Which will be interpretted as a sign of weakness to be exploited. This isn't paranoia, the history of the world is full of examples to justify the statement.
The point i was trying to make about cruise (TLAMS) is that they have guidance which has the potential to be interferred with. I did not say it would be easy. Ballistic missiles do not,and therefore are impossible to jam. To be honest i cannot say what trident has but Polaris once launched was on its own and fell where it was pointed. Thats what the B in icbm means. As someone that used to live next door to some i stand by this assertion.
Yes, when you built a house, (or at least an apartment building) it had to have a basement that was meant to be the fall-out shelter. That legislation has been relaxed now, which is surely an indication of what the Swiss think about the likelihood of a nuclear armageddon. I have heard no one say "Oh, it may be alright now, but what about our children's children? Why should we deprive them of a safe bunker in the event of a nuclear holocaust?" Mind you, all those basements have been very handy for storing wine.
Re nuclear shelters, is it not paradoxical that many were built 50 years ago, when the concept was faulty - a full-scale nuclear war would make the planet uninhabitable anyway, so the shelters would be pointless. But nowadays shelters might serve some useful purpose, and save lives if just one nuke was set off as is now more likely, yet shelters have been scrapped. Am I the only one who thinks this is back-to-front?
I thought the whole idea of shelters was pointless anyway. It was designed to make nuclear war thinkable, when it shouldn't be. I still have my copy of Protest and Survive by EP Thompson. No doubt you'll say he was a naïve Soviet lackey. I don't know. It seemed to make sense to me at the time and probably still does.
@ Desmoboy - If you check your facts you will find that Polaris was a two-stage ICBM that used Thrust Vectoring on both stages, guided by an internal inertial navigation system. Trident is a three-stage ICBM and uses internal inertial navigation, "star-sight" navigation to update its position to correct for errors in the initial position input, and in some cases uses an optional GPS input ( although it is assumed that this will not be used for a "war shot" ). So, far from being unguided, the are very carefully guided. The three separate Re-Entry Modules of a Polaris definitely did not just "fall where they were pointed"... And the "B" stands for Ballistic - it relates to the speed, not the guidance...
