> Mutually Assured Destruction is still a thing.
My assessment is that it isn't.
The only MAD-able nation states in the 1980s were the United States and the Soviet Union.
Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Russian successor state has been unable to adequately maintain its military.
I have seen ample evidence that the entire Russian military apparatus is a fraud and no evidence that it is not. The examples are too many to list in total so here are some highlights:
1. A string of ballistic missile test failures.
2. Photographic evidence of the poor conditions of their ballistic missile submarine bases and the submarines themselves including submarines that are considered "active" but haven't left port in many years.
3. The halving in the last 30 years of the number of Rocket Armies and the reduction of Rocket Divisions within the Rocket Armies.
4. The reassignment of Rocket Army personnel, supposedly the highest-priority and most stringently-selected personnel in the Russian Armed Forces, for duty in Ukraine where they have very quickly been killed.
5. Obsolete equipment rendering their strategic bombing forces ineffective in the face of Ukrainian air defense systems to the point that no strategic bombers enter Ukrainian airspace, instead lobbing cruise missiles into Ukraine from outside the air defense envelope due to numerous airframes being lost to, quite frankly, an inadequate and patchwork Ukrainian air defense network.
I find any military that claims to have thousands of nuclear warheads ready to launch but cannot feed or clothe its infantryman to be, as the kids put it, "sus".
Finally, they seem to have shifted their rhetoric to absurd doomsday weapons because they know we know that their nukes are shit so they have to come up with "nuclear tsunami torpedoes" and "nuclear doomsday cruise missiles" which are, I'm telling you as an engineer not a poly-sci major who grew up on Cold War fetishism and is now an "analyst", impossible fantasies.
So you have the nuclear triad: submarines, bombers, and land-based ballistic missiles.
Their subs are rusting hulks that rarely leave port, and those that do are at Kursk/Moskva levels of readiness.
Their bombers can't even operate over Ukraine, a nation subsisting on single-digit percentages of obsolete NATO equipment.
Their land-based ballistic missiles keep blowing up on the ground. Even their saber-rattling launch before Biden's trip to Ukraine, something that they would want to get right, exploded on the launchpad.
Let's be very clear: they still have nuclear weapons.
But MAD is MAD. Annihilation. Extinction. Not "fuck this is bad", but "fuck we're all doomed, permanently, forever".
MAD doesn't mean NYC gets nuked, MAD means all human life on earth ends for all practical purposes with only scattered bands of irradiated survivors in the southern latitudes.
Russia is almost certainly incapable of MAD.