Boomer: Ballistic missile submarine. Ballistic missiles fly out of the atmosphere and release their warheads in a suborbital ballistic trajectory back down to earth. The warheads release from the nose section and drop back to earth, each one independently targeted from the other. The warheads are always nuclear.
That's not a boomer. That's a Virginia, stretched in the middle, with even more cruise missiles than the earlier ones. Cruise missiles never leave the atmosphere and while some are programmed to climb and dive to the target in their terminal homing phase, none of them employ a ballistic trajectory.
We have converted several Ohio class boomers into guided missile platforms by inserting clusters of cruise missile launch tubes into the now vacant ballistic missile launch tubes and redesignating them from SSBN to SSGN. I believe this was done to maintain compliance with strategic arms reduction treaties that we've signed with Russia.
