The End of the New ICBM

Canada has been breaking treaties with the First Nations for many many years .You can choose to not trust whoever you choose to . a reply to: Xeven

Some interesting articles there but I'd have to agree that it isn't really necessary for the U.S to upgrade its ICBM arsenal just yet.
They've officially got 450 Minuteman III silos, 336 ballistic missile capable tubes on the Navy’s 14 Ohio-class submarines(not all nuclear armed and being reduced) plus 66 nuclear-capable B-52 and B-2 bombers, 60 of which will be in deployed status.
United States has a total inventory of 4,650 nuclear weapons, including nearly 2,000 actively deployed warheads with Russia having similar amounts apparently.
Seeing how both countries have the ability to not only blow each other back into the stone age but make much of their respective countries uninhabitable in the process it seems unlikely either would try a first strike unless the men in charge completely lose their minds.

Here's a cool clip of the Russians doing a military drill to repel nuclear strike

Under an all out assault its hard to imagine either side stopping enough to make much difference

a reply to: DogMeat

Just how fancey of a Nuke do you really need to wipe out this planet???

Aww..but new ones will have go-faster stripes painted on the sides.

Nukes are a dirty, non-surgical and clumsey weapon system. They had their heydays (if you want to think of a nuke having a heyday) in the 50's - 70's...by the time Star Wars was becoming a reality, the writing was on the wall for nuclear weapons (good riddance too).

Since the 80's and the early days of Star Wars, technology has moved on leaps and bounds..super powerful lasers, rail gun tech, other particle beam weapons, and the impactors mentioned in another post in this thread are the way things are going.

The REALLY scary weapon systems, the ones we will never hear about on the evening news or from our leaders lips are already being developed.

They are super deadly, inescapable - even in dumbs / subs, and very selective with little to zero unintended collateral damage.

These weapons are invisible, undetectable and we'll never hear them coming, but we'd see their terrifying effects before we blinked out.

Ladies and Gentlemen...the future of weapons systems, of death and destruction on this our little planet Earth, isn't big, isn't loud and it doesn't go bang...but it will be (if not already) more powerful than even the biggest nuke ever produced.

The future belongs to nanotech...an army of trillions of microscopic machines, able to be programmed to carry out specific missions, will be able to eat through any armour, any fortification, any other weapons system. It will make mincemeat of any of us in seconds and its targets would be dead before they knew what was attacking them. It will be able to shut itself down to avoid EMP, and restart its mission of death right after a burst.

The only real defence would be a similar trillion soldier army of nanites, programmed as nanite hunter-killers and even then..

Weapons don't need to be big, loud and make a mushroom cloud and spread radioactive fallout around the world, they need to be small...very, very, very...very small.