“Attempts to restore Russia’s 1991 borders will lead only to one thing - a global war with Western countries with the use of our entire strategic (nuclear) arsenal against Kyiv, Berlin, London, and Washington. And against all other beautiful historic places that have long been included in the flight targets of our nuclear triad,” Medvedev said in a reference to the triad of intercontinental ballistic missiles, submarine-launched ballistic missiles, and strategic bombers with nuclear weapons.
Call. The. Bluff.
Russia has been bluffing for decades. Neither their nukes nor their delivery systems work after 50 years of being “maintained” by notorious black market scalpers.
The end of the menace is possible. Call the bluff.
Inspected and fully functional as of 2021 via the joint inspection program with the US that RU has since backed out of.
I don’t think those inspections were that thorough or comprehensive.
The inspections are to verify locations of warheads and delivery systems. They are not function tests. They do not verify fuel integrity, structural integrity, nav hardware functionality or any other critical function. They don’t even check that all the components exist in the delivery system.
These parts (fuel, computer components, chassis components) are all valuable on the international black market. The scalpers who have, for decades, been the main sources for these commodities have been the poorly paid people who maintain these systems.
Idiotic take.
The take is actually grounded in history.
The US has notoriously bad spy craft when it comes to Russia. We spent literal decades believing they were an equal power, spending vast sums on defense to make sure we didn’t fall behind. The government funded all sorts of “studies” but anyone who questioned the narrative got blackballed, and the people who kept getting that work just parroted back what the generals wanted to hear.
And then the iron curtain fell and the Berlin wall came down, and we saw the state of their military…and it was abysmal.
We are seeing the same thing with their basic war capabilities right now. Ukraine has been able to hold them off, more or less, for two years using mostly NATO cast off equipment and sunflower seeds.
There’s a pretty good book that goes over a lot of this by Anne Jacobsen called The Pentagon’s Brain.