Boeing engineers at the company’s Oklahoma City site recently completed a preliminary design review to put the Load Adaptable Modular (LAM) pylon on the U.S. Air Force B-1 bomber to carry hypersonic missiles and other standoff weapons, the company said on Tuesday.
LAM would use six B-1 hard points that were to provide external carriage for the now decommissioned AGM-86 nuclear Air-Launched Cruise Missile.
“Those hard points have largely gone unused since the removal of the aircraft’s nuclear role under the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty,” Boeing said on Tuesday. “The pylon repurposes them for new payloads.”
The Air Force eliminated the B-1B’s nuclear mission in 1994 upon enactment of the the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty. The service then converted the bomber to a conventional mission between 2007 and 2011.
Nuclear Role Again?
The House Armed Services Committee (HASC) Seapower and Projection Forces panel is proposing that the Air Force study making the B-1Bs nuclear bombers again.
The secretary of the Air Force and the head of U.S. Strategic Command are to submit a report by this December on the “feasibility of restoring nuclear capability” to the B-1Bs, according to the panel’s portion of HASC’s draft fiscal 2027 defense authorization bill.
The report is to include an analysis of the deterrence value of nuclear-capable B-1Bs and other elements, such as a “description of any structural, electronic, software, and weapons-integration modifications required to enable the B–1B aircraft to deliver nuclear weapons” and “an assessment of the compatibility of such aircraft with currently fielded and planned nuclear gravity bombs and air-launched cruise missiles,” the proposal said.
The 2010 New START Treaty lapsed on Feb. 5–a discontinuance that may lead to a U.S. increase in nuclear capacity, including equipping the nation’s ICBMs with multiple warheads.
A version of this story originally appeared in sister publication Defense Daily.
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