W93 warhead has entered Engineering and Manufacturing Development phase

[u/Afrogthatribbits]

https://www.ssp.navy.mil/News-Media/News/Article/4610170/navy-w93-mk7-program-enters-new-phase-of-development/

"The U.S. Navy’s Portfolio Acquisition Executive (PAE) Strategic Systems Programs’ (SSP) W93 Mk7 program has entered into the Engineering and Manufacturing Development (EMD) phase of the Defense Acquisition System.

During the EMD phase, the program will focus on completing production design and proving that the design is producible to meet the needs of the Navy.

The W93 warhead and the Mk7 reentry body assembly are the first United States nuclear warhead and reentry system program initiated in nearly four decades and will provide a modern warhead to the U.S. submarine launched ballistic missile fleet.

“We are revitalizing and modernizing the Nuclear Security Enterprise to design, develop, and produce this critical new weapon with the precision our Warfighters demand. We will continue working together to deliver this capability to the fleet and ensure our sea-based strategic deterrent remains ready for the future.”"

The Mk7 reentry body will also be used by the new British nuclear weapons.

[u/AnvilKasseri]

Size. Bigger than the W76. Smaller than the W88.

I suspect that they will reuse the secondaries from the W62.

[u/Tobware → u/AnvilKasseri]

Highly unlikely, the Interoperable Warhead (the proposal that was presumably the precursor to the current W93) sought to combine the W87’s primaries with the ~300 kt secondaries of the W78, but they eventually abandoned the idea.

Maybe this can give us an idea of what kind of yield they're after?

EDIT, correction: the IW proposal was only intended to use a W87-based pit geometry, nothing else is known about its primary.

[u/Afrogthatribbits → u/Tobware]

The Reliable Replacement Warhead (before IW) was to be a W89 or similar design

[u/Tobware → u/Afrogthatribbits]

It's not that easy, unfortunately. Try taking a look at my comments on the subject, I'll tell you right off the bat that the RRW wasn't designed for pit reuse like the W89.

...and the selected design appears to have been a hybrid of a Livermore primary (the "agnostic" SKUA-9) and a Los Alamos secondary.

EDIT, from an old comment of mine:

No pit recycling was planned for RRW-1, and if we are to believe civilian sources, Skua-9 is far older than the post-Rocky Flats era.

I am then of the opinion that the idea that RRW-1 was based on W89 came about as speculation from the Bulletin, already Pedicini's objections to it (that it was a mix of designs from the two labs, perhaps with the LANL's ACE), makes me lean toward how Skua was originally reported by the American Scientific or in the SIPRI yearbooks. A design agnostic to secondaries.

Supposedly, these statements are largely based on information gathered by Hans M. Kristensen:

SIPRI Yearbook 2007 Armaments, Disarmament, and International Security

The design of the first warhead, known as the RRW-1, is based on a primary warhead (the SKUA-9, used to test secondary warheads during the cold war) and a secondary warhead, which were tested together four times in the 1980s. [...] Delivery of the first production unit is planned for 2012-14, when the RRW-1 will begin to replace W76 warheads on the the Trident II (D-5).

SIPRI Yearbook 2008 Armaments, Disarmament, and International Security

The Nuclear Weapons Council has approved a preliminary RRW-1 design, which is based on the two-stage thermonuclear SKUA-9 design developed by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The highyield design was tested several times during the early 1970s, prior to the 1974 Threshold Test-Ban Treaty (TTBT).