The W89 was an American

thermonuclear warhead A thermonuclear weapon, fusion weapon or hydrogen bomb (H bomb) is a second-generation nuclear weapon design. Its greater sophistication affords it vastly greater destructive power than first-generation nuclear bombs, a more compact size, a low ...

design intended for use on the

AGM-131 SRAM II The AGM-131 SRAM II ("Short-Range Attack Missile") was a nuclear air-to-surface missile intended as a replacement for the AGM-69 SRAM. The solid-fueled missile was to be dropped from a B-1B Lancer, carry the W89 warhead and have a range of 400&n ...

air to ground nuclear missile and the

UUM-125 Sea Lance The UUM-125 Sea Lance, known early in development as the ''Common ASW Standoff Weapon'', was to be an American standoff anti-submarine missile, initially intended to carry a W89 thermonuclear warhead. It was conceived in 1980 as a successor to ...

anti-submarine missile. What was to become the W89 design was awarded to the

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) is a federal research facility in Livermore, California, United States. The lab was originally established as the University of California Radiation Laboratory, Livermore Branch in 1952 in response ...

in the mid-1980s. It entered Phase 2A technical definition and cost study in November 1986. It entered Phase 3 development engineering and was assigned the numerical designation W89 in January 1988. The W89 design was a diameter by long weapon, with a weight of and yield of 200

kiloton TNT equivalent is a convention for expressing energy, typically used to describe the energy released in an explosion. The is a unit of energy defined by that convention to be , which is the approximate energy released in the detonation of a t ...

s. The design was canceled in September 1991 along with the SRAM II missile, prior to production of any units, though some test devices may have been manufactured.

Reused plutonium pits

According to one source, the plutonium cores (technically known as pits) of the W89 warheads were planned to be reused from existing

W68 The W68 warhead was the warhead used on the UGM-73 Poseidon SLBM missile. It was developed in the late 1960s at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Specifications The W68 weighed and had an official design yield of . The design was revol ...

warhead pits, which were surplus at the time.

Reliable Replacement Warhead link

Lawrence Livermore engineers have hinted in prior press reports that the

Reliable Replacement Warhead The Reliable Replacement Warhead (RRW) was a proposed new American nuclear warhead design and bomb family that was intended to be simple, reliable and to provide a long-lasting, low-maintenance future nuclear force for the United States. Initiated ...

design that they were preparing might be based on the W89 warhead design. On March 2, 2007, the NNSA announced that the

RRW design had been selected for the initial RRW production version. One of the selection reasons given was that the LLNL proposed design was more closely tied to historical underground tested warhead designs. It was described by Thomas P. D'Agostino, acting head of the

National Nuclear Security Administration The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) is a United States federal agency responsible for safeguarding national security through the military application of nuclear science. NNSA maintains and enhances the safety, security, and e ...

, as having been based on a design which was test fired in the 1980s, but never entered service. LLNL staff have previously hinted in the press that LLNL was considering a design entry based on the tested but never deployed W89 design. The W89 warhead had been proposed as a

W88 The W88 is an American thermonuclear warhead, with an estimated yield of , and is small enough to fit on MIRVed missiles. The W88 was designed at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in the 1970s. In 1999, the director of Los Alamos who had pres ...

warhead replacement as early as 1991.An Assessment of US Nuclear Weapons and related Nuclear Test requirements: a post-Bush analysis
, URCL-LR-109503, R.E. Kidder, 1991. Accessed March 2, 2007Report to Congress: Assessment of the Safety of US Nuclear Weapons and Related Nuclear Test Requirements
, URCL-LR-107454, R.E. Kidder, 1991, Accessed March 2, 2007 The W89 design was already equipped with all then-current safety features, including

insensitive high explosive Insensitive munitions are munitions that are designed to withstand stimuli representative of severe but credible accidents. The current range of stimuli are shock (from bullets, fragments and shaped charge jets), heat (from fires or adjacent ther ...

s, fire-resistant pits, and advanced detonator safety systems. The W89 was also reportedly designed using recycled pits from the earlier

nuclear weapon program, recoated in

vanadium Vanadium is a chemical element with the symbol V and atomic number 23. It is a hard, silvery-grey, malleable transition metal. The elemental metal is rarely found in nature, but once isolated artificially, the formation of an oxide layer ( pas ...

to provide the temperature resistance.''Pit Tubes and Pit Re-Use at Pantex'', i
Plutonium: the last Five Years
, Blue Ridge Environmental Defense League, 2001, accessed March 2, 2007 The W89 warhead was test fired in the 1980s.

References

External links

University of California 1989 nuclear weapons labs status report

at the Nuclear Weapon Archive a
nuclearweaponarchive.org
{{United States nuclear devices Nuclear warheads of the United States Abandoned military projects of the United States

Reused plutonium pits

Reliable Replacement Warhead link

See also

References

External links