Subs still have to keep up with the fleet
What the hell is the purpose of a
ballistic missile sub sitting in the middle of a fleet? Their
literal entire point is to be isolated untrackable "backups" for deployment of strategic nuclear weapons, sticking with a group of surface vessels for anything but resupply that ought to be done stationary is counterproductive to everything I understand of what they do. It applies for show of force, but in that case stealth is no issue so you're fine turning up the propulsion to a "noisy" point.
It looks far more like a "design problem with space to try to fix it" situation than a "Big Fat No" situation. Sure,
could turn into an R&D sinkhole, but there's no indication of any effort in deriving compromise solutions that answer some of the speed issue at the cost of some of the active sonar avoidance, or adapting the principals to more useful setups. Note the base is a
thousand times less active sonar return. There is a huge amount one can go down while still being a major improvement.
No, they need that speed to get to their launch positions as soon as possible and evade torpedoes.
...Except they can sit around for months. That's the point of the nuclear reactor, letting them stay deployed for extremely long periods of time without resupply that could give away their position. The point of them is middle-of-the-ocean launch points, the way they work doesn't
need them to travel to a separate launch point unless they have the rotten luck of inclement weather or were for some reason out of range to begin with.
Do you have anything suggesting they are outside the matter-of-minutes counter-barrage paradigm that I understand US nuclear doctrine to be, needing to do anything more than surface in clear weather to launch their missiles in response? Because I don't understand why one would position them such that they lack an expected target inside their effective radius to end up needing the travel time, unless they're moving to restock or in-between areas of interest.
This also only works on active sonar, not passive. The only reason that the US and NATO have damn good passives is that we've built all of our modern systems on WW2 German systems.
Your claim was specifically that it was discounted for loss of
speed. Not anything about compromising other stealth concerns intrinsically. And even besides that, the vast majority of the passive sonar defense is in the materials rather than shape. The subs are pretty much still the same tubes as the first round of them, which was a shape chosen for
speed while submerged, not because it was particularly effective at avoiding sonar.