Somewhere in the cold waters of the Atlantic or Pacific, at any given moment, several Ohio-class submarines glide at depth, each one carrying enough nuclear firepower to rank among the most destructive weapons platforms ever built. Those boats are old. The lead ship of the class, USS Ohio, was commissioned in 1981. The hulls are fatiguing, the reactor cores are aging, and the Navy has no way to extend their lives indefinitely. Their replacement, the Columbia class, is the most expensive shipbuilding program in American history and arguably the most consequential. Once all twelve Columbia-class boats reach the fleet, they will inherit a mission that already accounts for roughly 70% of all U.S. deployed strategic nuclear warheads, a concentration of deterrent power that will define American national security into the 2080s.
The program is also behind schedule, over budget projections, and, according to federal auditors, lacking the management controls needed to get back on track.
Why 70% of the arsenal rides underwater
The figure is not Pentagon spin. A peer-reviewed analysis published in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists calculated that warheads loaded on submarine-launched ballistic missiles account for approximately 70% of the warheads attributed to U.S. deployed strategic launchers under New START treaty accounting rules. The math reflects a deliberate strategic choice: because ballistic-missile submarines (SSBNs) patrol deep underwater and remain virtually undetectable, they are the leg of the nuclear triad an adversary is least likely to destroy in a first strike. That survivability is the reason successive administrations have allowed the sea-based leg to grow until it dominates the deployed warhead count.
The Columbia class is designed to carry the Trident II D5 life-extended missile, the same weapon currently deployed on Ohio-class boats, in 16 missile tubes per hull (down from 24 on the Ohio class, a reduction driven partly by earlier arms-control commitments). Twelve boats, rotating through maintenance and patrol cycles, are intended to keep a sufficient number at sea at all times to guarantee a second-strike capability no matter what happens on land or in the air.
A $132 billion program with schedule problems
The price tag matches the scale of the mission. The Columbia-class program carries an estimated cost of approximately $132 billion for development and procurement combined, according to a Government Accountability Office audit published in April 2023 (GAO-23-106292). That figure may have grown since; the Congressional Research Service has noted upward cost pressure in subsequent updates to Congress.
More troubling than the cost is the schedule. GAO auditors concluded that the Navy did not have adequate schedule controls to track whether the program was on pace. They identified persistent construction challenges at General Dynamics Electric Boat, the lead shipyard in Groton, Connecticut, and found that the Navy’s own management tools were insufficient to provide visibility into whether milestones would be met. The lead boat, USS District of Columbia (SSBN-826), had its keel authenticated in a ceremony in June 2022, and the Navy has publicly targeted a first strategic deterrent patrol in the early 2030s. Whether that date holds is an open question. As of mid-2025, no publicly available primary source has confirmed that the schedule gaps identified by the GAO have been fully closed.
If Columbia boats arrive late, the consequences cascade. The Navy will have to extend the service lives of Ohio-class submarines already operating beyond their original design parameters. Longer service life typically means more frequent overhauls, higher maintenance spending, and increased risk of age-related material failures, all at a time when the nation’s public shipyards are already strained by maintenance backlogs across the fleet.
The world is not waiting
The geopolitical backdrop adds urgency that did not exist when the Columbia program was first conceived. In February 2022, Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered his nuclear deterrence forces placed on heightened alert amid the invasion of Ukraine, some of the most explicit nuclear signaling by a major power in decades. A year later, in February 2023, Russia formally suspended its participation in the New START treaty, the last bilateral agreement limiting U.S. and Russian deployed strategic nuclear weapons. The treaty’s formal expiration in February 2026 means the accounting framework that produced the 70% warhead-share figure no longer has legal force.
That does not make the 70% figure meaningless. The physical reality, that most U.S. deployed strategic warheads sit aboard submarines, reflects force structure and basing decisions that change slowly regardless of treaty status. But the collapse of the arms-control framework does introduce new uncertainty. Without agreed limits or counting rules, both Washington and Moscow have more freedom to adjust how warheads are distributed across bombers, land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles, and submarines. The proportion of the arsenal riding underwater could shift over the Columbia class’s projected service life, which stretches past 2080, even if the number of boats and missile tubes stays the same.
What the public record does and does not show
Two of the core sources behind this story are unusually strong. The GAO audit is a formal government accountability product, produced through established audit methodology and published on a .gov domain. Its findings about schedule shortfalls and program cost carry the weight of an independent federal watchdog with legal access to internal program data. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists analysis is peer-reviewed and draws on publicly available treaty notifications and official stockpile declarations, making its 70% figure one of the most carefully sourced statistics in the open nuclear-policy literature.
What the public record does not yet show is equally important. Navy budget justification documents for fiscal years 2025 and 2026 would reveal whether Congress has appropriated additional funds to address the GAO’s concerns or whether cost growth has forced trade-offs with other shipbuilding priorities. Updated production data from Electric Boat would clarify whether construction timelines have improved or worsened and whether workforce and supply-chain bottlenecks have eased. And any new arms-control developments would reshape how deterrence is distributed across the triad in ways that are impossible to predict from the current vantage point.
A narrow margin for error
The core tension is straightforward. The United States has chosen to concentrate the majority of its deployed strategic nuclear warheads on a submarine fleet that is aging out of service. The replacement program costs at least $132 billion and, as of the most recent federal audit, lacked the schedule discipline needed to ensure timely delivery. Every month that Columbia-class construction slips increases pressure on Ohio-class boats to remain in service longer than planned, with all the maintenance and readiness risks that implies.
None of this means the program is failing. Building a nuclear-powered ballistic-missile submarine is among the most complex engineering tasks any nation undertakes, and schedule pressure on major defense programs is common. But the stakes here are not comparable to a late fighter jet or a delayed satellite. The Columbia class will quietly carry the backbone of American nuclear deterrence for the next six decades. Getting it right, and getting it on time, is not optional.
More from Morning Overview
*This article was researched with the help of AI, with human editors creating the final content.
