John Mearsheimer

And if you have limited nuclear use, right, we understand hardly anything about nuclear escalation because thank goodness we've never had a nuclear war.

So once you throw both sides out on the slippery slope, even if you only use one nuclear weapon in your scenario, you don't know what the escalation dynamics look like.

So everybody has a powerful incentive to put an end to the conflict right away.

I might add to you that there were people who believed that we would not even initiate

manipulation of risk strategy in Europe if we were losing to the Warsaw Pact during the Cold War.

Both Henry Kissinger and Robert McNamara said after leaving

office that they would not have done it.

They would have not initiated nuclear use, even limited nuclear use.

That's what we're talking about here.

They would rather be red than dead, right?

That was the argument.

Too risky.

Too risky.

That's exactly right.

But if they had used one nuclear weapon in your story or three or four in my story, everybody would have said, oh my God, we've got to shut this one down immediately.

I only tell you this story or lay out this scenario as an answer to your question of how you use nuclear weapons in a mad world.

And this is the answer.

Let's just talk about this in the context of the Ukraine war.

If the Russians were losing, as I said before, which is not the case anymore, but in 2022, it did look like that.

If the Russians are losing and they turn to nuclear weapons, the question is, how do they use them?