De-Nuked Tridents?

A tip of the hat to Noah at the DefenseTech Blog, who alerted me to a recent Washington Post story. Apparently some 24 submarine-launched Trident missiles will be converted to carry improved conventional munitions for a “global strike” capability See: http://blogs.washingtonpost.com/earlywarning/2006/01/a_bad_weapon_in.html#more. According to the story, some observers suggest that a launch of any of these retrofitted missiles (which could carry up to four MIRVs each) might cause a false alarm in
trigger-happy nuclear nation states like North Korea. That could create the excuse for a retaliatory strike with nukes, which would of course be a very bad thing.