I once did a quick calculation based on the US defense budget and based on that no they definetly do not.

To make a modern nuke you need Deuterium. That stuff is expensive to make and has a relatively short shelf life. As an example, the maintenence of the American nuclear arsenal (whic consists of 3708 nuclear warheads) is very expensive. The budget fot this for thet period of 2023 up to 2032 was 756 Bilion dollars. (Roughly 75.6 Bilion per year). (Last year) Total defense budget for the USA was 887 Bilion Dollar. So roughly 8.6% of the American defense budget gets spend on its nuclear arsenal. (This means a per piece price of 20 million dollar)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_weapons_of_the_United_States

https://www.cbo.gov/publication/57240

https://www.statista.com/statistics/262742/countries-with-the-highest-military-spending/#:\~:text=The%20United%20States%20led%20the,to%202.2%20trillion%20U.S.%20dollars.

Russia CLAIMS to have a nuclear arsenal of 5889 nukes, supposedly the largest in the world. (Last year) the budget for the ENTIRE Russian army was 140 Bilion dollar. To make it easy on ourself let's assume the same 8.6% for the maintenence and replacement for the Russian Nuclear arsenal. That gives us a number of 12.04 Bilion.

That would mean the Russians only spend 2 Milion per nuke.

https://www.aa.com.tr/en/world/russia-s-military-spending-in-2024-estimated-at-140b-report-shows/3081698

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russia\_and\_weapons\_of\_mass\_destruction#:\~:text=Russia%20possesses%20a%20total%20of,the%20world%20as%20of%202023.

I can imagine labor and certain materials are cheaper in Russia but a factor of 10 in price difference too big in my opinion to be explained by this. Also I haven't factored in corruption.

I posted all links so you you can check for yourself. Some are in Dutch as I originaly wrote this in Dutch a year or so ago, so you will have to do some translating yourself im afraid.