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    I recently blogged about Congressional hearings that were called to consider problems with new U.S. nuclear weapons programs. It appears that faulty electrical components that were purchased on the retail marked for electronics resulted in huge cost overruns and delays. I now have more details on those problems to share.
    Congress and the Trump administration revealed yesterday that a five dollar electrical component used on two types of new nuclear weapons will require at least seven hundred and twenty five million dollars in fixes. Tests in April of this year showed that a glitch in the cheap capacitor used in both the B61-12 gravity bomb program and the program to modify W88 submarine launched warheads. The problem had been made public earlier this year but the low cost of the capacitor and the high cost of dealing with the problem have not been made public before.
     This situation makes clear that there are serious problems with the increasing use of the off the shelf components from the retail market being used in highly classified nuclear weapons programs. Congress is worried that the problems encountered in the B61-12 and W88 projects may be recur in other weapons programs.
    A problem with a small, simple part in a very complex nuclear weapon can trigger a cascade of effects that require significant and expensive changes. As one official said, “It’s not like changing a spark plug.”  
      It is estimated that fixing the problem caused by the cheap capacitor for the B61-12 will cost between six hundred million dollars and seven hundred million dollars. The cost for fixing the problem with the W88 program is estimated to cost between one hundred twenty five million dollars and one hundred fifty million dollars. So the total cost for fixes to these two programs will be between seven hundred twenty five million dollars and eight hundred fifty million dollars.
     These estimates were delivered at a House Armed Services panel hearing by Charles Verdon, deputy administrator for defense programs at the Energy Department’s National Nuclear Security Administration. The five dollar commercial capacitor that cost five dollars will be replaced by a better capacitor that cost seventy five dollars. Jim Cooper is a Tennessee Democrat who is the chairman of the Subcommittee on Strategic Forces was at the hearing. He said, “In rough figures, due to the effect of a failure in a component that costs less than $100, taxpayers will face charges on the order of close to $1 billion.”
    Fixing the problems caused by the use of the cheap capacitor will take between eighteen and twenty months additional time before the first production models of these new weapons systems. First estimates of the delay were between one year and eighteen months.
    The B61-12 nuclear gravity bomb is intended to replace four different types of nuclear bottoms now in the U.S. nuclear arsenal. The W88 Alteration 370 upgrade is intended to replace a subsystem that helps detonate the W88 submarine launched nuclear warhead. The total estimated cost for these two programs is now twelve billion dollars. Verdon commented that he hopes that his agency will be able to divert funding from other nuclear weapons programs in the future to pay for the fixes to the B61-12 and W88 upgrade programs.