Re: Tough choices
A lot of the time we have a single Trident-carrying submarine at sea. That's a single point of failure and so can't be relied upon.
Also, Russia is big. Really big. You may think it's a long way to the chemists, but that's nothing compared to how big Russia is. So even if that single submarine did fire its nukes, it wouldn't be able to completely depopulate Russia immediately. And of course, Putin will have a fancy bunker somewhere.