I always wondered why the B-52 didn’t get replaced by converted airliners (787 has quite similar dimensions I believe). Would be much cheaper to run and could do practically the same thing, no?
Each 747 CMCA would have carried dozens of AGM-86 nuclear-armed cruise missiles on rotary launchers that shuffled around the plane's cargo bay on rails (the missiles would be ejected one at a time from a small door near the rear of the fuselage).
Those kind of system would be really „cheap“ to deploy, you overwhelm a lot of air defense systems with it and well it’s transportable outside of air defense range.