@shavixmir said
I’m sure out American friends are pleased with their tax-dollars being spent this way?

I doubt that Trump seriously intends to increase the US's nuclear weapons arsenal, there isn't a tremendous need for more warheads given the US has over 5,000 of the things.

I'd take the threat to withdraw from the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces treaty more seriously. This looks like Trump's standard procedure of presenting his counterparts with a worst case scenario and seeing if that will get them to budge. The difficulty is that if the SSC8 does have Russia in breach of the treaty they probably don't mind it being scrapped, especially if they can claim that it was the Americans fault the treaty was abandoned. So I think Trump is liable to find his bluff called this time.

@deepthought said
I doubt that Trump seriously intends to increase the US's nuclear weapons arsenal, there isn't a tremendous need for more warheads given the US has over 5,000 of the things.

Trump just increased mlitary spending by 100 billion, when we already out spend pretty much every country in the world combined on military. increasing our already massive stockpile of nukes is completely in line with Trump's wasteful decisions.

@vivify said
Trump just increased mlitary spending by 100 billion, when we already out spend pretty much every country in the world combined on military. increasing our already massive stockpile of nukes is completely in line with Trump's wasteful decisions.

Conventional weapons spending makes some economic sense, you can keep people in work and generate trade for support industries, such as eating places for the workforce. The difficulty with nuclear weapons production as a mode of economic stimulus is that relatively few people are involved in their production and their supply chains are a lot tighter (I hope!), so it's not clear to me that there's much economic side effect.

I'm not exactly a fan of Donald Trump's policies, but there are real military reasons for spending some money on defence seeing as Russia has built a collection of novel weapons. I just don't think that more atom bombs represent much more of a counter to them than the 5,000 the US already has. The money would be better spent on more direct defences to them.

The worry is he's doing all this on the never never and that you'll end up with a sovereign debt crisis.