I already gave another in-depth reply, so I'll keep this one short: the idea that the current US nuclear arsenal would be fully needed to cripple Russia or Chin

I already gave another in-depth reply, so I'll keep this one short: the idea that the current US nuclear arsenal would be fully needed to cripple Russia or China's military and industrial capacity is ridiculous, and has been thoroughly rejected any time military analysts were actually asked by the government to make a survey of the US's nuclear plans (which is, not that often). You don't need to bomb every station of a train line to cripple the line. If you want to stop car production, you don't need to blow up the car factory, the bolt factory, the windshield factory, and every single rare earth mine in the country. Yet those are the kind of assumptions the US doctrine relies on. Quoting from [1]: again: > Another jaw-dropping example: One part of the nuclear war plan called for destroying the Soviet tank army. As a result, JSTPS aimed a lot of weapons at not only the tanks themselves, but also the factory that produced the tanks, the steel mill that supplied the factory, the ore-processing facility that supplied the steel mill, and the mine that furnished the ore. [1] https://asteriskmag.com/issues/01/the-illogic-of-nuclear-escalation https://asteriskmag.com/issues/01/the-illogic-of-nuclear-esc...