Yuri Kobzar 00:06, 03.05.26 UNIAN

The development is planned to be financed starting next year

The US government is pushing ahead with the development of a new specialized nuclear bomb designed to hit well-defended and deeply buried targets, The War Zone reports .

According to the publication, the Department of Energy’s budget request for fiscal year 2027 has a new spending line item under the “Armaments Work for Future Programs” section. The agency is asking for nearly $100 million for initial work on launching a new program called NDS-A (Nuclear Deterrent System Air-delivered).

It is not yet officially known whether the NDS-A will be a modernized version of existing nuclear munitions or a completely new system.Video of the dayAd loading

“The air-based nuclear deterrent system will provide the president with additional nuclear capabilities to defeat fortified and deeply entrenched targets, ensuring that adversaries cannot hide their most valuable assets beyond the reach of America’s nuclear forces,” an unnamed representative of the US National Nuclear Security Administration told the publication.

Currently, the main American weapon of this type remains the B61-11 – a modification of the older B61-7 with a reinforced body and elements that allow the bomb to penetrate deep underground before detonation. According to various estimates, the B61-11’s yield is from 340 to almost 400 kilotons.

The authors of the article remind that back in the 2000s, the United States was working on the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator (RNEP) program, which involved creating a powerful nuclear bomb to destroy underground facilities. But in 2005, the US Congress effectively blocked the project due to concerns about a possible reaction from other states.

According to the publication, the current interest in the new nuclear bomb is connected with the rapid expansion of the network of underground military facilities in Russia and China. The US is paying particular attention to the Russian bunker Kosvinsky Kamen in the Urals, which is considered one of the key control centers of Russian nuclear forces.

In addition, China, Iran, and North Korea have also been actively building protected underground facilities in recent years. The article notes that the issue of the effectiveness of strikes on such targets became particularly acute after the American attacks on Iranian nuclear facilities in 2025.

The War Zone notes that the final fate of the project remains unknown. The US is already spending hundreds of billions of dollars to modernize its entire nuclear triad, so the issue of funding another new nuclear system could become a subject of heated political debate.

Other news from the world of weapons

As UNIAN reported, the US Department of Defense has allowed the use of agent-based artificial intelligence to work with classified documentation and secret-level tasks, although previously such systems only had access to unclassified materials. 

We also reported that the American company AeroVironment introduced the Halo_Shield system – an intelligent complex for countering drones and low-altitude cruise missiles based on artificial intelligence.

The developers claim that Halo_Shield allows you to quickly deploy an adaptive “dynamic shield” to protect critical infrastructure without complex reconfiguration or additional training of personnel.

https://www.unian.ua/weapons/yaderna-zbroya-ssha-pentagon-hoche-novu-yadernu-bombu-13369812.html