President Trump and his new secret nuke

MY STORY UNUSED IN THE TIMES TODAY: The Pentagon appeared unaware yesterday of what President Trump had in mind when he declared the US had built a new secret nuclear weapon. “We’ll have to refer you to the White House to clarify what the president meant in his remarks,” a Pentagon spokesman said, after Mr Trump’s claim appeared in The Washington Post, based on interviews with the journalist Bob Woodward. Although the Pentagon was reluctant to make any comment, there appear to be several possible candidates for this “new weapon”. In February the Pentagon confirmed that a US Navy ballistic missile submarine, USS Tennessee, had deployed for the first time with a new low-yield nuclear warhead on at least one of the 20 Trident missiles on board. The explosive yield of the W76-2 is secret but is estimated to be around five kilotons, compared with the maximum 455-kiloton warheads on the other Trident missiles. The smaller warhead was developed as a deterrent to Russia whose military doctrine embraces the concept of using tactical nuclear weapons in a limited regional war in the event that Russian conventional forces failed to achieve victory. There are also Pentagon plans to design a next-generation warhead for Trident missiles, called W-93, due to be in service by around 2040. The details of this new weapon are classified. Another candidate is a nuclear-armed hypersonic missile. The US Air Force has expressed an interest in having such a system fitted to the next intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) which is currently under development and is due to replace the Minuteman III, already 50 years in service. Northrop Grumman, the US defence company, has his week been awarded a $13.3 billion contract to develop a new ICBM called the “ground-based strategic deterrent” (GBSD). Expected to be built by around 2028, the whole programme could be worth more than $85 billion over the next few decades. In his remarks to Mr Woodward for his new book, Rage, not yet published, Mr Trump is quoted as saying: “I have built a nuclear – a weapon system that nobody’s ever had in this country before.” “We have stuff that you haven’t even seen or heard about. We have stuff that Putin and Xi [President Xi Zinping, the Chinese leader] have never heard about before. What we have is incredible,” Mr Trump said. Mr Woodward said US officials had confirmed the president’s claim and were surprised at Mr Trump’s disclosure. The president has made other claims in the past about the development of new weapon systems. He has on a number of occasions spoken of a “super-duper missile”. It turned out he was referring to the first successful flight test of a hypersonic glide vehicle in March. This was part of the Pentagon’s accelerated programme to develop a non-nuclear hypersonic weapon that would travel on the edge of the Earth’s atmosphere at up to Mach 20, or 20 times the speed of sound. Russia and China have similar programmes. In remarks on the super-duper missile in May, Mr Trump claimed it would fly “17 times faster than what they [Russia and China] have right now”.