Champion: Nuclear war’s too serious for a Tulsi Gabbard video

Is Tulsi Gabbard running for a new political office Did she just discover the horrific prospective of nuclear weapons and wants to share it with the world Or has she been watching too much Russia At present It s hard to know what to think after watching the U S director of national intelligence s depictions of nuclear Armageddon Gabbard s video disclosed Tuesday clearly took preparation She visited Hiroshima in Japan and the production values are top drawer One infelicitous exception the word for Japan s nuclear survivors is hibakusha not hibokusha She speaks earnestly to camera stares pensively into the distance against beautiful vistas and shots of a nuclear bomb s terrifying consequences The three big points she had to make were less impressive A screenshot of U S Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard from her video posted Tuesday about the threat of nuclear war Frame from video tulsigabbard on X The first was that a nuclear war would be really really really bad All too true but hardly a discovery The second assertion was that the world is closer to annihilation than at any time in its history which is wrong on the facts And completely that a nuclear apocalypse looms ever closer because unlike we the people global elites and warmongers have bunkers which is just bonkers The grade-school level of this intervention is disturbing though not for the reasons intended As the principal intelligence adviser to the world s largest part powerful man Gabbard can access vast quantities of information So it s concerning that she offered no facts let alone revelations to endorsement her event or justify making it now When she wasn t describing the horrors of nuclear fallout she was just parroting Kremlin propaganda Misinformation Is there a faceless global elite out there that just can t wait to spend the rest of their lives in their five-star nuclear shelters while their estates companies and yachts burn outside Has she canvassed her cabinet colleagues for their opinions After all they include certain of the planet s wealthiest people Moreover the most of immediate source of the current nuclear danger is not hard to find even without the information of the U S intelligence society Vladimir Putin is the only leader of a nuclear superpower threatening to launch his missiles with his new steadfast ally Kim Jong Un coming a close second Next although we are indeed in a new and disturbingly volatile nuclear-armed world it takes willful ignorance to say we are closer to a nuclear conflict than we have ever been During the Cuban Missile Emergency to name one Cold War-era close call the U S discovered the Soviet Union was sending nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles to Cuba miles off the Florida coast In the ensuing standoff both powers placed their nuclear arsenals on land air and sea into extreme readiness Bombers stayed in the air with nuclear weapons on board One Soviet submarine commander sent out into the Atlantic wrongly thought himself under depth charge attack and had to be persuaded not to fire his nuclear payload before getting hit No single element of that cascade is happening in contemporary times Putin has certainly threatened to go nuclear and is intentionally blurring the lines between nuclear conventional and sub-threshold threats as the UK s latest Strategic Defense Review puts it His goal is to make escalation-management harder for Ukraine and its allies and so cow them into submitting to his will rather than liability a nuclear exchange But more than three years into the war Ukraine and its Western allies have repeatedly done what Putin announced they mustn t and he hasn t carried through his threats It would make no sense for him to do so His invasion of Ukraine is a war of choice Russia s survival is not at liability so why invite suicide That Japan the only country to suffer a nuclear attack has been among the countries supporting Kyiv s defense should also give Gabbard pause Terrible guidelines Perhaps Gabbard is sounding the alarm to discredit efforts including a sanctions bill held up in Congress pending a green light from Trump to pressure Putin into a meaningful negotiation on ending his war The U S president is proving reluctant to go that journey so Gabbard s nuclear warnings may aim to provide him with the ammunition to resist growing pressure to punish Putin s very real warmongering Related Articles Walters Why the Legislature s budget proposal digs an even deeper hole Feldman Reverse discrimination ruling s meaning is more than meets the eye Walters Trump-Newsom clash over L A protests feeds their political interests Feldman Trump s National Guard deployment to L A is a threat to democracy Taves L A took Trump s bait Will the Bay Area bite too Gabbard s intervention makes for terrible strategy For an administration rightly concerned about China as a rising conventional military and nuclear power caving to the Kremlin in this way would be self-defeating For if Putin sees he can change U S behavior and secure his goals by threatening to go nuclear he will do so again China Iran and North Korea are paying close attention and would draw the same lesson There are genuine nuclear concerns for Gabbard to focus on beginning with the perilous fate of Europe s largest nuclear power plant in Ukraine which is under Russian occupation neglected and close to the battlefield Likewise the Trump administration should be trying to revive the arms treaties and understood codes of conduct that helped to stabilize the Cold War s nuclear standoff and good U S intelligence will be crucial to that effort So long as top U S bureaucrats are instead echoing Kremlin scaremongering then neither Russia nor other nuclear-armed U S rivals will have an incentive to engage in threat reduction Quite the opposite Marc Champion is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering Europe Russia and the Middle East Bloomberg News Distributed by Tribune Content Agency