French, Russian and US economies has a little bit different sizes.

That's why I put as % of GDP. Russian nukes cost rubles, not USD. The numbers suggest pretty conclusively that the Russian arsenal of 5500 is maintained about as well as the US arsenal of like 5300.

Your "staggering reality" of 100 working missiles is completely delusional.

I think there is a degree of trade off in this, yes a nuclear scientist/engineer/technician in Russia or China is cheaper than in the USA. But also, the people with those kind of skills (or those technically competent enough to do a good job, are going to be expensive no matter what.)

At some level when people have enough technical skill to do these jobs well, they also have enough technical skill to leave the country and go elsewhere and do something else for better quality of life.

Like GDP per capita in china is much lower than the USA, I bet that their nuclear program engineers are getting paid at least ~80k range, which while less than the equivalent engineer in the USA is paid, is not the same level as what a direct PPP comparison would give.

There are a lot of software engineers in UK who made $50k or less who could have presumably moved to the US a make a lot more but never did. Lots of government employees making much less than they could. Patriotism, wanting to live in their own country, wanting to work on interesting things, etc.

Again, Russia has much smaller economy than USA. What are you searching for is PPP And no amount of PPP will help you to have 5500 warheads on 8 Billion budget vs 200 warheads on 6 Billion budget.

With your logic Kongo should be able to afford 5500 nuclear warheads just by spending 0.4% pf GDP. That's not possible is it?

So you are saying that Tuvalu could maintain a nuclear arsenal for around 260 000 USD.

Shouldn't you compare US with EU?