> Though AFAICT Russia still has enough land based ICBMs to level every major city on earth... I learned the other day that there are two main strategies for t

> Though AFAICT Russia still has enough land based ICBMs to level every major city on earth... I learned the other day that there are two main strategies for targeting nuclear weapons, counter-force (nuking military targets) vs counter-value (nuking cities). The former requires a lot more warheads for an effective deterrent, and the large stockpile of nukes in the US and Russia implies that they're doing a lot of counter-force targeting (though I suppose that doesn't mean they won't also attack counter-value targets as well). IIRC, according to this an exclusive counter-force nuclear attack against Russia would use far more warheads, but kill less people than an exclusive counter-value attack (~10 million vs 50 million deaths). https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.2968/057004008 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.2968/057004008