Agreed that nukes close to Russia (or any other nation with ICBMS) is a really bad idea. Short flight time means that the next time there’s a false alarm, the people in charge have just a couple of minutes to determine whether the alert was false or not, maybe initiate a 'counter' strike.
Back when the USSR invading West Germany with swarms of tanks was a possibility, neutron bombs already in place made sense as they could stop the tanks and troops without massive amounts of fallout. But folks here in the US freaked out over bombs intended to kill tank crews so that went nowhere.

Trivia on that Bush Jr in front of a "mission accomplished" banner: the banner was unrelated to Bush’s visit; it was up as that ship had completed a tour and was about to depart for home port. Typically, that’s something to celebrate, and so a banner... Not realizing the optics does say something about the calibre of Bush’s PR team - or maybe that address was not pre-planned (?) Not our brightest president ever. He did have a cabinet of brilliant people, but other than Powell they had agendas that had nothing to do with making the US (or the world) a better place.