This is one of those odd situations where "both things are true at once." Militarily speaking, Russia is so bad, it's cringey-awkward bad. So bad that it was, and still is, almost cognitively impossible for many to really entertain just how bad Russia is compared to Western military capabilities.

And that has significant bearing on people's fatalistic ideas of: "I just want to be vaporized in WWIII..." Because WWIII may not cooperate with that. Even targeting priority and how a nuclear war might actually be fought could leave large US population, transportation, and industrial centers without a bomb. Or even get significant downwind fallout.

And suddenly, you're left sitting there where some canned food & water would have made all the difference, thinking: "Well, this is awkward..."

Simultaneously, despite how awful and creaky the Russian military apparatus is, in a nuclear exchange, whatever percentage of it still works, and reaches CONUS the UK, & Europe, will still be the worst absolutely shitshow day in human history.

You don't want to go soft on your enemies, but the entire Cold War with the Soviet Union, and now Putin's Russia has always had a big "Poor as fuck bumpkin with short-man syndrome" aspect to it. And the West kind of in a combination semi-honest "better safe than sorry" ethos, and a lot of greed... a lot of greed, deliberately deceived itself they were more dangerous than they were.

It's what President Eisenhower was warning us about in his famous "Military-Industrial Complex"-speech. And the self-deception was already so ingrained he had to tiptoe around it, or risk getting lambasted. And the American people never understood the unspoken part of perpetual and intentional overestimation of the rather crusty & poverty stricken Soviet bloc.

The Soviets & Warsaw Pact were poor as hell. Even with US Lend-Lease giving them everything we could in WWII, the "Great Patriotic War" and the entire Eastern Front, Germany pushing in, and getting pushed out to the bitter end in the Reichsbunker in Berlin, the Soviets won, essentially, by perpetually suffering a 2:1 KIA/WIA/POW ratio to Germany.  

In the Cold War, U2 overflights, then SR71s, Corona, Hexagon, & Keyhole satellites, and whatever other SIGINT, & HUMINT we gathered on the Soviets, we KNEW they were poor AF.

We counted paved road miles, and the cars/trucks on them. Rail lines and the number of trains & cars. Counted farm fields and calculated food yields. Measured power plants, mines, & factories, for what went in and out.

The US KNEW. We ALWAYS KNEW.

In nuclear analogy terms, if you're in a standoff with a crackhead mugger, you don't spit in his face or turn your back on him just because he's got a rusty Taurus 9mm of some sort, and there's a good chance there's some .40, and a .380 in the magazine, and one or two might be backwards.

If the first few rounds still work... well, "dead is dead."

But in this thread, I see lots of blithe talk about things like ICBM missile warning times. And then adding that SLBM launches off the US coast are mere fraction of the ICBM warning time, only 8-5 minutes...

Nobody remembers that Russia is only sailing two SSBN's of late, just occasionally to "saber rattle," and they only deploy about 1000 miles max into the North Polar Sea?

Where's all the others?

Why are they barely going outside their territorial waters, using their SSBNs as a sort of makeshift ocean-going TEL truck?

Because they are having tech and logistics problems going further. And, it's likely that the USN & other NATO Navies have given Russian subs some overt "Well, HI THERE!" active pings, and other persistent surface shadowing activities from ships, aircraft, sonobouys, and permanent sea-floor equipment... to say: "Don't waste your time guys."

Russia has pretty much lost an entire LEG of their "nuclear triad."

What else isn't working or barely works?

And a huge chunk of the Russian stockpile is "tactical" or "battlefield" nuclear weapons. Short tangentially gravity bombs. Short range cruise missiles. SRBM's, stuff that sucks for Ukraine, Eastern Europe, and the former Baltic SSR's that want no part of Putin's "reunion tour."  But it cannot reach CONUS or most of Western Europe.

Obviously, whatever percentage of Russian nuclear weapons that reaches CONUS or elsewhere is still categorically speaking, "too much."