Just a few points to add here:
Washington Metro subway:
Owen: "In the 80s they [Old Soviets] moved city grocery supermarkets underground.
We never did that.
They have a civil defense advantage."
Sure, and I think many countries also built large underground facilities for their government elites in case of nuclear war.
The US does not have such extensive facilities, but we do have:
One wag said the explosion resulted from someone stealing the part designed to prevent it.
Bottom line: all their insane threats notwithstanding, there is no way that Russians want nuclear war because it would effectively result in Russian national "suicide by cop".
Russia's Satan II, aka Putin's Big D*ck, suffers from E.D. -- premature Explosive Disfunction:
I realized later I was not clear about bombers needing to have warheads put aboard and it takes an hour or so, and they will probably get it. —— Will probably get it refers to targetting. If you’re in St Petersburg, the Russian naval central offices, you point your boomers at the targets that might immediately hit Russia. That won’t be bombers. That is ICBMs, maybe some command and control like the Pentagon and Bremerton/Groton, and not places like Wright Patt logistics or home ports with no ships currently docked.
Meaning, you aim at things that might hit you, Russia, in the next 48 hrs. Bombers aren’t going anywhere, even stealth, until there is some confidence Russian air defense has been destroyed, and thus bombers won’t be SLBM targetted. They get hit later, not first, and thus there is time to load bombs on them.
ICBM targeting and “loading targets into them” just means align/calibrate the onboard inertial nav systems (the gyros and linear accelerometers) and give them a latitude/longitude to hit. That’s a less than 1 hour activity, but it’s not less than 2 minutes. Nobody is dumb about this stuff. If a missile is offline per treaty requirements, it got cut up into pieces, not merely erased target.
SALT and START were two different things, and there are solid in-orbit recon assets for verification on both sides.
Perhaps the biggest Russian advantage in all of this is their somewhat brilliant choice to place ICBMs on mobile launchers. You have to point missiles at latitude/longitude and if they move them, you lose not only accuracy, but a completely wasted warhead that is not hitting nothingness.
US anti missile interceptors number about 44, and their somewhat optimistic effectiveness estimate is 50%. I read the test criteria that generated that number. It required all countermeasures be off and zero maneuvering past boost phase. So just put that stuff aside. There is no defense against high speed ballistics, never has been and are not now. And that was all pre hypersonic.
Note the ABM treaty allowed both sides to have interceptors to defend 2 sites. A later protocol reduced this to 1 site, because neither side built a 2nd site. The Russians put theirs around Moscow. The US, around the North Dakota launch complex. The whole idea of ABM was to reduce defenses — because if defenses were kept small then there would be no ongoing incentive to build more and more strategic ICBMs or SLBMs. Regardless, the US withdrew from the treaty in 2002. There is no ABM agreement as of now, largely because there is no point. It doesn’t work.