It looks like any old-fashioned gravity bomb as it falls to earth. But what you’re seeing is one small part of an $8 billion project, the most extensive and expensive improvement ever to the B-61 nuclear bomb. It’s a nuclear test of sorts without a mushroom cloud, because what’s being tried out is a new guidance system to increase accuracy.
The first test mission was flown by pilot Jeff Searcy.
MAJ. JEFF SEARCY, Air Force Test Pilot: We are able to enter in coordinates into our system and then transfer those coordinates into the weapon now. And the weapon is built to be able to guide to those coordinates.
NARRATOR: This is a B-61 bomb, a lightweight two-stage thermonuclear weapon.
JAMIE MCINTYRE: The B-61 was designed and first built in the early 1960s. As this vintage Air Force film shows, it lacked any of today high-tech guidance systems, relying on a parachute to give the plane time to escape the blast.
A half-century later, it’s still the mainstay of the Air Force’s nuclear arsenal, long overdue for an overhaul, argues Major General Garrett Harencak.
MAJ. GEN. GARRETT HARENCAK, U.S. Air Force: These components age, just like any component would in an automobile or in an appliance, and it has certain aspects of it that just have to be modernized.
JAMIE MCINTYRE: The PBS NewsHour was given exclusive and unprecedented access to the labs and facilities across the country involved in the multibillion-dollar makeover, such as the National Security Campus in Kansas City, where crash tests help determine the durability of key components.
The B-61 is just one program in a $100 billion effort dubbed stockpile stewardship, an ambitious plan that includes modernizing America’s remaining arsenal of 1,500 nuclear bombs and warheads. At Sandia National Laboratory in New Mexico, senior engineer Brad Boswell showed me the obsolete analog innards of the old 1960s version of the bomb.