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4 November 2021

US develops game-changing nuclear sensors for warheads

Josie Ensor

The US has developed sophisticated electronic sensors for its ballistic nuclear missiles which allows them to better time detonations, in a major advancement in the global arms race.

The sensors have been buried in hundreds of the most powerful American warheads, which experts say gives them an improved ability to destroy Russian and Chinese nuclear-tipped missiles.

The technology will also allow them to hit some of the world’s most challenging targets, such as hardened silos or mountain sanctuaries, and storage bunkers in North Korea.

The new components - which determine and set the best height for a nuclear blast - cost the US some billions of dollars and were completed in July for installation on missiles aboard navy submarines.

Experts have estimated that the fuzes have roughly doubled the destructive power of the US submarine fleet alone.

A passerby watches a TV screen showing a news program reporting about North Korea's missile launch with file footage, in Tokyo CREDIT: AP

The Defense Department has publicly described the components as a routine engineering improvement to the W88 series of warheads that provides no substantial new military capabilities.

Air Force budget documents provided to Congress describe it as a “form, fit, and functionally equivalent replacement” for existing nuclear warhead fuzes. But those familiar with highly sensitive nuclear planning told the Washington Post it will make the warheads significantly more damaging than previous weapons.

“It’s an astounding piece of technology,” said mechanical engineer Paul Hommert, who used to direct the government-owned Sandia National Laboratories. He said that while existing US weapons are highly accurate, the sensors the lab created are even better at computing the best moment for a blast to be ignited to produce the highest pressures on targets.

The US’s nuclear arsenal has shrunk by roughly a third because of arms agreements struck in the past two decades.

Administrations involved in the development have sought to depict it as simply a slight modernisation of a single component that they say does not violate a 2010 promise by President Barack Obama to forswear the development of new nuclear weapons or their modification to support new military missions.

Arms reduction agreements between the US and Russia have typically measured the relative military might of both nations by the numbers of nuclear weapons they held, not how destructive the weapons were.

But Navy Admiral Charles Richard, who commands the US Strategic Command that stewards the nuclear arsenal, told the House Armed Services Committee in April that “the size of a nation’s weapons stockpile is a crude measure of its overall strategic capability. It is necessary to consider the capability, range and accuracy of the associated delivery systems.”

Some experts express concern that leaders of nuclear countries hostile to Washington might be more prone to strike first in any future conflict, knowing the new destructive force of the US arsenal.

“If China or Russia believe in a conflict or a crisis that we are going to attack or destroy their nuclear forces and command posts, that gives them an incentive to use nuclear weapons first, or to threaten their use,” physicist James Acton, who co-directs the nuclear policy program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told The Post.

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