Russia doesn't have nearly the amount of nukes they used to. Apart from the dismantling, all signs point to many of them being unusable due to lack of maintenance (due to corruption). What they have left are smaller bombs.
Nuclear arsenals and capability are regularly assessed by the FAS. The latest numbers leave Russia with around 1,710 currently actively deployed strategic nuclear weapons. [1] And somewhere around 4,000 nuclear warheads beyond that. These figures are just estimates, but do account for dismantling, obsolescence of dated capabilities, and so on.
The reason strategic weapons are generally tracked is largely because these are the massive weapons, both literally and in terms of capacity. For instance a modern strategic nuke on the smaller end would generally be around 500kt of yield. The largest bomb ever detonated, Czar Bomba, was 50,000kt of yield. For contrast, the nuke dropped on Hiroshima had a yield of 15kt. Even if our estimate is wrong by 90% in the happy direction, that's enough power to effectively destroy any country countless times over, including the US. Furthermore, those 4000 'rando' warheads are indeed going to be small relative to strategic nukes - but "small" in this case again means sizes of up to ~100kt, once again several times the power of Hiroshima.
I find the propaganda gradually trending towards 'nuclear war wouldn't be so bad' to be quite disconcerting. Let's at least wait until we're a multiplanetary species before we decide to start offing ourselves on a massive scale. Or even better, never do it in the first place. The Fermi Paradox is a real thing, and could be easily explained by people's inability to escape their own self delusions.
I doubt Russia's nukes still work. They would create a localized environmental atrocity where they landed, but that's about it.
It costs a king's ransom to maintain a nuclear arsenal, as Ukraine well understood when they made the decision to give their own weapons up. The people charged with maintaining Russia's nuclear weapons since the fall of the USSR had absolutely no incentive to do anything but divert the funds for their own purposes. That's just how the Russians roll.
Meanwhile, ours will most likely work as intended. The question is, does Putin feel lucky? Well, does he? (Don't answer that, please -- I don't actually want to know.)
(Shrug) I can read and watch the news, just like you can. A country of congenital losers made up a bunch of fairy tales about Nazis to justify an incompetent war of conquest against their peaceful neighbor. They said it would take three days, and now, over two years later, they are bumming weapons from North Korea.
You tell me: what should I think of Russia, given the evidence at hand? They are still powerful enough to cause immense pain and suffering outside their borders as well as inside. If they were content with the latter, that would be one thing, but we have Putin's word that they are not.
