I agree there are a number of intermediaries that need to be convinced it's a good idea to push the final button to ignite the rocket with the nuclear tip ... ... but one would assume there are some similar checks and balances around deploying 200k baby-faced infantry to "exercises" on the Ukrainian border ... ... and further checks and balances before those kids are told to breach the border. All of which has happened, with clearly little preparation or forethought. So while I do hope the nukes are better secured and harder to activate, I don't have much faith in the performance art troupe that is the Russian chain of command.
There's this whole "1982 = 2022" thing people are doing right now and I'm just not having it. YOU CAN CALL TROOPS BACK. That's the whole point of the "nuclear triad" - you have bombers to spook the shit out of people, ICBMs to give irreversible first strike and subs to put fear into the hearts of people who think they might survive if they can take the other guy out first. There's a whole philosophy and policy to nuclear armageddon that no one running for election has had to think about seriously for thirty years so every fearful SOB automatically assumes no one has ever thought about. We deploy troops all the time. Troops here, troops there, troops everywhere, often to ridiculous extremes. More than that, you can't parallel park a troop carrier without it showing up on Google Maps anymore. The level of situational awareness in this our current moment is un-fucking-real from a cold war perspective. I mean, look at this shit. kk now check this out: Dude went to jail for giving that to Jane's in 1984. The information landscape now, as compared to then, is no comparison at all. We know more about North Korea now than we knew about the Soviet Union then. STRATCOM entertained the notion that there were secret missile bases under Moscow. Serious nuclear physicists wrote books about the Soviets conducting secret nuclear tests on the far side of Venus. People keep not reading this: ...despite the fact that it's a story about how 20 years of nuclear policy were shaped by measuring the shadows on the fins of missiles as taken from space. You're assuming that rolling conscripts across a border you've already disregarded "has some similar checks and balances" with ending human civilization. It's not a safe assumption to make. - WWIII - The Day After - Threads - Red Dawn - Wargames - Sum of All Fears - Hunt For Red October - Dr. Strangelove - Fail Safe fuck even - Spies Like Us Take, as their fundamental impetus for nuclear armageddon, the coarse misunderstanding of simple events. That whole "red phone" thing is more than a trope at this point, it's a goddamn legend. It's also a myth - launch authority for Soviet missiles in Cuba was with the Cubans. The fastest nuclear readiness the Soviets ever had was about 28 hours. A quarter of the Russian military is currently involved in Ukraine. This is a "demilitarization" operation from a Russian perspective, not a land war. Right now they're talking about "neutralizing intelligence facilities" while actually attacking civilian targets with cluster munitions. A big part of this is the Russian insistence that it's no big deal - which is exactly the opposite posture the Russians would take if there was a chance in hell of a nuclear attack.
TL;DR: we got one shot of a missile site we didn't understand before U-2 flights over Russia were grounded and as a consequence we increased the amount of warheads we deployed by a factor of ten over a Soviet anti-aircraft strategy to take out a bomber we never built.