Something to keep in mind, maintaining a nuclear arsenal is very expensive. Not just storage. The Tritium in the warhead has to be replaced every 12 years, the Plutonium has to be replaced every 20 years. That costs are enormous, and russia is almost certainly lying about the size of its arsenal.
Yes looks like it was just the test warheads
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Having supposedly less nukes than russia.
Iirc last data on this for russia was like less than 10% of that budget. Not unreasonable to assume that branch is also super corrupt
A lot of nuclear tech they developed back in the day has almost definitely gotten lost or forgotten.
I wouldn't be at all surprised if russia didn't have a single working nuke.
Just looking at history, combined with the current info we have, and it doesn't seem entirely unreasonable that the current russian nuclear arsenal would be a paper tiger
They still employ Soviet doctrine with a focus on artillery and meat waves to overwhelm.
Tactical battlefield nukes fit with this, especially since they don't even care about their own soldiers.
I thought it was revealed they had far fewer than they claimed to have when the USSR fell.