Donald Trump administration new missiles plan; Dumb idea says Jon

US, Jan 11: The Donald Trump administration is planning to develop a smaller low-yield nuclear weapon that can be mounted on US Trident missiles, a formal official who was privy to the draft of a policy review, revealed. The government also seeks to loosen the constraints on nuclear usage.

The policy review will also increase the scenarios when the administration can use a nuclear weapon– the expansion includes response to a non-nuclear attack that caused mass causalities. A nuclear attack would also be authorised if an attack is made on critical infrastructure or nuclear command and control sites. The nuclear policy review could be made public in January end.

Special assistant to Barack Obama on arms control and nuclear nonproliferation, Jon Wolfsthal said the idea was dumb as firing a weapon would give away submarine's position.

"We spend $5bn per submarine to make it invisible and we put a lot of warheads on each submarine and so what they want to do is take one missile, put one small warhead on it and launch it first, so the submarine is vulnerable to Russian attack."