Originally Posted by
Mesabah
They would be easy to track yes, but if they plan on flying these things for months on end just off our coasts, tensions will certainly boil over. This is certainly not the direction the world needs to be going.
Not easy to track in subsonic cruise, see above (especially if the airframe is stealthy).
I seriously doubt the russians intend a permanent airborne nuclear alert using these things.
- Airframes don't fly forever, how do you recover it?
- Other people (ie us, Europe) would be VERY nervous when such things were launched for alert duty. In the cold war, airborne alert was intended for survivability. This would obviously have a tremendous first strike potential. By "very nervous" I mean DEFCON 1.
- Such gadgets won't be very reliable, how many bombs are you willing to lose control of due to crashes?
No, I think it's intended to get around our ballistic missile defenses, probably as a deterrent but unfortunately it opens up a big can of first strike worms. US missile defense were actually implemented to defend against small attacks from the likes of DPRK and Iran, not against russia which could easily overwhelm all US missile defense with sheer numbers. But MDA probably makes the russians nervous.