[Nowhere Man]

The bigger the missile,the more MIRVs you can put on it. Maybe they want to overwhelm any air defense we are developing or have developed.

Yeah, it seems like for an SDI defense, we would need something like Emperor Ming had in the 1980 "Flash Gordon" movie (one of my favorites) where he basically and a screen of zillions of lasers firing every which way. We dumped the MX too and only have Minuteman II's and III's that are almost as old as me (44). B-P

[ErnstStavroBlofeld]

This new missile would be massive and the thrust on this missile must be huge too. When the Soviet Union were designing their 100 megaton bomb, they developed the Proton rocket.It was hugely oversized for an ICBM, and was never deployed in such a capacity.