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russia is completely corrupt. Nuke upkeep is expensive and is an obvious area for corruption (you will only know at the end of the world). There is zero reason
by tomjen3 2y ago
russia is completely corrupt. Nuke upkeep is expensive and is an obvious area for corruption (you will only know at the end of the world). There is zero reason that more than a handful has actually been maintained.
Not to mention that their recent launch was a bit - eh.
The Soviet Union was evil, but it was somewhat competent. The russian regime is not.
- jabl 2y agoOTOH current day Russia doesn't have the yoke of communism around their neck. Is the level of corruption worse than the economic inefficiency of communism? I don't know, possibly? As for nukes, nuclear saber rattling seems to be one of the few remaining reasons the rest of the world gives a f*ck about whatever Putin and his cronies are saying. Without nukes, the West would have massively stepped up support for Ukraine, and the Russian army would be nothing but a breadcrumb of smoldering wrecks all the way to Siberia. So I'd think that Putin has a huge incentive to keep his nuclear deterrent functional, no matter how corrupt and inept the rest of his armed forces are.
- hollerith 2y agoI've never heard any expert in nuclear weapons suggest that Russian nukes don't work, especially the ones that have been modernized since the fall of the SU, which is all the ones attached to ICBMs and SLBMs. Until a few years ago, US nuke experts regularly inspected Russian nukes and Russian nuke delivery systems. If Russian nukes don't work, it seems likely that the inspectors would have been able to tell, e.g., through gamma-ray spectrography. The ICBMs and SLBMs to "deliver" the nukes are more expensive and harder to develop them the nukes themselves, and Russia routinely tests those. "harder to develop": London, not having had as much money to spend on nukes as the US and USSR had, gets its SLBMs (along with the launch tubes) from the US (whereas they make their own nukes and SLBM-carrying subs) and a few minutes of searching finds no signs of them ever developing an ICBM. (In fact, they might never have had ICBMs: they certainly don't now.)