My view
There were 40,000 plus nuclear warheads in 1989 yet the game only mentions 322 of them (IIRC). Yes mostly strategic nukes were mentioned but they were nearly half of the 40k total so you are talking about 2%.
Everything reasonable to be thought as an explanation for the discrepancy probably did have an effect.
Fizzles
Missile Failures
Warhead Failures
Targeting Failures
Destruction of C3I Facilities
ABM systems
Lack of control codes
Destruction of Launch facilities from enemy action, entropy, or accidents
Lack of Intelligence on what actually was hit (or missed and deserves a second strike)
As normal from the Russian perspective any quality issues would normally have been addressed with quantity. This was not an option here. When looking at strikes in the US, lets say they wanted 300 targets, normally they would launch say 1000 warheads for those 300 targets. That would have probably triggered full blown MAD.
So they launch 40 at a time over a couple of days with lets say a 25-33% success rate for the first go (remember they have been a Tac nuke target for months). They get hit in retaliation and then strike again. Each time their C3I and launch capabilities are degraded even further.
In the end they have 84 successful strikes in the US at the cost of 59 known strikes back. In the USSR i assume that the count is a little low as the US had far more warheads that were under GDWs 500kt threshold. I expect it was a very tit for tat.
Canada gets 30 strategic hits, my assumption is that the US responded with 30 strikes outside the USSR (Vietnam? Bulgaria? North Korea? Iraq?). I believe these strikes were earlier in the war and were that natural extension of the existing tactical strikes and not considered a threat to escalate to MAD. Being earlier there might have been better C3I and post strike analysis. That might explain why proportionally they were hit "harder".
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