Y-12 Plant Resumes W-76 Warhead Upgrades

The Y-12 nuclear weapons facility in Tennessee has resumed production of parts for W-76 nuclear warheads, the Knoxville News Sentinel reported today (see GSN, Sept. 4, 2007).

“Current production issues at Y-12 associated with the W-76 Life Extension Program have been resolved,” U.S. National Nuclear Security Administration spokesman Steven Wyatt said in an e-mail, referring to classified technical obstacles that delayed work for several months.

The refurbishing program aims to extend the life of the warheads, which fit onto Trident submarine-launched ballistic missiles.  The program is set to meet its first milestone “late this year,” Wyatt said.  The original deadline was June 2007.

Wyatt called the program “a long-term, multiyear effort,” but added that its relevance could be affected by the fate of the contested Reliable Replacement Warhead program as well as other polices addressing the size of the U.S. nuclear arsenal.

The RRW program is meant to produce new warheads that could replace Cold War-era weapons.  The first to be produced would be a submarine-launched warhead.

“Fielding an RRW would mean that even fewer of the W-76s would need to be refurbished because we would no longer need to keep extra weapons as a hedge against possible future technical problems,” Wyatt said (Frank Munger, Knoxville News Sentinel, May 14).

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