I base this in part on a class I took in 2010 at Harvard as a refresher on nuclear weapons, although the opinions are my own and not that of the instructor of course, as we often don't see eye to eye on such things.

The Russian ballistic missile sub Yekaterinburg caught fire on December 29, under circumstances that are now becoming curious, and potentially serious.

Its not the case as relatively open Russian journal Komersant Vlast reported that there was likely a grave danger of the 16 nuclear missiles on board exploding, and even if that happened, it would be a manageable, if ugly, hazmat situation for the Murmansk region, and not a Chernobyl-like event.

That's not what's important about that event, but rather that the Russian sub may, or may not, have downloaded its nuclear warheads from the sub while in port, and if they weren't downloaded, that was in potential violation of START Treaty rules as to counting what warheads are active at any given moment.

Size matters in nuclear arsennals, if not over an infinite range either.

The marginal benefit of going from 1000 to 2000 warheads is a large difference compared from going from 1o,000 to 11,000, because at the latter sized arsenals, like at the height of the Cold War, its hard to believe that one could get a clean kill on enough of the arsenal for anyone to try that.

It's worth remembering that even in any such a "nuke on nuke 'only' war," what are known as counterforce strikes, or limited nuclear war, the amount of damage done still would be large from such a large number of detonations, even if most of the detonations were on missile sites, since you would still have to attack air bases and most importantly, command and control.

A counter-force nuclear war would still be survivable, possibly, which isn't really the case for counter-value strikes on cities.Its not the most likely scenario, but since so many lives are at stake even in a limited nuclear war, one has to take such a contingency seriously too.

As to the possibility of anyone ever launching such a counterforce war, at 1000 targets, especially after what would presumably be a barrage on command and control, is doable, if it would be very, very risky, as if there are even 50 surviving warheads, even with missile defenses, that's going to be a lot of damage.

The point in the context of the Yekaterinburg is that as the U.S. and Russian nuclaer arsennals are built down under arms control treaties like START, they run the risk of actually making nuclear weapons more dangerous, because at lower levels, at some point, cheating on a Treaty to bump your own arsennal up for a first strike is more and more appealing.

That may well not be the case with the Yekaterinburg at all, as both the Russian Federation and the American govenment have denied that the sub in question was actually loaded with missiles, but, it doesn't change the fact that its not so easy as one would like to take U.S. and Russian arsennals lower forever without running a real risk of endangering stability of the balance of terror that keeps the nuclear peace in the first place.

finis