to be MIRVed, meaning that each missile would be able to carry multiple warheads, and that each warhead could then be independently delivered onto separate targets (meaning people, places, lives). MIRVing harkens back to the darkest days of the cold war, and to bring it back into the stockpile now would be costly, destabilizing, and dangerously proliferation-provocative.
Some of the issues for the W87-1 outlined in the budget request include procurement of energetic materials (specialized high explosives) in order to move forward with warhead development. The budget also notes the need for subcritical nuclear tests in Nevada to be able to certify the W87-1. Subcritical nuclear tests use weapons grade plutonium in underground chambers but are configured to stop short of an appreciable nuclear yield, though they may approach the threshold. That subcritical testing is needed in order to certify the W87-1 suggests that the new design contains significantly novel components.
The W87-1 is slated to be the first new warhead to require new plutonium pit (bomb core) production. The first 10 years or more of planned pit production at the Los Alamos Lab in NM is slated to be solely for the W87-1. While pit production costs are addressed below, we note here that putting new pits into the W87-1 may lead to additional technical problems, more cost and accident risks, and, potentially, certification issues that could lead to pressure to resume nuclear explosive (i.e., yield) testing underground in Nevada.
The W80-4: A New Warhead for the New Air-Launched Cruise Missile
Livermore Lab’s new W80-4 warhead has been designed for a new air-launched cruise missile that the Pentagon plans to use to deliver it. This is called the Long-Range Stand Off (LRSO) weapon because pilots will be able to launch a radar evading, precision-guided surprise nuclear attack on an unsuspecting population from more than a thousand miles away. This is a weapon designed for a first use, as a sneak attack is its main utility.
NNSA’s Fiscal Year 2027 budget request will fund the W80-4 to reach warhead First Production Unit (called phase 6.5 or phase 5). It is in this phase that Lab designers and the NNSA production complex sites collaborate to produce the first warheads, which are then analyzed to determine whether they meet the specifications set by the Livermore Lab designers as well as the Pentagon’s military requirements. This is the last step before full production and placement into the stockpile begin (called phase 6.6 or phase 6).
The Fiscal Year 2027 budget request for the W80-4 is $1 billion. Elsewhere in the budget document, there is a note stating that the W80-4 funding also includes a bit more money, up to $211 million, in “carryover dollars,” meaning funds appropriated in prior years and therefore not part of the 2027 request. The budget’s anticipated “outyear” costs total more than $3.8 billion for Fiscal Years 2028-2031.
Some of the issues to be resolved in Fiscal Year 2027, according to the budget request, include procuring sufficient energetic materials (specialized high explosives) to move forward and also the use of the subcritical nuclear testing facility in Nevada to validate the W80-4 design (note that validation and certification, as with the W87-1, are not the same).
The W80-5: A New Variant for Small “Attack Subs”
This new warhead was the product of Trump’s first nuclear posture review in 2018, which proposed bringing back nuclear armed sea-launched cruise missiles. This warhead type was removed from service and placed in storage by President George H.W. Bush in 1991. In the decades since, smaller submarines, known as “attack subs,” have carried conventional, but not nuclear weapons, and the old sea-launched cruise missile warhead has been retired.
The Biden Administration, after funding it for one year, did stop requesting funds for this warhead, but Congress none-the-less appropriated enough money for the program to carry forward – and now it is poised to create a new nuclear weapon that carries specific nuclear dangers. It has been reported that the nuclear version and the conventional cruise missiles will look the same, so a country that detects them in flight will have to make a very quick and dangerous calculation about its retaliation.
In Fiscal Year 2027, funding for the new W80-5 comes entirely from “carryover dollars.” The budget request notes specifically that the W80-5 will get $400 million from the “Working Families Tax Cut Act.” This $400 million is part of nearly $3.9 billion that has been redirected from climate and people-centered projects into NNSA nuclear weapons programs – and is not going into the pockets of taxpayers despite the name. The FY 2027 budget’s predicted “outyear” costs for this new warhead top $5.6 billion during Fiscal Years 2028-2031.
As with the two new warheads listed above, Livermore is the “Lead Lab” for this design. Originally, the W80-5 was simply called the W80-4 ALT SLCM to designate both its nuclear sea-launched capacity and its design similarity to Livermore’s air-launched W80-4 warhead. However, in early stages of development, the new warhead was known to have design challenges in creating a sea-launched version. The new separate designation, W80-5, denotes a broader reliance on the “family” of previously certified W80 warheads and not just the new W80-4 design.
In Fiscal Year 2027, the funding will allow the W80-5 to continue its Engineering Development activities (phase 6.3 or phase 3) which can include manufacturing actual warhead components for testing purposes. The Fiscal Year 2027 budget request touts that the warhead will move forward to complete an “aggressive program schedule,” with deployment beginning in September 2032 and full Initial Operational Capability coming “no later than September 2034.”
Plutonium Pit Production: NNSA’s Plan for New Bomb Cores for New Warheads
As you may know, Tri-Valley CAREs and three colleague organizations sued the NNSA for failing to analyze the full environmental impacts of its plans to ramp up plutonium pit production to 80 or more new bomb cores per year. The full picture includes not only the two proposed production sites, but other sites across the country as well, including Livermore. All of the new pits are for new warheads, there is no scheduled production to replace pits in weapons already in the stockpile.
Bottom line: We won the litigation, and the NNSA has just announced the release of its Draft Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement (PEIS) and the calendar for public hearings. With additional colleagues, we have collaboratively launched a dedicated website – so, for all things pit production PEIS, please CLICK HERE.
There is a connection between our lawsuit victory, the PEIS, and the budget for pit production. While NNSA’s pit production decisions are not final under the National Environmental Policy Act, the agency’s Fiscal Year 2027 budget request contains billions in funding and has a hurry-up vibe. Here are some of the budget’s key details.
The Los Alamos Lab in NM, is one of the two locations at which NNSA plans full scale production. It was tasked with producing at least 30 pits per year, and has recently been charged with being able to produce 60 pits per year due to mounting delays at the Savannah River Site in SC, which is the second production location planned by NNSA. The Savannah River Site is tasked with producing at least 50 pits per year, although numerous construction and other issues are pushing its production dates farther into the future.
While NNSA plans call for 80 or more pits annually by 2030, the Fiscal Year 2027 budget request notably hedges on the date. It states, rather vaguely, that the agency will have “the capability to produce 80 pits per year as close to 2030 as possible.”
The Fiscal Year 2027 budget request for pit production at the Savannah River Site is $2.25 billion, an 87% increase compared to the current year. The Fiscal Year 2027 budget request’s anticipated “outyear” costs for pit production at SRS top $10 billion for Fiscal Years 2028-2031.
The Fiscal Year 2027 budget request for pit production at Los Alamos Lab is $2.4 billion, an 83% increase over the current year. The Fiscal Year 2027 budget request’s anticipated “outyear” costs are $9.2 billion for Fiscal Years 2028-2031.
Livermore Lab is one of a half-dozen additional sites involved in NNSA’s pit production plans. While the Fiscal Year 2027 budget request for Weapons Activities blends budget lines for multiple additional sites in some places, here are some quotes that disclose the nature and scope of Livermore’s involvement in pit production.
The Fiscal Year 2027 budget request touts an increase in a funding line called Enterprise Pit Production Support for “Modernization of equipment at LLNL [Livermore Lab] needed for continued support for pit production and certification.” Further, it notes the “issuance of a vendor contract to stand up a new capability for production of special materials management of the plutonium pit Production Realization Team (PRT) at LLNL.”
In the Fiscal Year 2027 budget request’s Capital Equipment section, it lists a half-dozen new projects, including a new “machining center” in Building 332, Livermore Lab’s main Plutonium Facility and “pit certification support glove boxes.” The budget request also notes that Livermore Lab “conducts and supports training activities to enable LANL’s [Los Alamos Lab] near term acceleration of pit production.”
Taken together, this means that “hands on” risky activities with plutonium will increase at Livermore Lab, which sits on one earthquake fault, and near multiple other faults, in a populated City with 93,000 residents, and well over 7 million people within a 50-mile radius.
Tri-Valley CAREs is committed to ensuring that nuclear weapons funding, which is not well-covered in the mainstream media, does not go forward in secrecy and silence. Our budget analyses are intended to help inform your activism and to foster public outcry and opposition. We invite your continued participation!