With a huge nuclear arsenal. So I doubt Moscow would be reduced to rubble, unless everything else was too.
Could you please come back to reality?
If not, where do you draw the line?
Because this isn’t the first time this has been analyzed, and the math is clear: the only winning strategy with terrorists not negotiate under any circumstances. You call their bluff, and you make known that you will always call their bluff in the future, and never back down. Do anything else and the terrorist can manipulate you into anything they want.
However, the idea that a conventional force would obliterate the capital of a nuclear armed power without escalating into full-on nuclear war seems unlikely to me.
I live in a nuclear armed country too.
Nuclear weapons are extremely sensitive and maintenance heavy devices. They have parts that need to be regularly checked and replaced or else the bomb will fissile. These parts are EXTREMELY precise and very high purity. The rockets have similar needs or else the engine will as likely blow up on launch.
Maintenance cycles are on the order of 10-15 years. We are now 35 years out from the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the nuclear and space industries have experienced massive brain drain and almost complete elimination of operational and maintenance budgets.
The likelihood that these strategic weapon systems have been adequately maintained is indistinguishable from zero.
For reference, that number of nuclear weapons is where China decided to draw the line as a nuclear deterrence against the US until recently.
A hundred modern nuclear weapons is plenty to fucking ruin a country, but no, it doesn't not take "just one". Most western countries would survive say, a smuggled terrorist nuke (or 4) just fine. Angry and mourning, but fine.
France alone has enough deterrent in their nuclear weapons. The UK has theirs in submarines, to ensure even if you magically erased the entire British Islands, you still take tens of nukes up the ass.
Nuclear deterrence is not complicated, and it's pretty well understood in public. I don't know why so many people here are so wildly off base.
Meanwhile, all this was always intended to be roughly "backup" to the US's absurd stockpile, including tons of literal gravity drop nukes so we can cosplay Dr Strangelove as the world ends. And the ending of the IRBM treaty means the US has recently told our defense industry that it gets to play with the cool rockets again.
Contrast this with many "advanced" nations such as UK, EU, Australia etc. that can't even get a rocket into space. There was a period recently where the US was relying on Soyuz rockets to get into space.
Uh, by what metric?
>has continually bombed Kiev and other parts of Ukraine
Yeah, with primarily low sophistication weapons invented by a country that has to build everything from scratch in bunkers. This is only possible because Ukraine does not have much in terms of anti-air missile systems and cannot police its airspace.
Meanwhile, Kyiv is giving back plenty of half-assed weapons systems, including multiple jury-rigged light sport aircraft that Russia was unable to keep out of their airspace.
Both combatants are basically children playing with toys right now.
>There was a period recently where the US was relying on Soyuz rockets to get into space.
At no point was the US relying on Soyuz rockets to "get to space". The entire time the US was using Soyuz to ferry astronauts to the collaborative space station we were launching unmanned payloads with multiple launch vehicles, and the military has at no point lost the ability to put payloads into orbit.
Meanwhile in Russia:
>Despite the Russian claims that the missile is on 'combat alert', since its 2022 flight test, it [Sarmat] has experienced four failed tests, the most recent on 21 September 2024.
Russia is not the Soviet Union.
In terms of their nuclear vehicles, I'd bet on enough of them working to be a deterrent, but there's lots of open questions about what percentage. Russia has been running even their Rocket Force on a remarkably small budget compared to the number of warheads they are supporting. Unless they have magical efficiency, they are likely skimping somewhere, and in a military rife with outright fraud and every step of the chain pocketing money that is supposed to be used for procurement, why should we believe the Rocket Force is free of that behavior?
The Kinzhal is just a normal ballistic missile. If it is "hypersonic", so were the missiles the US has sitting in bunkers.
China has the first real "hypersonic" weapon.
Besides, Russia's super awesome hypersonic missile that will totally kill the west is regularly intercepted by the Patriot platform. Because it's just a normal ballistic missile, which is what the Patriot is designed to intercept.