First New US Low-Yield Submarine-Launched Ballistic Missile Warhead Produced

[jpak]

https://thediplomat.com/2019/03/first-new-us-low-yield-submarine-launched-ballistic-missile-warhead-produced/

The U.S. National Nuclear Security Administration—the agency under the U.S. Department of Energy responsible for the production and maintenance of the country’s nuclear arsenal—announced that the first production unit of a new low-yield warhead was produced on February 22.

The warhead, known as the W76 mod 2 or W76-2, was produced at the Pantex Plant in Amarillo, Texas, and will be used to provide a new low-yield submarine-launched ballistic missile (SLBM) capability called for by the Trump administration’s 2018 Nuclear Posture Review.

The warhead will be another option for the UGM-133A Trident II D5 SLBM. Currently, the D5 SLBM is capable of carrying up to eight warheads of either the W76 mod 0 or W76 mod 1, each of which has a 100 kiloton yield. Alternatively, some D5s can carry up to eight W88 warheads, which have a 455 kiloton yield each.

The precise yield of the W76 mod 2 is not known, but it is thought to be in the range of less than 10 kilotons. U.S. SLBMs are carried by Ohio-class ballistic missile submarines.

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[dalton99a]

1. .

[getagrip_already]

2. Oh wow! A Diet Nuke!!!!!!

Is the thought of destroying an entire city too much to approve? Well, look no further, use the new and improved Diet-Nuke to target just a neighborhood or maybe just a small town. It's the perfect win-win!

There must be a jingle that can be used to market this.

[Girard442]

3. Hey, let's deploy a weapon that makes it more likely we all die.

Because the last person to be alive in a bunker somewhere is the winner. Right?

[DFW]

4. The lower the yield, the more likely some nut case president will be to use one

Well? Is our president a nut case?

Uh-oh. Maybe the subject needs to be changed. I need to be able to sleep at night.

Besides, Republicans are cowards. They never attack places where they are sure the people there will shoot back. So, instead of sending one of these things into North Korea or Iran, Trump will probably attack Paraguay. He can always come up with his excuse later. Republicans are good at that, too. Dick Cheney could dictate the text for Trump's secretary.

[jpak]

5. Ding Ding Ding!

yup

[soryang]

6. The major "advance" to the W76-1 warhead was the "superfuze" which tripled warhead lethality

In effect, it changed the US submarine based ICBM force into a first strike capability. Limited Russian detection and response times estimated to be half of that US capabilities, readily disabled with a preliminary air burst, render any US submerged launch in certain maritime regions, a potential cause of a preemptive Russian nuclear response before the nature of the detected launch is ascertained.

https://thebulletin.org/2017/03/how-us-nuclear-force-modernization-is-undermining-strategic-stability-the-burst-height-compensating-super-fuze/

Under these circumstances, is it assumed that the new smaller warheads, W76-2, can be launched with impunity, because of a theoretical overwhelming superiority in US first strike capabilities? How does the potential adversary even know what sort of warhead is on the delivery vehicle when it is on the way to its intended target?

The superfuze enhances enhances the destructive capability of the warhead by a factor of three, so even a 7 kiloton warhead would have the destructive power of warheads used on Japan in WWII, in military terms.