The proposed NATO Multilateral Nuclear Force was actually designed around the basing of Polaris on surface ships, not submarines.
I remember seeing reports at the time.....vessels of approx 5,000 tonnes from memory.
We had a thread on this a while back. Both options were considered; the Europeans wanted subs for survivability, but the US wanted surface ships because we wanted to reserve our submarine construction capability for our own uses.
SAC's response time was to get the alert force off in three minutes from the horn sounding. The reason's pretty simple: a number of SAC bases (Castle, Fairchild, Mather, Pease, Plattsburgh, Griffiss, Loring, among others) were under the gun from SLBMs off the coast-six minutes' flight time from launch until impact. Bases in the middle of the country had ICBM flight times to worry about, and they certainly would be able to get their alert force not only off, but well away, before the first ICBMs arrived.
Do you have a citation for that? I'm looking for something to read on the subject that's more reliable and less pop-nonfic than Fifteen friggin' Minutes. (In case you can't tell, I am absolutely unsurprised he got that wrong.)