Extrapolating from the general sad state of the weapon systems in use by Russians where they are at this point unpacking tanks made in 1950, the quality of maintenance on their vehicles, and is difficult to plausibly claim that all the ancient rusty USSR stuff across the strategic rocket barrier is in any sort of usable shape.
Now, if an order to launch is given, some rockets may launch, some of those may actually fly, some of those flying actually get somewhere, and perhaps some of THOSE may actually detonate should they reach the target, and maybe if you're lucky at the designed yield. The percentages in that funnel that aren't known. And nobody [perhaps except some crazies] wants to find them out because even one in the middle of big city is enough.
There is no more ancient rusty USSR stuff -- at least in the Kremlin's strategic nuclear arsenal:
According to one comment I saw here a few weeks ago, Russia's nukes are probably made of wood.
I suggest searching the web for "Russian nuclear weapons modernization", restricting yourself to credible news outlets.
Opinions are fine, but the evidence against your opinion is currently stronger.
Also, you do realize that Russia is currently winning in Ukraine -- in part because they have an equipment advantage over Ukraine? E.g., the glide bombs they recently developed have proven effective.
They are not "currently winning". By any objective measure, the war on the ground is currently a stalement.
Only problem is that in the long term -- stalemates never work out for the occupiers.
In Russia's case: If the situation continues as it does, and moving at the glacial pace that it does, and draining 10 percent of its GDP every year -- they will ultimately have to give up on their optional neocolonial adventure, pick up their toys and go home.
By any objective measure it is a war of attrition where for almost one year only one side has had meaningful advances.
>stalemates never work out for the occupiers.
Yeah, don’t bother justifying that. What actually almost never works out is a smaller country winning a war of attrition against a (much) bigger opponent.
BTW, did you catch Zelensky talk about (not) ceding 30% of territory the other day? That’s quite a bit more than the four oblasts plus Crimea. He knows where this is going.
That's not true, as Ukraine has scored significant non-territorial advances (like forcing most of the occupier's fleet to retreat from Crimea) in the same time frame.
Also you're setting an arbitrary time window of 1 year (when if we want to evaluate the conflict meaningfully, we need to look at how things are moving now compared to the start of the conflict. Which is definitely not the outcome Russia intended. And ignoring Russia's considerable losses in achieving the paltry gains that it has (which are very much part of the attrition equation), etc.
What never works out is a smaller country winning a war of attrition against a (much) bigger opponent.
You're missing the point -- the smaller country doesn't need to "win" the war of attrition (in terms of effecting a complete reversal) in order to win the conflict. It just needs to outlast the occupier. For which there are no end of precedents in history, recent and ancient. Including (ironically) the U.S. withdraw from Afghanistan, which is apparently what gave Putin the gigantic (for him) hard-on that inspired him to sign his country for the same inevitable fate in the first place (but with much higher cost and KIA/WIA rates to his people along the way).
Did you catch Zelensky the other day? He knows where this is going.
I don't see any significance to that quote.
But it does seem pretty clear which side you're cheering for, in any case.
Ah, then Ukrainians will be landing there any minute now. Liberating it and the whole coast. Now that they are patrolling the Black Sea again.
But, of course, they’re not and they’re not going to. Because it’s a sideshow that gives them no meaningful advantage. Except fodder for the fandom.
>arbitrary time window
Oh, you want to talk about how the Kontr went? How Ukraine burned its offensive potential in three months for nothing? How Russia has been on the offensive for ten months without slowing down, rather the opposite? You want to talk about how things are going right now?
>Which is definitely not the outcome Russia intended
Putler tried to force Ukraine to the table. That failed. Making Russian nationalists very happy.
>It just needs to outlast the occupier. >part of the attrition equation >effecting a complete reversal
Yeah, you simply do not understand what a war of attrition is. You don’t understand why the war is happening where it is.
You don’t understand that every day of war pushes Ukraine deeper into a hole it has no hope of ever getting out of. You don’t understand the cost of this war to Ukraine. You don’t want to and you’re not supposed to. It’s like a movie, a morality play. The only relevant concepts you were taught to understand are aggressor, victim and atrocity. The Good Guys always win In the End. In the meantime you get to watch people die and feel good about it. Doing Your Part.
The comparison with Afghanistan is infantile.
>I don't see any significance to that quote.
That comes later.
PS: I have a movie for you to watch: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantis_(2019_film)
Whether Russia has the upper hand is an important question for deciding on what policies the NATO countries should pursue, but we cannot have a fruitful public discussion on the question if anyone giving evidence for one side of the question is shouted down as a traitor.
Based on the carefully worded sibling comment to yours - it would seem they have other goals in mind.
>carefully worded
The Project 2025 promise: A Russian under every American bed.
"shouted down as a traitor" does not get at the crux of the problem I see. The problem is that anyone who thinks as follows cannot form an accurate opinion about the likely outcome of the war:
Anyone who argues that Russia is winning the war is probably a Russia sympathizer, and a Russia sympathizer shouldn't be trusted and consequently we don't have to consider his argument.
I've personally yet to encounter anybody who holds (or read any arguments in favor of the view) that Russia is outright winning this conflict in any tactical or operational sense, beyond perhaps a very marginal measure - without it becoming immediately clear that the person making them had major gaps in their knowledge, and/or strong biases (as revealed by reciting standard narratives as to the supposed causes of the war). Or without it emerging (as with the sibling commenter) that they just don't seem to give a fuck either way.
But this is of course a different topic.
Mearsheimer is a prime example of someone way too ideologically biased and beholden to broken narratives to be taken seriously.
For just a bit of - at the glance similar - but much, much more thought out and balanced stuff, I would recommend anything at all by Steven Kotkin. He speaks with folks from Brookings quite a bit. His experience is unparalleled and world view is considerably more nuanced
https://carnegieendowment.org/russia-eurasia/politika/2024/0...
I think you're likely wrong about that last part. I would be willing to bet that certain US 3-letter agencies know very well what the percentages in that funnel are. It's clearly enough that the west is careful about direct confrontation with Russia.
Some choice quotes: "Vladimir Putin has the old politburo to thank for the huge stockpiles of weapons that were built up during the cold war"
"Russia’s ability to build new tanks or infantry fighting vehicles, or even to refurbish old ones, is hampered by the difficulty of getting components. <...> The lack of high-quality ball-bearings is also a constraint."
"They [military firms] also largely depend on machine tools imported years ago from Germany and Sweden, many of which are now old and hard to maintain."
Given that the country has no ability to produce ball bearings - and in other news, even nails, and can only cast gun barrels in single digits on western equipment, consider me HIGHLY skeptical that any rocket modernization that was supposed to have transpired has gleaming ready to fly stuff. More likely the money was "razpil" (разпилено) - literally "sawn off".
Still, lets hope we don't have to find out
Does it matter?
The thing about a nuclear *deterrent* is that it doesn't have to work. There just has to be a realistic possibility that (at least some of it) it might.
If you too would like to know way more about nuclear weapons than is useful in civilian life, I'd recommend reading:
Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb
The nuclear weapons FAQ, authored by Carey Sublette, a hobbyist researcher who is extraordinarily dedicated to understanding nuclear weapons from declassified documents and physical principles: https://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Nwfaq/Nfaq0.html
Anne C. Fitzpatrick's dissertation Igniting the Light Elements: The Los Alamos Thermonuclear Weapon Project, 1942-1952: https://www.osti.gov/biblio/10596
The Arms Control Wonk blog/podcast: https://www.armscontrolwonk.com/
Nuclear historian Alex Wellerstein's blog Restricted Data: https://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/
The nuclear weapons subreddit, particularly posts on it authored by Alex Wellerstein, Carey Sublette, and a few others whose names currently escape me: https://old.reddit.com/r/nuclearweapons/
Chuck Hansen's book "U.S Nuclear Weapons: The Secret History" (out of print, sadly; will have to pay $$$ or find a scanned pirate copy) and his massive book/PDF "The Swords of Armageddon" available for purchase here: http://www.uscoldwar.com/
That's peace time thinking. Little Boy was detonated over Hiroshima without ever having performed a full scale test of the design. Our knowledge and modeling capabilities today are more than sufficient to produce and stockpile a new design that is guaranteed to work -- without testing an actual weapon -- if that somehow became necessary.
There are many reasons why a nuclear power such as the US is unlikely to consider doing this, but lack of confidence in weapon design or manufacture is not among those reasons.
US weapons also rely on tritium gas "boosting" to operate reliably and efficiently [2], and tritium decays with only a 12.3 year half life. The gas reservoirs of weapons need their tritium replaced at significantly shorter intervals. Even manufacturing enough tritium to maintain the stockpile has become a challenge because the US has retired its Cold War era weapons-material reactors that used to operate at Hanford and Savannah River. Currently the US uses a power reactor owned by the Tennessee Valley Authority to make tritium for weapons [3].
It's possible to make nuclear weapons (even thermonuclear weapons) with only uranium 235 for fissile material and no stored tritium. Such weapons could last a much longer time without active maintenance, since U-235 decays thousands of times slower than Pu-239. However, they would be larger and heavier for the same explosive yield, which complicates delivery. They would also lose certain safety features. Finally, without being able to perform full scale tests, it is doubtful that the US would have the confidence to replace its current high-maintenance weapons stockpile with a new generation of low-maintenance weapons.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockpile_stewardship
[2] https://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Nwfaq/Nfaq4-3.html#Nfaq4.3....
[3] https://www.wvlt.tv/2022/05/24/watts-bar-lone-source-nuclear... "Watts Bar lone source of a nuclear weapon material; TVA increasing production"