Practically speaking, Russia needed to fire missiles to make sure their missiles actually work. While missiles are “high tech”, they go through incredible stresses enroute, and seemingly insignificant problems can destroy them. The US used to test fire missiles at frequent intervals.
“Overkill”, having multiple missiles aimed at the same target, was not, as misunderstood, so as to be able to “over-destroy” their target, but was based on the idea that most missiles would never reach their target.
There are losses just getting out of the silo. Losses just after leaving the silo. Inertial losses where in the initial boost it goes off course or starts to twirl. Losses at the second stage. Finally, at altitude, there is some peace and quiet right about when missile defenses engage. Then, losses in the descent, with lots of air friction. Then there is missing the target, and finally, the bomb doesn’t explode properly because *it* is flawed, or perhaps damaged by vibration and heat.
Even for very good quality US missiles, overkill is very high.
As far as the Chinese, they are more of a concern, in that to successfully conquer Taiwan, they need to severely cripple the US Pacific fleet. The way to do this is less to attack the fleet itself, than to attack the only two deep water ports capable of repair, refueling, and rearming them. This means Bremerton, Washington and San Diego.
While in addition, they have published white papers from their strategists that unconventional attacks to other parts of the US would be needed as well, so that the US was both distracted and unable to respond before China had landed huge numbers of soldiers on Taiwan, and intermingled them with the Taiwanese, then declare that any future acts by the US Navy amount to unprovoked aggression against China, since the US has technically agreed to the reunification of the two.
However, this does mean that the attacks on the two ports have to be done in such a way that China can claim “plausible deniability.”
Of course, the flip side of this coin is called the Office of Naval Research (ONR). A truly amazing military research and development organization, it is their job to design naval weapons 50 or 100 years in the future as well as for right now.
So the brilliant Cold War scheme of using ballistic missile submarines may have some flaws, like the USN releasing The Kraken, Monster X, and Cthulhu to eat their submarines before they can launch, as it were. Or a reasonable high explosive facsimile thereof.
You made my day!
Cthulhu. Great one.
Ditto. Other than power infrastructure, looks like they are going after the shipyard in Maine, which produces destroyers.