Are you remembering your Skipper's comment correctly? Our nuclear capable subs cruise the seas for the purpose of first, second, and third nuclear strikes. One nuke on American terrority, and our nuke subs hit next, which would include them in WWIII. Doubt he meant that after nuclear devastation of America that they would finally launch just to kill some survivors of WWIII.
Tridents let me sleep at night. Bombers, land-launched ICBM's (if any left), surface nuke equipped ships are vulnerable. There's a reason they call submarines the Silent Service. Yes, Russian and others have attack subs that try to follow our Tridents, but we also have attack subs that track their attack subs. My best guess is that we have at least 4 Tridents cruising at any given time.
No matter who were to launch nukes against America, they know that just one Trident has 24 missles with 8 MIRVS that can be targeted to different locations. Do the math. And how many Tridents do we have cruising the seas at any given time. Believe that is major classified.
Side note: It would only take one Iranian nuke to destroy much of the small country of Israel. Who would strike back against Iran? US? NATO nuke countries?
Also, their is no such thing as a viable "suitcase nuke". By design, they have too much maintenance to remain viable. However, selling warheads to enemies of Western civilization is another matter.
My position: Give 36 hours notice to Iran to vacate their cities (don't name which ones) and then end them. North Korea should get no such notice.
Kill them all now as we did in Dresdan, Hamburg, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki. Let Amercian make its point again. The world would go into hysterics, but once again FEAR the prowess of American might and resolve. Russian, China and Pakistan would be peeing their pants and not get involved. Then we talk diplomacy as we did with Germany and Japan, both allies now.
>>Tridents let me sleep at night.
Back in my day, it was a lot of Poseidons and a few Tridents that let you sleep at night.
>>Are you remembering your Skipper’s comment correctly? Our nuclear capable subs cruise the seas for the purpose of first, second, and third nuclear strikes.
Yes. The bomber and land-based missiles were the “use em or lose em” sides of the nuclear deterrent triad. So, at the indication of first launch, they had to go right away or they would cease to exist 30 minutes later. The boomers could afford to wait. They always told us that if the orders to launch ever came, we could be certain that most of US had ceased to exist several days earlier.
>>And how many Tridents do we have cruising the seas at any given time. Believe that is major classified.
Based on the length of patrol vs length of refit, we’ve always had about 80% of our boomers on patrol and on alert at any given time. (Two crews for each boat to maximize alert time for each boat.) We have a lot more than 4 on patrol at any given time!