[nikdaheratik]

The slides went into this in some detail and assumed the audience was familiar with the issues.

Namely:

1. The Pacific nuclear deterrence is currently based in WA. This means that deployments that cross the pacific would be much longer and much farther from base. Even subs that go out for months on end need to be resupplied. The proposed solution to this would be moving those subs to Hawaii.

2. The majority of the US sub deterrence is based in the Atlantic, because that's closer to Moscow. If you have a limited amount of subs, you would need to move some from there to cover the Pacific, which means you have less deterrence in the US-Russia standoff even if it gives you more options for US-NK or US-China.

[dingaling]

1. On paper the Trident D-5 can hit North Korea whilst the SSBNs are sitting in dock in Washington state.

That's probably an unrealistic range with a useful payload, but there's certainly no need to cross the Pacific.

2. "As of 2016, nine Trident-armed submarines are deployed in the Pacific and five in the Atlantic."

[nikdaheratik]

1. Yes, but they would still need to cross further into the Pacific if they wanted to reach NK without passing over Russia. The slides showed more or less the issue with the angles needed for that.

2. You may be right, I'm not an expert on deployment locations, of course a source would still be nice.

[Johnny555]

Ohio class subs have a reported quiet cruising speed of 20 knots (23mph), so it would only take about 8 days to travel across the Pacific.

Basing the sub in Hawaii might shave a couple days off of that.

Doesn't seem like it would make much of a difference in a 90 day SSBN deployment.