Potemkin Village

Is Vladimir Putin bluffing when he threatens to use nukes? Some people say he’s gone mad, but what if he’s bluffing? How can you tell the difference? The answer is in a few numbers.

Russia doesn’t have serviceable nuclear weapons. They certainly have nukes and have demonstrated them to the world, but that was decades ago, and they have fallen into disrepair because they are too expensive to maintain, and Russia is too poor to afford it. Perhaps a small subset of Russian nukes…