Even if the USA could launch an attack that takes out all Russia’s ground based ICBMs, Russia still would have those 500-ish submarine-based ones, wouldn’t it? If those ignore military targets, and manage to hit the top 100 largest population centers in the USA, everything larger than Spokane (population: 220k) would be hit (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...)
Now, the Soviet (and then Russian) solution to this was to eventually develop missiles that could reach the US from port, but guess what? That means that instead of a survivable, highly dispersed and hidden missile force, the vast majority of your missiles are massed together where a single warhead could take them out.
Russian strategic bombing forces are also pretty small (36 Tu-160's built, maybe half operational, and something like 60 Tu-95MS operational), so most of their nuclear deterrent comes from land based ICBMs. Note, however, that Soviets understood this and so built the SS-25 Topol, and there are about 100 of these road-mobile ICBMs operational today. (Along with ~130 silo launched missiles.)
The Bulletin kinda glosses over the road-mobile survivability. It isn't what America did, so people who are experts in American systems often don't pay sufficient attention to the advantages of such systems, in my experience.
> Such an attack would be potentially aimed at destroying all road-mobile launchers either as they disperse or after they have taken up position some short distance from roads that give them access to forested areas.
Russia has over 3 million square miles of forest, and is over 6 million square miles total. 8,000/3,000,000 seems like pretty poor odds to get all the ICBMs hiding in the woods.
About half of the Russian mobile ICBM force are based in the Volga plain, and the Siberia based half are in mixed forest-steppe zones, because the Russians know their own geography.