> Yet when President Trump called on Congress to “modernize and rebuild our nuclear arsenal” in his State of the Union address last week, he did not mention his administration’s rationale: that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia has accelerated a dangerous game that the United States must match, even if the price tag soars above $1.2 trillion. That is the latest estimate from the Congressional Budget Office, one that many experts think is low by a half-trillion dollars.
The CBO report is at https://www.cbo.gov/system/files/115th-congress-2017-2018/re... .
Sure, the US has fewer warheads. It's still something like 5,000 warheads which is far more than is needed for any sort of retaliatory strike.
It is what's needed if you want a first-strike capability to take out all of Russia's hardened launch sites.
"Makes noises"? Aren't we actually doing that, and have been doing that, for decades? The most recent is super-fuze. Quoting https://fas.org/blogs/security/2017/03/super-fuze/ :
> Under the cover of an otherwise legitimate life-extension of the W76 warhead, the Navy has quietly added a new super-fuze to the warhead that dramatically increases the ability of the Navy to destroy hard targets in Russia and other adversaries. ...
> “As a consequence, the US submarine force today is much more capable than it was previously against hardened targets such as Russian ICBM silos. A decade ago, only about 20 percent of US submarine warheads had hard-target kill capability; today they all do.” ...
> In the article we conclude that the SSBN force, rather than simply being a stable retaliatory capability, with the new super-fuze increasingly will be seen as a front-line, first-strike weapon that is likely to further fuel trigger-happy, worst-case planning in other nuclear-armed states.
There are three factors to consider with "unstoppable super-missiles":
1) The US pulled out of the ABM treaty. This was predicted to destabilize things, because it implies the US might want first-strike capability, with the ability to prevent a retaliatory response. Since the US upgrades mean we can take out hardened targets, that means Russia will have to switch to launch-on-warning rather than launch-on-impact.
2) There has always been a strong argument against ABM systems because they are extremely expensive, they don't work well, and the counter-measures are cheap.
3) The "unstoppable super-missiles" are what you must have if you believe that a retaliatory second strike is a deterrent against a US first-strike attack. We have only to look at history to see how high-level people in the US have wanted to use nuclear weapons. The current president appears to be one of those.
On the flip side, consider the nuclear drone torpedo. This cannot be used as a first-strike attack because it can only destroy coastal cities. It cannot take out the US nuclear triad. It therefore more effective for retaliation, by the threat of destroying millions of Americans should the US decided to nuke Russia.