The Pentagon might soon pull the plug on U.S. Strategic Command’s biggest, baddest nuclear bomb.
The Biden administration has targeted the B83 gravity bomb for retirement in the next few years, according to recent congressional testimony.
Built for Cold War-era deterrence, the B83Â packs almost three times the punch of the next-biggest weapon in the U.S. nuclear arsenal.
If such a weapon were detonated at ground level over Omaha’s Gene Leahy Mall, it would instantly vaporize the heart of downtown, from Creighton University to the Durham Museum, according to a bomb-modeling program at . Almost everyone would be killed from Lake Street to Lauritzen Gardens, either from the blast or radiation. Damage would be widespread inside the Interstate 680 loop and in Council Bluffs.
But despite its shortcomings, now is no time to abandon the B83, said Christopher Yeaw, associate executive director of strategic deterrence and nuclear programs at the National Strategic Research Institute, a StratCom-funded think tank at the University of Nebraska. Not with Russia at war in Ukraine, China expanding its nuclear arsenal at a rapid clip and North Korea once again conducting regular missile tests.
“Why would we do this, in the face of growing risks?" Yeaw said. "It seems a little tone-deaf.â€Â
Today, fewer than 50 B83s remain in the U.S. nuclear stockpile out of 660 produced between 1983 and 1998, Kristensen estimates.Â
But they are getting old. The plutonium and uranium inside them is slowly decaying, as is their electronics and even the glue that holds them together. That makes them unreliable.
“All these components corrode with age,†Kristensen said. “It doesn’t have to be a lot. Over time, you just have to take them back.â€
Keeping it in the stockpile won’t come cheap. To continue beyond its planned retirement in the late 2020s, the B83 will require an expensive life-extension program.
“Don’t we want to get a system that’s effective?" Kristensen said. "Why would we go with this old clunker?â€
The B83’s main purpose in StratCom’s modern war plans is to destroy underground command and control facilities, like the ones thought to be beneath Kosvinsky and Yamantau mountains in Russia. The Pentagon calls them “hard and deeply buried targets.â€
The theoretical need to destroy such targets in a nuclear war is why Rep. Doug Lamborn, R-Colo., has pushed back against the Biden administration’s plans to retire the B83, because there is no replacement currently planned.
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“The hard and deeply buried target set remains a requirement for Adm. (Charles) Richard and U.S. Strategic Command,†Lamborn said during a May 17 hearing of the House’s Strategic Forces Subcommittee. “How does the administration justify removing this capability from our strategic arsenal?â€
John Plumb, President Joe Biden’s assistant secretary of defense for space policy, acknowledged the gap and said the Pentagon is studying how to attack nuclear bunkers deep underground. But the B83 — which was never designed as a “bunker busterâ€Â — is no longer the answer.
“Our enemies are digging deeper and harder,†Plumb said. “The B83 does not solve all the issues. It has increasingly limited utility, and retiring it does not change the 'hard-and-deeply-buried' problem set.â€
The bomb’s large size (12 feet long, 2,400 pounds) and complexity have long limited its usefulness, Kristensen said. Only the B-2 Spirit stealth bomber is currently capable of carrying it; the B83 is not compatible with U.S. and NATO fighter-bombers, including the new F-35.
And it would require flying skills worthy of Tom Cruise’s “Maverick†to drop the bomb deep in the Russian interior, past hundreds of miles of anti-aircraft defenses.
“Militarily, it doesn’t make any sense whatsoever,†Kristensen said.Â
In 2013, the Obama administration embarked on a $10 billion life-extension modernization to the older but nimbler B61 series of weapons, the other major gravity bombs in the U.S. nuclear arsenal.
Then-StratCom commander Gen. Robert Kehler supported upgrading the B61 class while eventually retiring the B83s.
“The B61 is the best of the choices to go forward,†he told a congressional committee at the time.
After Donald Trump was elected president in 2016, his administration undertook a nuclear posture review. That 2018 report called for keeping the B83 in the nuclear stockpile until the upgraded B61 — called the B61-12 — joined the arsenal, and until a “suitable replacement†for the B83 is identified.
Delivery of the B61-12 began last year. But the B83 replacement is nowhere in sight.
“The B83 is currently our only option to hold hardened and deeply buried targets at risk,†said Yeaw, a principal author of the 2018 nuclear posture review. “In the increasingly perilous 2030s, things aren’t going to get any friendlier.â€
Last year, Congress approved $52 million to continue funding for the B83, overriding an effort by Rep. Adam Smith, D-Wash., to defund it. But the Pentagon deleted the program from its 2023 budget blueprint.
On the Senate side, Sen. Edward Markey, D-Mass., sought to axe the B83 last year as part of a plan to slash $73 billion in nuclear spending over the next 10 years.
“We must resist Dr. Strangelove-like efforts by Republicans to keep our last and most indiscriminate megaton bomb in the stockpile,†Markey told the military news outlet Defense News last month.
But Nebraska Sen. Deb Fischer, a top Republican on the Senate Armed Service Committee, pushed successfully to keep the B83 in the Senate’s version of the 2023 defense authorization bill. The $858 billion bill cleared the committee last week with a bipartisan vote of 23-3 and now heads to the Senate floor.
Fischer also said in a statement that she brokered a bipartisan agreement to continue funding for the Navy’s Sea Launched Cruise Missile-Nuclear, a Trump-era weapon still on the drawing board that Biden had sought to cut. Richard, the StratCom chief, had going.
“I believe it’s absolutely vital that we ensure the men and women at STRATCOM have the capabilities they need to deter nuclear conflict, the highest priority mission of the military,†she said.
A training model of a B83 nuclear bomb, shown in a static display in 1989. Nebraska Sen. Deb Fischer took action to block retirement of the bomb until the Pentagon comes up with a replacement.