[rustyboots]

I could live with 300 nuclear weapons if we have a president with the “stones” to use them when/if needed. Super accurate, advanced decoy devices to assist with reentry and defeat any anti-missile systems, combined with a willingness to use them at the slightest attack on any American interest, I could accept this low number.
But since we know there is NO Democrat with he “stones” to use force against anybody except what most of us refer to as patriotic American citizens, then I reckon we need to defeat this worthless oxygen thief and keep our level of nuclear weapons at at higher number; say about 5,000 and use them or other weapons as needed to protect America.

[mkjessup]

I could live with 300 nuclear weapons if we have a president with the “stones” to use them when/if needed. Super accurate, advanced decoy devices to assist with reentry and defeat any anti-missile systems, combined with a willingness to use them at the slightest attack on any American interest, I could accept this low number.

Don't kid yourself my FRiend, 300 nukes in an arsenal might be sufficient for perhaps a nation like Israel, or Japan, or even Britain or France who would most likely NOT be facing a future situation where they would have to engage in a literal global thermonuclear exchange with the only other true superpower (in terms of military hardware), i.e., Russia.

300 nukes would NOT be a sufficient deterrent to the Russians, because they know (as we do as well) that out of those 300 nukes, there have to be allowances made for the following potential conditions, should they be used:

- malfunction of the launch vehicle (if ICBM or SLBM)

- malfunction of the nuclear device itself (which is increasingly likely due to the lack of actual nuke testing of weapons in our inventory, to establish the potency of those warheads in 'active' service)

- interception of an incoming U.S. nuclear weapon by anti-missile defenses of the target nation.

- destruction of any number of those 300 nukes by a surprise attack.

Considering that Russia is in fact our most likely nuclear adversary should hostilities break out, 300 nukes would not even be sufficient to cover all the targets as designated in the SIOP (Single Integrated Operational Plan). On top of that, it has long been U.S. nuclear policy that IN the event of a nuclear war, that a certain percentage of warheads would be held back in reserve for the contingency of a second or even third retaliatory strike on our enemies, this is because you can bet the rent that among the potential targets that Moscow would be aiming at would be our nuclear research, development and production facilities, the Pantex site comes to mind. So whatever we have in inventory is very likely to be all that we have for any nuclear conflict. There won't be time or opportunity to "build more", we'll have to rely on whatever we have available.

You can bet the rent that if any executive shithead in the White House manages to roll back the total number of warheads in our inventory to as low as 300, they might as well just get rid of them all, because those 300 will be all but useless, why?

If you fire every one of those 300 warheads and assuming that every one of them explodes on target, what is our next step when the Russians respond with another 1000 warheads on U.S. soil?

That whole '300 warhead' gambit is nothing but setting us up for national suicide, i.e., Moscow informs us at some future point that if we launch ANY of those 300 warheads, they will respond with 10 for every 1 we launch.

In that scenario, our goose is cooked nuked.