I wonder, what more do they need in nuclear weapons? Smaller size? Harder detection? Bigger contamination radius?
Somehow, I am sure, if people start a nuclear war, even the WWII's initial nuclear weaponry will be enough to destroy ourselves, knowing how many countries can now chime in with their own.
Cover the bases: you can't be sure someone else won't discover a new type of nuclear weapon or something you haven't thought of. The big one would be if someone figured out how to get kiloton->megaton yields, from a weapon which didn't produce radioactive fallout.
Sure, target a city and it's functionally indistinguishable, but what about against military formations or bunkers? It would be a big game changer if someone eliminated the fallout problem, since it changes how one could plan to use nukes in a defensive posture.
So you do the research to make sure you're always within a year or two of whatever the next state-of-the-art will be. Being the dominant hegemon has a lot of cost-of-living expenses.
Its the ongoing expense. Look over time, what does it cost to maintain the ability to use one?
Inflation adjusted cost of the entire B-52 program including all maintenance and crew personnel and their training? I donno, like a billion?
A missile field is cheaper to maintain (I think?) and not much more to develop, so its probably a bit under a billion.
A nuke launching sub might cost a billion but it holds alot of them so divided out is probably only hundreds of millions
Grats you've now got one so small and light a plain old fighter-bomber plane only 10 million or so can drop one.
Finally small and cheap enough to do some million dollar class cruise missiles.
I'm sure we'll eventually have cheap drones as delivery vehicles.
The point is minimizing spent money during peacetime. A bunker full of cruise missiles is infinitely cheaper than multiple operating wings of B-52.
The other (obvious?) idea is burying history. Say Canada wanted to nuke us for invading and regime changing them to steal their maple syrup. It could happen. IF we used 1940s techniques which only require a billion or so and a couple months or a whole year, anything their spies steal is very dangerous. On the other hand, "Go ahead, steal these 1980s kryton switch designs, it'll take you 50 years and a trillion bucks to figure out how to use them not to mention all the extra stuff that goes with those handy dandy trigger mechanisms". A good analogy is the time machine. So you can visit Bavaria in the 1300s if you sneak a 1500s level wooden clock escapement that would probably revolutionize Bavaria in the 1300s one way or the other. On the other hand sneak in a modern AMD64 CPU, just the bare chip, not even a heatsink or a PCB or anything, just the chip, and they're going to be all "WTF" all they have to do is get to the 2000s or so, and this will chip will leapfrog them into the 2010s, but its going to take a heck of a long time to get them from 1300s to 2000s without any help. So, yeah, go steal that modern US design, a mere couple trillion bucks and 70 years experience and you'll be stamping them out like license plates just like us. I guess by the 2080s we should be worried, but right now no problemo.
Somehow, I am sure, if people start a nuclear war, even the WWII's initial nuclear weaponry will be enough to destroy ourselves, knowing how many countries can now chime in with their own.