Congress wants the Department of Energy to slide about $5.5 million from the W80 cruise-missile warhead’s maintenance budget into a Pentagon study focused on a design for a nuclear-tipped Sea Launch Cruise Missile, according to the compromise 2020 spending bill that would fund the agency through September.
The Trump administration proposed studying the Sea Launched Cruise Missile in the 2018 Nuclear Posture Review released a year into President Donald Trump’s first term. Neither the Pentagon nor the DoE’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) have speculated publicly about the missile’s design, but a Pentagon official last year said
the proposed weapon would require an industrial and interagency effort similar in scope to what it will take to field the proposed Long Range Standoff Weapon air-launched cruise missile.
The Pentagon plans to field the Long Range Standoff Weapon beginning some time after 2025. The NNSA is refurbishing the missile’s planned warhead, W80, under the W80-4 life extension program expected to turn out a first production unit warhead around 2025.
The NNSA requested some $86 million for W80 Stockpile Services in 2020 and would get about $80 million, under the further consolidated appropriations act the House handily approved Wednesday 280-138. Stockpile Services is a catchall for ongoing maintenance and evaluation NNSA does each year on all active nuclear weapons, and some quasi-retired weapons, such as the B83 megaton-capable gravity bomb.