A typical liquid fueled satellite launching platform would make a very poor ICBM. Liquid fueled rockets can't be stored fully fueled. The fuel is extremely volatile and slowly seeps out of the tanks. This means you have to store it empty, adding a huge launch delay.

ICBMs use much more stable fuels so they can sit in a silo for years on end. This requires totally different engines and fuel tanks.

tldr: You can't just stick a nuke on top of a liquid fueled rocket and use it like an ICBM.

Some liquid fueled rockets can be used more-or-less effectively as an ICBM. Despite being extremely volatile, rocket engines powered by hypergolic and room-temperature liquid fuels/oxidizer mixes can be stored fueled in silos for long periods of time. The notable example of this is the Titan II (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGM-25C_Titan_II) whiched served as the primary ICBM for the U.S. for 20-odd years (with some mishaps)

Yeah, I may have spoke too soon. After reading up on the India's PSLV rocket, it doesn't appear to use any cryogenic fuels or oxidizers. Maybe it could be used as an ICBM...

You can't use it as a deterrence/defensive ICBM because of the liquid fuels but it's still very viable as an offensive ICBM because you could just fuel it up when you're about to launch. It's not particularly practical but it's a viable make due if you've been unable to design a more normal ICBM.

But India has already done that. They're not at a nascent stage that they need help, they already have a fully functional nuclear program with working ICMBs.

You are underestimating how much importance world politicians give to pieces of paper that mean shit for commonsense. Do you think it is hard for a country like India to send a small nuke to USA and blow it off ? They can send it via ship, commercial jets and what not.

The point of MCTR is to prevent a nation from openly admitting they have such a weapon and hence it can not be used as an argument in any future negotiations.

The issue isn't India performing a terrorist strike agains the US. They'd love to send nuclear missiles to Pakistan, though.

They can already do this, and they don't thanks to

1) Their no-first-use policy

2) Pakistan already having nuclear weapons

US money that funded Osama, current money that ends up funding Pak Army/ISI seems to be a lot greater factors in destabilization of Pakistan than anything India has ever done.

For example I never understood USA providing F16s to Pakistan. It is nothing but USA's attempts to escalate the tensions.

And India needs ICBM for that ? If India wants to wipe out Pakistan off the map it is perhaps the easiest things to do than developing some nuke technology.

It's doable, not trivial. Tying your shoe laces is trivial.

You are mixing perspectives.

Trivial for a nation-state is different than trivial for a person. A nation like India could accidentally lose the amount of money required to hire a team of 20 to do the engineering to mount a working nuke to a working rocket.

Intentionally paying and assembling that same team would be trivial for a nation like India, USA, China or Russia. It could be as simple as a single line item on some military spending bill.

I think he meant that relative to the difficulty of actually creating a platform for accurate delivery of payloads to space, changing out the payload is, in fact, trivial

Thanks, I'm well aware of what he meant. Rockets have very specific requirements in terms of payload weight and shape. So do nukes. Matching the two would take actual engineering effort. Enough that I may not be possible to do so in total secrecy. Which is what this thread was originally talking about.