Russia has something like 4,000 nukes, only 1 or 2 really need to work to cause massive devastation. It's much more likely that more than 1 or 2 still work and that is more than enough.
I don't know, losing for example New York City would be kind of rough. In reality probably every major US city.
Your analogy doesn't quite check out.
But nuking Russia is still bad since it would cause trouble (nuclear winter for example?) for other countries/whole world
Any large exchange of thermonuclear weapons is going to break most supply chains and lead to a great simplification of society and the deaths of at least 90% of the population in the process as industrial farming stops being a thing.
Obviously.
Historically, with real tanks seen to be performing in action, then cardboard tanks additionally performed exactly as the deterrent fake ones were intended to do.
Also in tank warfare when the majority of tanks have not been brought into action, the cardboard ones accomplished the same things as the majority of real ones.
Edit: not everyone can be expected to believe it's true, some are just more easily fooled than others
Plus my bad, there were a lot of inflatables historically for even better deception:
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/05/ghost...
Nuclear weapons will not actually make a huge difference. Neither on the battlefield nor on civilian targets.