Alex Wellerstein wrote an excellent blog post called How not to redact a warhead in May 2021. In it, he revealed how in a redacted document from 1999, someone did not redact the document properly, allowing people to reveal some details about some of the weapons in the report by fiddling with the contrast.

Los Alamos’ The US Nuclear Stockpile: Looking Ahead discusses the future needs of the US nuclear stockpile, including testing capabilities and technological hedge (providing a different warhead to cover the same role if the original warhead develops a technical issue).

On the pages discussing technological hedge (pages 21-24), there are diagrams of the W78 and W87 ICBM warheads, W80 cruise missile warhead and W76 and W88 SLBM warheads. To varying degrees, these diagrams can be seen through the redactions.

They don’t reveal all that much that we didn’t know, for example we already knew the W87 and W88 use spherical secondaries and very little else can be made out, but I imagine internally the DoE’s response would have been interesting.

However, from this I believe I have managed to get a rough idea about the dimensions of the W87’s radiation case and drawn a diagram. The location of the case and its size should be correct, having been measured from the image.

The next best quality diagram appears to be the W76, but not being a side on view, it’s difficult to get dimensions. I may take a crack at it later.

References:

“The US Nuclear Stockpile: Looking Ahead Drivers of, and Limits to, Change in a Test-Constrained Nuclear Stockpile.” Military Applications Group, Nuclear Weapons Stockpile Systems, Los Alamos National Laboratory (March 1999).