Fiona Hill

General Severikin is known as General Armageddon, you know, the kind of person who, you know, pretty much facilitated the use of chemical weapons in Syria, you know, for example.

So, you know, don't think that Putin, you know, hasn't thought about how ruthless he can possibly be.

The question is really the calculation.

It's his estimation of the probability that it will get the desired effect.

We keep talking about this idea of escalate to de-escalate.

That's not what the Russians, you know, how they call it.

But it's the whole idea that you do something really outrageous to get everybody else to back off.

Yeah.

Now, when he talked about the precedent that the United States set of detonating the nuclear weapons in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he obviously meant the precedent of using nuclear weapons, of course, which, of course, we would then say, well, we showed then how the impermissibility of ever doing that again.

But what he's talking about is the precedent of escalating to such an extent that you stop the war, because he reads that saying, well, you know,

The US dropped the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The war was brought to a quick conclusion.

And of course, there's a huge debate in America about whether it was necessary to do that, whether the war was ending anywhere.

Did that really, you know, kind of change the minds of the Japanese high command?

I mean, there's all kind of books being written about that.

And of course, you know, the revulsion that people felt in the wake of that was just, you know, just the shock of what actually happened.

And we've spent, you know, 70 years, you know, basically coming to terms with the fact that we did something like that.

You know, the firebombing, you know, we've also looked at all the bombing, you know, in Vietnam and everywhere and everything.

You know, all these massive bombing campaigns and realizing they actually often had the opposite effect.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki might have contributed, and there's a lot of, you know, scholarship suggesting it did to the end of the war.