Back at the beginning of the arms race, the US believed Russian propaganda that they had significantly more nukes than the US was capable of producing.
By the time the US had around 4000 nukes, later intelligence revealed Russia had 4. The US decided to maintain the policy of the arms race as it was very beneficial to the defense industry and research.
The cost to develop and maintain a working thermonuclear weapon is enormous, let alone fission bombs. Russia never had the resources to maintain an arsenal the West isn’t capable of intercepting. You may recall the “Iron Dome” missile defence system that was removed from Europe.
The rocket platforms are expensive enough. The nuclear material requires time, maintenance, and a fuck load of power to produce.
I get the fear. China can do it, they have all the resources and knowledge to. Same with India.
Facts of nukes help: Tritium has a halflife of 12.3 years. Meaning after 12.3 years, the amount of tritium in a nuke is half. the 500lbs of tritium in the 60s is now 35lbs today. Obviously I dont know how much is needed to make a nuke, but it’s not easy to concentrate tritium well. The most effective way is replacing control rods in nuclear reactors with lithium rods. But that’s not the real issue. That’s relatively minor.
The problem is weapons grade uranium or plutonium. You need to enrich those to very high % of U-235 to get a big enough blast to trigger the fusion reaction. To do that, enormous, power intensive centrifuge facilities are required. And it takes a long time to produce enough for a fission bomb.
Given that Putin operates on wealth, and the shit state of the Russian military? They didn’t maintain any operational nukes after the Soviet Union fell.
Now ‘ere’s what crazy-ol’ u/peopleproblems would do. Crazy ol’ u/peopleroblems would come to the sum of bitches we have in Acquisitions, and say 'how many weeks could a force of exactly Ukraine’s force hold a position with everything we have currently sitting in storage deployment ready, but not otherwise deployed? Ok, and how about all the equipment we have being delivered under contract for that many weeks? Ok, now, get me a number to replace all that equipment with the newest contracts set to immediately fill everything we send for that first chunk. Ok, now double it, and phone the pencil pushers to get procurement offers for this shit from the defense manufacturers. Yes, definitely let their boards know too. Oh, don’t mention where the already purchased equipment is going, that’s national security interest. Just mention the US is interested in making them rich in turn for securing our country for a long time."
“And give that number to Congress?”
“Once the various board members hear first. We gotta feed the handlers before we treat the pawns in Congress.”
“Sir is that, legal?”
“It’s an official act. I just made it legal.”