Ballistic missiles are terrifying, but the truth is russia just doesn’t have very many of them. The use of the missile then is essentially an admission of bluffing since inevitably the best time to deploy this very production limited weapon is when russia maximally needs to project strength… which is when it is weakest.



They include components that haven’t been produced since 1990’s. They will have to re-think large parts of the missile if they want to produce more than just a handful of new ones. There aren’t endless amounts of 30-year-old devices laying around to use.