U.S. Navy’s New Nuke Sub Is 20,000 Tons of Apocalypse

Next-gen ballistic missile boats are priciest, biggest ever for U.S.

• David Axe in War is Boring

The U.S. Navy has unveiled the design of its next-generation nuclear ballistic missile submarine.

It’s huge. And very, very expensive.

Displacing 20,000 tons of water—thousands of tons more than the Ohioclass it will replace—the so-called “Ohio Replacement” submarine packs fewer missile tubes and torpedoes than its predecessor vessel but extra space for sensors and propulsion.

The Ohio (pictured) and the Ohio Replacement, which the Navy once called “SSBN-X,” should be equally long—560 feet from bow to stern. But the extra displacement makes the newer boat America’s biggest submarineever, although not the world’s biggest. That honor belongs to Russia’s Cold War Typhoon boats.

The new U.S. sub will have 16 missile tubes for Trident D5 intercontinental rockets, each rocket dispensing around eight independent warheads that each can nuke a separate target.

A recent arms treaty with Russia limits America to 240 sub-based missiles plus a little more than a thousand warheads on those missiles. Once theOhio Replacements fully supplant the Ohios, the Navy will have a capacity for only 160 at-sea rockets, although additional copies could remain in storage.

The Navy’s ballistic missile subs, also known as “boomers,” comprise one leg of the Pentagon’s nuclear triad, which also includes the Air Force’s land-based missiles and bombers hauling atomic bombs. The sailing branch had 41 boomers during the peak of the Cold War but today possesses only 14 Ohios, each with 20 missile tubes.

To keep down costs, the Navy wants just 12 new boomers—withoutsacrificing its ability to effectively end civilization in a few hours’ bombardment. “Twelve Ohio Replacements must deliver the same availability as 14 Ohios,” according to a slide presentation by Capt. William Brougham, the boomer program manager.

The U.S. Naval Institute’s news blog published Brougham’s presentation in early April.

Opposite America’s planned 12 new boomers, Russia could end up with fleet of eight to 10 modern Borei-class missile subs. France and the U.K. plan to maintain four each equivalent boats. China is slowly developing a five-boomer fleet, but lags in technology and tactics.

Even a reduced U.S. boomer fleet will be incredibly expensive. In 2011, the Navy estimated each new boat would set taxpayers back $7 billion, not counting development costs. Today the sailing branch thinks it can eventually push the price of an Ohio Replacement down to around $5 billion.

But the overall program could still end up costing nearly $100 billion—a sum the Navy and outside groups say is unaffordable. “Ohio Replacement is poised to tear a gaping hole in the Navy’s shipbuilding budget,” the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferationwarned.

The Navy typically spends around $13 billion a year on new ships.