John Mearsheimer

And they would use them in Ukraine.

And because Ukraine has no nuclear weapons of its own, Ukraine cannot retaliate.

It's not a mutual assured destruction world.

It's a case where one side has nuclear weapons and the other doesn't.

That means that the Russians are likely to think that they can get away with using nuclear weapons in ways that would not be the case if they were attacking NATO.

And therefore, it makes nuclear use more likely.

OK, that's point one.

Point two is let's assume that the Russians use two or three nuclear weapons in a remote area.

My palms are sweating, by the way.

Just as a commentary.

It's terrifying.

Yeah.

The question then is what does the West do?

Now, Macron has said, and Biden has also, I think, implicitly made this clear, we would not retaliate with nuclear weapons if the Russians were to attack with a handful of nuclear weapons in Western Ukraine.

But then the question is, what would we do?

And if you listen to David Petraeus, what David Petraeus says is that we should attack the Russian naval assets—

in the Black Sea and attack Russian forces in Ukraine.

Well, once you do that, you have a great power war.

You have NATO versus Russia, which is another way of saying you have the United States versus Russia.

We're now in a great power war.