Russia still has the most Nuclear weapons, page 1

Originally posted by Brother Stormhammer
Some things to keep in mind when looking at those charts.

Hi Stormhammer, will do my best to keep them in mind....

1) Most of the Russian military's advantage in numbers comes from non-strategic nuclear weapons. If you look at the 'overall' nuclear picture, those are matched up against the nuclear forces of Great Britain, France, and (quite possibly) China.

Agreed, the Russian federation and US forces is relatively balanced with the US weapons being on the whole more accurate and the RF weapons amounting to about double the yield. As for Britain and France , to say nothing of China, i sincerely doubt they would get involved unless their own nations comes under attack. They just don't have the numbers of weapons required to significantly change the balance of forces in a early war nuclear exchange and have thus invested in a second strike capacity at sea.

2) "Deployed" doesn't always equate to "Deliverable". The U.S. manned bomber force is (at least on paper, it's obviously never been tested in reality) more capable than the Russians.

I would disagree but would openly admit that our disagreements and agreements would be 'on paper' only given the 'tactical/theather' nature of such deployments.

I'd also give the Ohio-class SSBNs a slight but significant qualitative edge over their Russian counterparts. This isn't to say that the Russian systems aren't extremely dangerous, just that the USN's are slightly better.

In terms of the current Ohio's yes, but the three Typhoon's that will eventually be redeployed , as well as the newly build Borei's, will make whatever true 'gap' there is very small indeed. As for the qualitative edge the boats can fire their arsenals from berthing locations in port ( or just outside within bastions protected by significant land and sea based ASW assets ) on US continental targets so any discussion about a lack of 'quality' has, certainly in my reading, since the late 70's been largely moot.

That impacts the at-sea time of the weapons, and the odds of them being fired when called upon. The Soviet (and now Russian) military has historically had serious problems with maintenance

They don't have to be at sea to be in range of their targets. As for the maintenance they did keep older systems in use as long as humanly possible which logically resulted in the oft commented upon inefficiency. That's what they were willing to do to gain and maintain the significant, again in my reading, strategic edge they had established by the late 70's.

(one reason that Russian warships carry so many different missile launchers and radar antennae), and if the missiles (or the vehicles that carry them, be they TELs or SSBNs) aren't mission-ready, the warheads aren't much good.

Actually they tend to have different tasks or be different incarnations/developments on the same idea which is largely why they are not stuck with the Harpoon and Tomahawk's as standard land and ship attack weapons despite the clear failure of those systems to live up to expectations. It is hard enough to change from one system to another but to keep on deploying new generations of ships with older generations of weapons isn't logical and thus not what they did.

As for the mission ready rates of the TEL's and SSBN's the Israeli's and USA can tell you all about how effective Russian SAM's are even in the hands of third world nations who have little or no experience with them, the experienced personal to operate them, or national networks that would massively enhance their lethality. As for the Russian SSBN's their land based forces were more than sufficient deterrent power and SSBN's isn't exactly a resource that doesn't wear out when used. The years in harbor may not have been good for the ships ( and they may not have been maintained as well as were planned for) but what could have happened at sea during underfunded operations would likely have been rather more severe.

3) You can only kill things so dead. Either side's nuclear arsenal is more than adequate to reduce any potential adversary to a Stone-Age level of technology. After that point, bigger numbers are just showing off.

But the nuclear weapons never reached levels where one would in fact just be bouncing rubble as was clearly understood by both sides. Both active and passive measures could , and certainly did in the USSR, be used to greatly dimish the damage sustained and the only way to make up for that would be to deploy even greater numbers of weapons. I have gotten involved in many such discussions so you can , if you wish, take a look at what i have introduced into evidence in the past.

Stellar