| HN Mirror

It's not handwaving conjecture, it is cold calculation.

Russia has a nuclear triad the same as the US.

1. Russia's submarine forces have been gutted since the Cold War. Poor training and maintenance has led to a slew of launch failures in recent years and analysis of their deployment tempo seems to indicate only a minimum number of submarines are deployed at any given time.

2. The long range strategic bomber forces of the Russian Aerospace Force are so outdated and vulnerable to western air defense systems that they rarely if ever enter the airspace of Ukraine, with the Tu-160 supersonic bomber lobbing cruise missiles from well outside Ukraine's air defense zone, the Tu-95 doing the same, and the Tu-22 only targeting areas not protected by Patriot missiles.

3. Aging systems, poor maintenance, and a lack of adequate funding has severely hampered Russia's Strategic Rocket Forces. They lack the precision to ensure a favorable outcome in the event of a nuclear war because they were designed for scenarios where dozens if not hundreds of warhead were used on individual area targets in an age where there were tens of thousands of warheads available for use.

All of Russia's "superhypersonic killer nuclear-powered unstoppable death machine weapons test" rhetoric is an attempt to fool the US into believing that they have something up their sleeve because they know that the US knows that each of the three spokes of their triad have been degraded so much. Russia also knows they can't afford to rebuild their forces, so wonderweapons it is.

They can't even build enough radios to equip all of their ground forces in Ukraine with communications gear and their megaweapons programs are hollow vanity projects.

Do not mistake any of this for hubris. Russia can still launch nuclear weapons and any such usage would be disastrous.

The doomsday scenarios at the height of the Cold War where 40,000 Soviet warheads could be mustered for deployment by a variety of difficult to stop systems to be met with a response of 20,000 US warheads thus irradiating the entire northern hemisphere and dooming humanity to extinction is all but impossible.

So unless the definition of "doomsday" has changed from "the extinction of all of humanity" to "a really shitty time where hundreds of thousands die in an instant" the doomsday risk level has indeed decreased.