[rl3]

My previous reply was talking entirely about tactical nukes. They're not exempt from the concept of deployment. Even the Russians don't just let them float around willy-nilly. Most sit in storage.

>But speaking of a deployed tactical nuke is somewhat nonsensical.

The people whose job it is to track deployments of tactical nuclear weapons would probably disagree.

[somenameforme]

Well nobody is entirely sure how many tactical nuclear weapons Russia has. Nobody is really sure of much really. Do you remember that early propaganda wave about needing to only give Ukraine $xx billion more because Russian was imminently running out of missiles? It was Stoltenberg that called it the 'critical phase' of the war, then repeated by all the media, late 2022 if I recall correctly. Everything on these topics is at best kind-of-sort-of-not-really intelligent guesses. We can't even get the vaguely right ballpark figure for their conventional warheads, and there's minimal effort to keep that classified relative to nuclear.

But strategic nukes are a different beast those simply because of their size and requirement for specialized launchers, as well as their relative incongruence with conventional weapons delivery devices. You're not launching a strategic nuke out of a conventional rocket system (as could be the case for a tactical nuke) for sure! So this makes them, more or less, able to be reasonably estimated. It's still a pretty big guessing game, but it's generally going to be at least roughly in the right ballpark.