“John Samford,
While I’d love to see Mother Russia get pounded to paste; I don’t see how a country with 10000
nuclear missiles is a “cardboard bear”.”

First, your numbers are a tad off. By treaty, (SALT II, IIRC) it’s 1200.
Second, here the angle on that from a famous military person;

“There is no point in having the capacity if you haven’t got the will to use it.”*
*
_Viscount Montgomery of Alamein

The only ones nutty enough to toss nukes around are those who are willing to die for Allah, or those who know they are going to die no matter what they do and want to take some with them.
No Russian is going to start the Last War over some pissant, wanna be country that would need a major upgrade to reach low tech sh1t hole status. If you want to bone up on the logic behind nuclear war, Kissinger wrote a book on it back in the 50′s that made him famous and got him started on his road to diplomatic superstar status. It’s called “Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy”
The foundation stone of Dr.K’s logic is the concept of ‘rational actors’. IE; that sane people will make sane choices and those choices can be predicted, if not controlled.
MAD was the result of this book. Henry the K wanted more then MAD, he wanted a set of rules for using nuclear weapons, so there would be no mass strikes involving hundreds or thousands of them. Dulles was on his way out then and he wanted nothing to do with it, so there was never any formal treaty written on the use of Nuclear weapons.

Anyway, the development of PGM’s has more or less made large footprint, mass casualty weapons obsolete. Still deadly, but there is not as much profit in killing off your enemy. The profit is in defeating him and taking what he owns including his labor.
War is just robbery on a international scale. Or at least that is the traditional usage of war. America changed that, but only after we did our share of profitable wars.
Not much point in conquering a land consisting of overlapping radioactive craters.

Russia has NO MODERN weapons. They are using at the best late cold war stuff. While weapons are just tools and the important part of a weapons syatem is the guy(s) using it, there is a thing called the technological advantage.
Any US weapons from the late cold war still in the US inventory are there because they still work as well as any replacement would. Except for the M-16 $ M109, which are there because of politics. The Russians are using 30+ year old weapons because they cannot afford modern ones nor design and build them.
When it comes to modern effective weapons, the Russians don’t have any. Combined with their poor quality troops, I think they are a cardboard bear. Paper dragon (China) is already in use. It matters not how many useless nukes they have.
As a final argument, America will always have a crucial advantage over any dictator. Despotic governments are vulnerable to decapitation strikes. Kill the tyrant and the regime falls. America decapitates itself on a regular schedule. Losing the tyrant de-jour means nothing to the American government.
Nuke DC and we’ll just hold new elections. Nuke Peking or Moscow and those regimes fall and the nations go into anarchy and civil war.