I can't attest to the maintenance-heavy nuclear arsenal. But I have lived the life of maintenance-heavy conventional weapons.
As a tank crewman, most of our day-to-day lives were spent, not crewing a tank through live-fire exercises or maneuver training, but just keeping the big beasts properly maintained and at a high state of combat readiness. As the article pointed out in the issue of maintaining vehicles that are not being used currently, some maintenance tasks are related to the debilitating effects of long-term storage or simple lack of field use. Checking battery and engine readiness, topping off or changing engine, transmission, and road-wheel hub fluids, etc, all have to be done on a regular basis.
The U.S. Army takes Preventive Maintenance Checks and Services, or PMCS, very seriously. They publish a monthly magazine with articles that explain new methods of equipment maintenance, or updates of old but tried-and-true methods, stories of maintenance mishaps, the consequences of poor or overlooked checks and services, etc. (The Army, in its wisdom, uses a comic book format for the publication, for the benefits of literacy-challenged Trumpster types).
There's no reason (unless one is Russian, I guess) why constant maintenance has to be unrelieved drudgery, either. Sometimes, our platoon sergeant would address us at morning formation and give us one big maintenance task for the day; say, lubing the tanks' drive trains. He'd come down, check our work, and then tell us we can hang out for the rest of the day until final formation. The prospect of a relaxing afternoon is strong motivation for getting the job done right the first time.
When a country's defense ministers are becoming billionaires by misappropriating the military's funding, I guess that can have a negative effect on unit readiness. But I guess Russia needed to learn that the hard way.
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