[Rashputin]

I thought START was an agreement on the number of warheads, not on intermediate range weapons of all sorts. We use a Hell of a lot of cruise missiles when we need to so I'm not sure what the difference here is.

Our Tomahawks can carry small nukes, what makes them different than this class of cruise missiles? Is there a limit on how many Tomahawks we can have at a given moment? That wouldn't make sense to me so, I'm wondering if this is the kind of thing someone picked a convenient moment to split hairs over or a real and major change in the type of weapon they're testing.

[thinkthenpost]

The Tomahawk is not a ground launched cruise missile, it is a sea launched cruise missile.

[pierrem15]

The INF treaty bans specific weapons types like cruise missiles above a certain range and intermediate range ballistic missiles (that's why we destroyed our Pershing missiles).

The appropriate response would be to resurrect the Pershing, but I doubt we have the capacity to do so, to say nothing of the will.

The scariest part is that we have deliberately postponing replacing our warhead assembly facilities to such an extent that the US now has no capacity to build new nuclear weapons at all.

We can recycle old ones, but that's it-- if we needed a newer, smaller warhead, we're SOL.