Let's take a step back and remember something: If Russia and the USA had a "war" it would consist of reducing each other to the Stone Age in a couple of hours, then struggling not to starve to death
Why do you think a country that isn't capable of properly maintaining tanks is capable of maintaining nukes? I mean, ICBMs are literally rocket science with nuclear physics on top of them.
How can a country that cannot even prevent theft of electronics from their "doomsday plane" in front of the 9th of May parade keep a fleet of ICBMs operative?
In a normal year Russia has a total military budget that is smaller than the part of the US military budged allocated to nuke maintenance. How do you think they keep their nukes ready?
All this is before we start talking about corruption. There is a reason why some Russian military leaders have yachts and/or palaces and US military leaders doesn't have them.
In all fairness, maybe most of the yachts are made of missing winter uniforms (I recently saw Russians wearing Tyvek suits as "winter uniforms"). But if they steal so openly from things that was supposed to be used - why wouldn't they steal even more from things that were never meant to be used?
Before I round up, some hearsay: Some journalist that claimed he traveled throught the former Soviet Union shortly after the collapse (I have forgotten the name and I am in no position to verify it anyway) said that he saw missile silos full of rainwater. And when he asked people said it had already been like that for a few years before the collapse in 1991.
Do I think we don't have to care? Absolutely not. They might very well have a few functional nukes, maintained by enthusiastic crews, sailing around on subs somewhere I don't know (I don't follow the space to closely).
But I am not worried that they will send US back to the stone age at all.
A nuclear arsenal where only 100 of the 6,000 warheads are actually maintained and functional is still a useful one, though. Less so if 100/6,000 tanks work.
Do you remember when there was a tiny blip in production for COVID, and suddenly the shelves were empty? What do you think is going to happen if 100 nukes go off and wipe out strategic chunks of the USA?
The idea that any armed conflict between the two is guaranteed to escalate to nuclear weapons is widespread, but certainly not proven. A US invasion of Russia seems likely to result in nuclear war, but an engagement between conventional forces over a third-party nation like Ukraine seems quite unlikely to. Neither side is suicidal at the leadership level.
US and Russian aviators directly engaged in Vietnam without nuclear holocaust.
If Putin had a big red button that ran wirelessly and automatically, I'd be concerned.
Human beings have to actually implement the order. I think a first-strike order on the US without a serious and immediate existential threat to the Russian state and people winds up with someone offing him with their sidearm.
The Russians have plenty of precedent for this (both offing the leadership, and more generally "oops, he fell out of a window" as a solution), and we've a number of historical examples of lower-level folks going "I don't wanna" in false-alarm situations, like Stanislav Petrov.
I agree, a first strike order is very unlikely.
But what if he fires off a nuke over Ukraine? Maybe in a way that it's not 100% clear whether it's a Russian nuke, or a power plant blowing up, or somebody else?
Or he orders to detonate a bomb over the open sea to demonstrate the capability?
But certainly, if I would be Putin, I'd be nervous drinking tea, or walking close to a window. That doesn't make him more stable though.
You can't make a nuke look like a power plant explosion; they're simply too different. No nuclear power station can explode in that fashion.
A bomb over the ocean wouldn't demonstrate any new capacity, and would be seen as the bluff it would almost certainly be.
A nuke on Ukranian soil would further open the floodgates of Western aid, expand sanctions, and push more nations firmly into the EU/NATO fold as Finland and Sweden already have been.
A nuke on Ukrainian soil also has the problem of the prevailing wind direction being from west to east. Detonating a nuke on Ukraine looks a lot like detonating a (smaller) dirty bomb on Russia.
Let's check our assumptions. The bulletin of atomic scientists first published in 2017 [0] that they felt the modernized US nuclear arsenal is likely sufficient to execute a devastatingly successful first-strike against the Russian arsenal and nuclear command and control, because the new 'super-fuze' in the submarine arsenal significantly upgrades the hard-target kill capability of the warheads. The risk they communicate in this article is that Russia will misinterpret a false positive from their early warning system (which offers only half the warning time of the US') and launch a "retaliatory" strike against the US on a false alarm, because they do not expect to have that capability after a US strike. The modernization program has continued since 2017 and extended to the minuteman arsenal.
>the United States would be able to target huge portions of its nuclear force against non-hardened targets, the destruction of which would be crucial to a “successful” first strike...The garrisons and their support facilities would probably be destroyed quickly, and some of the dispersed road-mobile launchers would also be quickly destroyed as they were in the process of dispersing. To destroy or expose the remaining launchers...Just 125 US Minuteman III warheads could set fire to some 8,000 square miles of forest area where the road-mobile missiles are most likely to be deployed. This would be the equivalent of a circular area with a diameter of 100 miles.
>Many of the nearly 300 remaining deployed W76 warheads could be used to attack all command posts associated with Russian ICBMs.
