I mean, any network is just a set of regional connections. Sure maybe no one takes NYC - LA line, but if people are taking the NYC to Chicago and LA to Dallas and Dallas To Chicago there's no reason not to join them up.
Worth noting nuclear submarines have a sort of minimum-practical-size determined by the need for a functional nuclear reactor on board. Combined with the plain expense of nuclear reactors means that states can build way more ssk's than ssn's for a given budget.
It's often better to have three 25% chances of sinking the other guy than one 50% chance.
Tories have been talking about this since at least the coalition, if they had really wanted to impliment something like this they would've.
The fact they haven't implies:
They don't actually want it. Judging on recent scandals any chaste puritans in the tory party are so far in the back benches as to be blind to any goings on up front.
They want to keep talking about it. See also: immigration. They know they have shit policies in every other area, so they need 'vote winners' among their core demographic (50 and over). Hence: save the kids, stop the boats, shag the flag. Labour and Lib-dems are never going to be able to present themselves as credible in these areas because of their historical leanings, so the tories don't actually need to back up their promises with any actual 'progress' on these issues.
Pop scientists routinely mis-represent facts to make warfare seem unappealing and lame, this is due their 'sense of morality' (read: crying baby noises).
For example, Carl Sagan warned that operation desert storm would cause a (non)nuclear winter and mass famine in Asia.
I mean, launch costs are going down over time.
It might make much more sense to put many warheads up with a reusable system like falcon (3000$/kg) than it does to maintain a fleet of necessarily single-use systems like minuiteman (7,000,000$/300kg = 23,300$/kg). You might well be able to put four warheads (with an equal mass of de-orbiting propellent into orbit - ~1.7 km/s given solid fuel) for the same cost as one ICBM.
Strictly speaking, catalytic converters are only valuable because of emission reduction regulations put in place by foolish communists like youself sir.
If the invisible hand of the market were to be set free, we could all simply go in raw as god intended.
I mean honestly, if any government can fuck up a large-scale infrastructure project it's absolutely the US federal government.