They can keep themselves under numerical treaty limits by retiring the Satan and Layner.
They would not have exceeded treaty limits so they wont need to retire anything... their existing missiles would have the allowed number of warheads, meaning they would not have carried anything like their max capacity.
Satan and even Liner could be used to launch satellites cheaply as a way of disposing of the missiles in a useful way.
They could be kept in storage for the purpose of satellite launch with the allowed warheads they might have carried placed on new missiles replacing them on duty.
START is already suspended, they don't have to maintain the limit of this idiotic treaty, do they?
The 1,550 limit was set for 2021 sometime so they would have met the conditions of the treaty then. They have since frozen their observance of the treaty because the US was using the verification visits to find targets for Ukraine and to check security, presumably to train groups to defeat the security measures.
I rather doubt they will have built a lot of new warheads in that time.
And no you can't make lots of warheads and just keep them in storage so they are not counted... they are counted whether mounted on missiles or kept in storage.
It probably won't be extended, although the US with its poor strategic nuclear arsenal may want to maintain the treaty. Putin will certainly agree to that.
The Americans will want China added to Russian numbers but wont allow France or Britain or Israeli warhead numbers be included.
They are also likely not going to be happy about Thunderbird or Poseidon and will want them banned completely along with restrictions on hypersonic weapons too... until they have them.
Now, with little effort, they can maintain a level of over 2,000 strategic warheads
It would make rather more sense to produce IRCM and load them with tactical nuclear warheads to level Europe and western allies in Asia and not worry about them counting in strategic nuclear arms agreements.
The only reason there is a formation with them still around is because its missiles were not close to expiration. So it would have been a waste of money to retire them early.
A useful, highly mobile way of launching new satellites if urgently needed...
I prefer that a 1 teraton nuke be developed. Go big or go home.
I don't disagree, but I would also agree with Big Gazza and say that the best way to deal with a large area target that is soft and crunchy like a city is with lots of small warhead rather than a single bigger one.
If you imagine a city as being lots and lots of buildings spread out over a large area, one really powerful warhead in the centre is really going to mess up targets close to the detonation but as you get further away the power reduces rapidly to the point where a dozen or two kilometres away it does very little damage at all.
Take the example of the 1 MT warhead, an 8-10km radius is small and is made worse if the terrain is hilly as it protects areas from blast too.
In comparison the use of 5 x 100KT warheads... which is only 500KT in total and only half the 1 MT power that is properly spread out will do vastly more damage to the whole city and kill rather more people and destroy more structures.
Think of a 500kg HE bomb. Drop it in the middle of a field filled with soldiers and the radius of 50-100m around the bomb impact point and those soldiers are going to be jam. But 300m away they might just get earache and knocked over by the blast.
If you split that 500kg bomb up into 250 gramme blocks of HE with a ball bearing cover and spread those out over the entire field... perhaps a 10m by 10m grid with one bomblet on each square and you could cover an area of several kms with fragments that will kill or injure soldiers or light structures.
And that is the key... in a normal city having lots of smaller bombs not only kills more people and destroys more buildings but the interacting shockwaves will ensure most structures are no longer standing afterwards because buildings are designed to resist gravity and don't cope well with side forces like multiple nuclear detonations.
As pointed out to double the effect of a bomb you need 8 times more energy, so two explosives 1/8th the power can replicate the same damage or more by not exploding in the same place.
Put them 10km apart and so while the lethal radius is smaller the gap between them will have shockwaves coming from two directions instead of one making them more destructive.
To double the effects of a 1MT detonation you would need an 8MT bomb to double the radius... but don't you see that the more obvious solution would be to just use two 1 MT bombs spaced the detonation radius of the two apart... or you could use four x 1 MT and increase the damaged area much more efficiently by dropping them in a pattern based on the ground around the target.