New START Treaty

[Skybird]

Originally Posted by tater

It's possible to imagine using a nuke, but the scenarios are very limited.

This is actually a good reason to continue work on new weapons, particularly deep penetrators. A penetrating ground burst maximizes local fallout, but minimizes distant fallout. This is critical to actually be able to use the weapon without irradiating nearby (friendly countries, or hostile nuclear powers) nations.

Having such weapons lends credibility to the threat to use them, and increases deterrence.

Yes. However, ground penetrating nuclear bombs already exist in the US, the problem is the kinetic energy makes them not penetrating deep no matter the release height - objects in free fall do not accelerate endlessly. I seem to remember that even a drop from 15 km does not make them penetrating deeper than just 10 m, and only a third of that if the ground is frozen.