Trump wants US to expand nuclear arsenal

US President Donald Trump expressed that he wants to expand America's nuclear arsenal adding that the country has fallen behind in its atomic weapons capacity.
According to the Independent, Trump said it would allow the US to stay at the "top of the pack" and expressed concern that America has "fallen behind on nuclear weapon capacity".
He also hinted at a change of course from Washington on America's involvement in a new strategic arms limitation treaty.
Repeating a phrase often used by the President to criticise trade pacts, the former property tycoon said the latest non-proliferation arrangement was a "one-sided deal".

Under the New Start treaty US and Russia must limit their arsenals of strategic nuclear weapons to equal levels for 10 years by February 2018.
It also permits both countries to have no more than 800 deployed and non-deployed land-based intercontinental and submarine-launched ballistic missile launchers and heavy bombers equipped to carry nuclear weapons.
Source: http://www.business-standard.com/ar...to-expand-nuclear-arsenal-117022400076_1.html

 

http://index.heritage.org/military/2016/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/table-score-all.png

The source is -> http://index.heritage.org/military/2016/assessments/ This is the same study that President Trump quotes from.

 

Just so you know, a very specific set of circumstances have to happen before a nuclear weapon "goes nuclear". Certain switches have to be thrown within given parameters or the weapon, if it blows up by mistake, will just blow itself apart. If one just falls from the aircraft that is carrying it, the weapon will not go nuclear. One can do down, find it, and bring it back home. We have had a few fall into the ocean that we finally found and recovered. They are very safe.

If our nukes are aging, we should replace them. I think they have a self life. We want them to be fresh and reliable.

 

Yeah, let's (*)(*)(*)(*) away money on something that will never be used, nor is needed. We already have enough to destroy the world many times over.Add that to the idiotic red meat he throws to the right of increasing a military budget already larger than the next 20 countries combined. Yeah, that's really needed.

And people will stupidly eat it up

 

While I agree expanding isn't needed, upgrading would ensure better reliability should some halfwit decide to push a button, & honestly, may provide a need for fewer weapons.

 

Pretty much what I was going to say.

I chalk it up to his over-compensating for having really small hands.....

 

Nukes are a deterrent, that's their real purpose.

Peace through strength.

Si vis pacem, para bellum ..."If you want peace, prepare for war"

But what if they have to be used ?

Will todays American nukes even work ???

We don't know...we no longer test them to find out. Instead we rely on computers to tell us if these really old nukes will still go BANG.

Same kinda of computers used to design the F-35, the Zumwalt destroyers and the Navy's "Little Crappy Ship" (LCS)

 

I don't want to see our nuclear capabilities expanded. As far a I am concerned, we have enough. I do think we need a bigger military though and one that is fully operational. The 82nd can't even fully deploy right now.

Also, I would like to see an expansion in military spending on research. Weapons and defense research.

I get the strange feeling we are due for a conflict. The world (and America itself) is fractured in a bad way.

 

I think mostly this is because our nuclear arsenal has become rather antiquated in the last few decades. Since the Cold War ended we have done almost no work on updating our systems, simply maintaining them.

And if you are going to modernize by making new weapons, you ultimately either increase the number you have as the new ones are being manufactured and prior to the old ones being retired, or you have a reduced number of current ones retired as you await the manufacture of new ones to replace them.

Most of the "increase" seems to be of the first sort. The President has talked quite a bit in the past year or so of modernizing our nuclear stockpile. And in the course of that modernization, of course the stockpile will increase. But one of the beautiful things about our nuclear stockpile is that the fissile material that makes the big bombs go boom can be recycled into other similar weapons. And to make new weapons we do not have to actually make fissile material, we still have in stockpiles lots from earlier systems we decommissioned.

 

That is a complete myth.

 

I agree we should upgrade our ICBMs and SLBMs. We are behind Russia in manuverable warheads to defeat missile-defense systems, and Russia is making their S-500 missile defense operational around 2020. We must counter that gap.

However, I don't think we need more warheads. 1500 warheads is enough.

 

They should just dust off the blueprints for the so called "Midgetman" small ICBM that was ready for production in 1991 at the end of the Cold War.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MGM-134_Midgetman

Since the U.S. doesn't deploy multi warheaded ICBMs anymore anyway.

 

Yeah plus silo ICBMs are very vulrable now with the accuracy of missiles now.

 

As do I. Biological weapons with an accompanying vaccine for the nation or group that deploys them, are perhaps a better approach. Structures are left intact and if done covertly, a highly developed contagion could annihilate a massive portion of the enemy's population with little to no indication of who is responsible, preventing conflict. Assuming the administration, or at least the specific formula and purpose, of the vaccine is kept secret. Given time, the enemy could be completely gone in every way. Militarily, economically, or even ideologically.

 

Right at the end of the Cold War we were starting to upgrade our arsenal with 455 kiloton warheads that were light enough to serve as MIRVs. They were based on the most advanced secondary that we ever tested before nuclear testing was limited to 150 kilotons.

When the USSR collapsed, we stopped producing them almost as soon as we had started, with only 384 SLBM warheads (plus a few spares) produced, and no ICBM warheads.

We could resume producing them and upgrade all of our SLBM and ICBM warheads to 455 kilotons even if we stay within the limits of whatever START treaty happens to be in force at the moment.

Keep in mind that having the ability to deploy more warheads is an important deterrent. If we only have 1500 warheads, Putin might be tempted to try to best us in an arms race. But if we can easily jump from 1500 to 3500 warheads simply by adding existing warheads to existing delivery vehicles, Putin won't see much profit in starting an arms race with us.

 

455 kiloton ICBM warheads are on the way!

"Sustain and modernize the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile with five programs currently underway (W76-2 Modification Program, B61-12 Life Extension Program, W80-4 Life Extension Program, W88 Alteration 370, and W87-1 Modification Program)"

https://www.energy.gov/nnsa/budget

 

Our species deserves it’s soon to arrive extinction.

 

You know those warheads are less than half the size of the ones the first several hundred Minuteman ICBMs deployed by the U.S. in the late 1960s carried.

 

But keep in mind that we can put three 455kt MIRVs on a Minuteman. A Minuteman can only carry a single 1.2mt warhead.

These new warheads will be a step forward for the defense of democracy.

 

We had 250 of the Minuteman I missiles. And each one carried a single W59 1 megaton warhead.

Then we replaced those with the Minuteman II missile, around 1,000 of them. Those moved to a 1.2 megaton W56 warhead.

The Minuteman III was a drastic change. The single huge warheads were gone, replaced with 3 MIRV W62 warheads of 170 kiloton each. In a few cases the warhead configuration was changed from 3 W62 to 3 W78 warheads, each having a yield of 350 kilotons. But that was only put on a few selected missiles, most maintained the W62 warheads.

Now I would like to know what warhead we have that has a 455 kiloton yield, and when it was added to the Minuteman series. I just listed the 6 warheads they were known to have been paired with, and have been looking at others.

The one that comes closest to your claimed yield is the W88. Developed in the 1970s, it had a yield of 475 kilotons. They are indeed used in a MIRV cluster array, with up to a suspected 10 warheads per missile. But because of SORT treaty restrictions we limit them to 8 warheads per missile.

But the W88 was never adapted for the Minuteman missile. They are used exclusively for the TRIDENT II series of SLBM.

But for the "Minuteman with a 1.2 megaton warhead", nope. We retired the Minuteman I and II from service decades ago. By the 1970's the idea of a "single large nuke" had been rendered obsolete for missiles, replaced with smaller MIRV delivery. I doubt if any of the older single warhead variants were even still in service by the end of the first term of President Reagan.

The Minuteman I and II were designed for a single large warhead delivery. The Minuteman III was designed for only MIRV delivery only.

 

By my recollection, we put W78 warheads on 300 out of 550 Minuteman III missiles.

It is called the W87-1.

Its first use would have on the Midgetman Mobile ICBM.

However, George H. W. Bush declared the Cold War over and stopped production of thermonuclear warheads before any W87-1 warheads were built.

The Navy got 384 (out of a planned run of four to five thousand) W88 warheads before production was cut off, but the Air Force didn't get any W87-1 warheads.

The true yield of the W88 is 455kt.

The SLBM version is the W88. The ICBM version is the W87-1.

None of that changes the fact that a Minuteman missile cannot carry more than one 1.2mt warhead.

A Minuteman missile can carry three W87-1 MIRVs.

 

OP

There's no point in having a nuclear deterrent if you won't know who to deploy it against when the time comes; the next war won't be waged with ballistics.

 

We already have enough weapons to destroy the Earth. There is a cutoff point beyond which having more nuclear weapons means nothing. Once you have enough to blanket the Earth in fire and ash, you don't need a single one more than that.

This is another in a long line of braindead policy decisions by the toddler-in-chief. Maintenance and modernization are fine, but we don't need more nukes.

 

Trump just wants a headline.. Let's see what sort of chaos he instigates this week.

 

That is a pure myth with no basis whatsoever in fact. Prove it if you think otherwise.