Previous posts have described the count of nuclear weapons in the U.S. inventory and how they are deployed. Future posts will dive into the inventory of other nuclear powers. Plan to have some discussion of the U.S. inventory at various times in the past.
Reading the various articles made me wonder how many weapons are available in what time frame.
(Update 2/28/20: Realized the photos of 1970s and ’80s weapon originally included in this post would be better in a comparable post discussing weapons in 1980. Photos moved. New photos added to this post.)
For example, the Minuteman-III loaded with the Mk12A reentry vehicle can carry 3 warheads but are only loaded with 1. It would take months to reconfigure 200 missiles with another 400 warheads.
Of the 12 Ohio-class subs not in refueling, 8 are usually at sea with 4 of those on-station. The other 4 are hours or days away from their assigned station.
There are guessed 200 ALCMs at Minot and 100 gravity bombs at Whiteman which would take a fair amount of time to load. It would take an even long time to transport the remaining 550 weapons out to Minot and Whiteman.
So, I took a wild guess at how many weapons are available to the president immediately and long it would take to get the remaining inventory on line.
Followup post will develop a comparable guess at number and availability back in the depths of the Cold War.
Disclaimer
Just to be clear, I don’t have access to anything other than open source information, so everything you see here is my uneducated guesses and uniformed uninformed assumptions based on various printed documents written by people who don’t have access to any classified info.
So on one hand everything you read on this blog is essentially conjecture.
On the other hand, not having access to any real information means I can talk about all the details, even if it means I speculate and assume.
Availability
Here is the result of my long string of guesses and assumptions in 2020:
| on alert | day or | weeks or | |||
| delivery | inventory | daily | days | months | years |
| MM-III | 600 | 200 | 400 | ||
| MM-III | 200 | 200 | |||
| Trident II | 1,486 | 288 | 288 | 288 | 622 |
| Trident II | 50 | 16 | 16 | 16 | 2 |
| Trident II | 384 | 72 | 72 | 72 | 168 |
| B-52H | 528 | 200 | 328 | ||
| B-2A | 322 | 100 | 222 | ||
| F-15E,F16 | 230 | 150 | 80 | ||
| total | 3,800 | 776 | 826 | 1,406 | 792 |
The loads on the various weapon systems in 2020:
| delivery | weapon | yield |
| MM-III | W78 | 335 kt |
| MM-III | W87 | 300 kt |
| Trident II | W76-1 | 90 kt |
| Trident II | W76-2 | 5 kt |
| Trident II | W88 | 455 kt |
| B-52H | W80-1 | 5kt-150kt |
| B-2A | B61x/B83 | 10kt-1.2mt |
| F-15E,F16 | B61x | 0.3kt-170kt |
My conjecture then produces guesses that about 776 weapons are on daily alert and immediately available. In hours, a day, or a few days, another 826 weapons would be on alert and available. Over the next weeks, month, or a few months, another 1,406 weapons would move to alert status. The remaining 792 weapons would have to wait for the refueling on 2 boomers to finish and pull other subs back into port for reconfiguration.
Take my wildly aimed guesses for whatever they may be worth.