> How much do you want to bet that a subset of the Russian nuclear weapons simply do not work, and that they will only figure this out when they need to 'test' in response to American tests
My bet is that most of them are in disrepair. Russia spends around 8 Billion USD on nuclear weapons. France spends around 6 Billion USD on nuclear weapons. Difference is that France has something like 200 warheads, while Russia has something like 5500 warheads.
Furthermore the fact that using of nuclear weapons has extremely low probability of happening is giving a massive space for corruption. Why maintain what you are not going to use? They managed to siphon money from maintenance of armored equipment, why not ICBMs?
We can get to the staggering reality like Russians have less than 100 working nukes and they themselves may not even know which one are those from those 5500
>My bet is that most of them are in disrepair. Russia spends around 8 Billion USD on nuclear weapons. France spends around 6 Billion USD on nuclear weapons. Difference is that France has something like 200 warheads, while Russia has something like 5500 warheads.
US spend: 57 billion USD; US GDP: 29,000 billion. US spend on nukes as % of GDP: 0.19%
Russia spend: 8 billion USD; Russia GDP: 2173 billion. Russia spend on nukes as % of GDP: 0.36%
France spend: 6 billion USD; France GDP: 3174 billion. French spend on nukes as % of GDP: 0.18%.
That's why I put as % of GDP. Russian nukes cost rubles, not USD. The numbers suggest pretty conclusively that the Russian arsenal of 5500 is maintained about as well as the US arsenal of like 5300.
Your "staggering reality" of 100 working missiles is completely delusional.
I think there is a degree of trade off in this, yes a nuclear scientist/engineer/technician in Russia or China is cheaper than in the USA. But also, the people with those kind of skills (or those technically competent enough to do a good job, are going to be expensive no matter what.)
At some level when people have enough technical skill to do these jobs well, they also have enough technical skill to leave the country and go elsewhere and do something else for better quality of life.
Like GDP per capita in china is much lower than the USA, I bet that their nuclear program engineers are getting paid at least ~80k range, which while less than the equivalent engineer in the USA is paid, is not the same level as what a direct PPP comparison would give.
There are a lot of software engineers in UK who made $50k or less who could have presumably moved to the US a make a lot more but never did. Lots of government employees making much less than they could. Patriotism, wanting to live in their own country, wanting to work on interesting things, etc.
Again, Russia has much smaller economy than USA. What are you searching for is PPP And no amount of PPP will help you to have 5500 warheads on 8 Billion budget vs 200 warheads on 6 Billion budget.
With your logic Kongo should be able to afford 5500 nuclear warheads just by spending 0.4% pf GDP. That's not possible is it?
Or, they do have a 100 working ICBMs and they do actually know which ones are those. The rest of the warheads in storage are not really maintained. Russians are corrupt as hell, but they are not actually incompetent when they need to have something working.
My bet is that most of them are in disrepair. Russia spends around 8 Billion USD on nuclear weapons. France spends around 6 Billion USD on nuclear weapons. Difference is that France has something like 200 warheads, while Russia has something like 5500 warheads.
https://www.icanw.org/nuclear_spending_get_the_facts
Furthermore the fact that using of nuclear weapons has extremely low probability of happening is giving a massive space for corruption. Why maintain what you are not going to use? They managed to siphon money from maintenance of armored equipment, why not ICBMs?
We can get to the staggering reality like Russians have less than 100 working nukes and they themselves may not even know which one are those from those 5500