It's an arms race. Do Russia and the US really know that each other's nukes work? Or would they rather just not find out. It's like that... will these patents hold up in court? Well if I have enough of them and it's my 20k patents vs your 15k patents, we're probably going to settle based on the likelihood that enough will hold up that we have proportional mutually assured financial destruction.

The crappy part here is that a patent is essentially useless and inaccessible for the individual inventor. A bigger entity will dwarf them. In the end it comes down to money, and it's just a matter of understanding the nature of the investment, which is not as concretely defined as the general public might think.