Thunderf00t—who I don’t always agree with or necessarily like—makes an excellent point around the 18 minute mark in this video. The jist of it is this: nuclear weapons are fragile as hell and expensive to maintain (to the tune of ~$1 million per year). If not properly cared for, they don’t kaBOOOOM!🤯 and Chernobyl us all to Mad Max land. Instead, they look perfectly fine and useful, but when you go to launch them, they fizzle like damp firecrackers (albeit damp firecrackers that can spread radiation; but still, while awful, a dirty bomb is not a nuclear bomb).
Russia is a first-order corrupt kleptocracy, as demonstrated by their current Ukrainian misadventure. If they haven’t been maintaining the cheap and easy stuff (like tanks), then they sure as hell aren’t maintaining the expensive stuff that’s hard to spot check for compliance (like nukes).
(Honestly, the whole video makes a series of inter-nesting excellent points, and is worth watching. The major thrust is that there are a lot of dogwhistles blowing out there, signaling who is and is not an actual nuclear superpower.)
