Jesus H. Christ in a jumped-up flaming sidecar going over a cliff with a drunken rebel yell.

My God, my God, they really are gearing up to fight the last war.

To determine how much the nuclear balance has changed since the Cold War, we ran a computer model of a hypothetical US attack on Russia’s nuclear arsenal using the standard unclassified formulas that defense analysts have used for decades. We assigned US nuclear warheads to Russian targets on the basis of two criteria: the most accurate weapons were aimed at the hardest targets, and the fastest-arriving weapons at the Russian forces that can react most quickly. Because Russia is essentially blind to a submarine attack from the Pacific and would have great difficulty detecting the approach of low-flying stealthy nuclear-armed cruise missiles, we targeted each Russian weapon system with at least one submarine-based warhead or cruise missile. An attack organized in this manner would give Russian leaders virtually no warning.

This simple plan is presumably less effective than Washington’s actual strategy, which the US government has spent decades perfecting. The real US war plan may call for first targeting Russia’s command and control, sabotaging Russia’s radar stations, or taking other preemptive measures—all of which would make the actual US force far more lethal than our model assumes.