U.S. Upgrading W-76 Warheads

While U.S. and Russian negotiators work on a new treaty to sharply reduce strategic nuclear weapons, the Navy is upgrading a 20-year-old submarine-launched warhead to enable it to destroy any remaining super-hardened Russian missile silos, according to government officials and private analysts.

More than 2,000 of the aging W-76 warheads will soon be going through the Energy Department’s service life extension program to be put back in submarines beginning in 2005.

Each warhead now has a destructive power more than three times greater than that of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945. After they are refurbished with new arming, fusing and firing systems, the W-76 warheads will have a greater destructive effect on their buried, reinforced targets than when they first went to sea in 1977.

As the number of strategic land- and sub-based intercontinental ballistic missiles is reduced, “the U.S. must maintain the number of hard-target killers we have on alert,” a senior Pentagon officer with responsibility for nuclear weapons said recently. Upgrading the W-76 warheads is in line with that need, he said.

At a conference on the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty conference in New York this week, delegates from the signatory countries are expected to raise questions about the upgrading of the U.S. stockpile. The delegates will review the records of Russia and the United States in moving toward elimination of nuclear weapons, as envisioned by the 1968 treaty.

Although the United States and Russia have both ratified START II (strategic arms reduction treaty) and are working on START III, both nations are expected to draw criticism from other signatory countries for not disarming fast enough and for keeping stockpiles of thousands of warheads.

The Russian decision to store rather than destroy 20,000 tactical nuclear weapons it has withdrawn from deployment will be a subject of concern in the New York conference. Nations in Asia and Europe, where such weapons could be used, are particularly critical of Russia’s refusal to destroy the battlefield nuclear weapons. Then-Russian President Mikhail Gorbachev took the weapons out of deployment in Eastern Europe in response to the United States’ unilateral withdrawal of U.S. tactical weapons from Europe and Asia.

Delegates to the conference are also expected to complain about U.S. plans to refurbish and upgrade its 6,000 deployed strategic warheads, such as the W-76, and Washington’s intention to maintain in an “inactive reserve” weapons withdrawn from deployment when START II’s limit of 3,500 warheads goes into effect.

Questions will also be raised about Washington’s “war reserve” of 4,000 plutonium triggers, taken from dismantled weapons, which could be converted into nuclear warheads within a year. Triggers from U.S. tactical weapons withdrawn from Europe in 1991 are in that reserve.

Secretary of State Madeleine Albright is to speak to the New York conference and release a report defending the U.S. approach to disarmament. State Department spokesman James Rubin told reporters Thursday that “the United States has led the way among the nuclear powers in trying to reverse the nuclear arms race.”

The START III negotiations, which got underway in Geneva last week, are based on an agreement reached in Helsinki in 1997 between President Clinton and former Russian President Boris Yeltsin. The two leaders not only agreed to reduce deployed warheads to between 2,000 and 2,500 but also to take steps to destroy “strategic nuclear warheads.”

Russia plans to make an issue of U.S. stockpile practices based on the Helsinki agreement, according to government sources. The Russians believe one flaw in START II was that it allowed the United States to store excess warheads rather than destroy them, according to Alexander Pikayev, an arms expert at the Carnegia Endowment for International Peace.

U.S. stockpile practices have drawn little attention on Capitol Hill or from the public at large.