Let's talk about nuclear war, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard's weird video about nuclear war.
President Donald Trump's onetime Democrat DNI released a campaign-style video this week, discussing the threat and real-world effects of nuclear weapons, following her recent visit to Hiroshima.
Gabbard got raked over the coals by right-leaning critics, some conflating her remarks with an historically illiterate apology for Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Noah Rothman was one of several who accused her of "all but endors[ing] Barack Obama’s revisionist and ahistorical account of the end of the Second World War," although I didn't hear anything like that.
But that's not to say that Gabbard's video wasn't at the very least odd.
At one point, Gabbard claimed that our "political elite and warmongers" are fomenting global thermonuclear war "because they are confident that they will have access to nuclear shelters for themselves and for their families that regular people won’t have access to."
They still have to come out sometime. Real life isn't an episode of "Fallout."
Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) — no RINO squish — quipped, “She obviously needs to change her meds," and I'm inclined to agree.
I'm not the biggest fan of Gabbard on policy — she was strangely buddy-buddy on several occasions with Syria's Bashar al-Assad and sometimes comes across as a Putin apologist. But I understand Trump's desire, the nation's need, and Gabbard's ability to shake up the D.C. intel community.
But none of that explains the general weirdness on display here.
Curiously, when Trump met this weekend at Camp David to discuss Iran and Gaza strategy with his "top team," including "Vice President Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, chief of staff Susie Wiles, special envoy Steve Witkoff, CIA director John Ratcliffe and other senior officials," Gabbard was not in attendance.
There's also the question of why the president's DNI would make a campaign-style video.
Is she on her way out — of her own accord or not? I won't pretend to even have a guess.
While it's fair to question her reasoning, Gabbard isn't wrong about the increased risk of a nuclear confrontation.
Andrew Latham has an eye-opening report today at RealClearDefense on "the most dangerous phase of the nuclear age since its inception." He warned that "the strategic architecture built during the Cold War – based on a relatively simple dyad of adversaries, both steeped in the logic of deterrence – no longer fits the world we inhabit."
Latham wrote, "This is not Cold War 2.0," as I've been calling it. "This is something worse."
And we're nowhere near ready.
All three legs of our strategic deterrence triad — missile subs, land-based ICBMs, and heavy bombers — are in desperate need of modernization. All three replacement programs currently fall short.
The first sub in the Navy's Columbia program to replace our aging Ohio-class SSBNs (the youngest of the Navy's 14 active ballistic missile subs was commissioned in 1997) is coming in at least 12-18 months late. The Air Force's Sentinel replacement for our Minuteman III ICBMs (which entered service in 1970!) is a hot mess.
The only bright spot is the Air Force's B-21 Raider stealth bomber, due to replace the B-1 and B-2 over the next decade or two. The program is largely on-time and on-budget, although COVID and inflation screwed things up a bit. But out of the estimated 300-400 Raiders needed to maintain a credible deterrence against two major adversaries, the Air Force will be lucky to get a third that many.
But in addition to China and Russia, as Latham put it, "North Korea has demonstrated operational ICBMs, tested submarine-launched ballistic missiles, and openly declared its readiness to use nuclear weapons preemptively," while "Iran continues to enrich uranium to near weapons-grade levels, edging ever closer to a breakout scenario that could shatter the regional balance."
The old NATO/Warsaw Pact virtual duopoly is over. So is America's "unipolar moment." What we have, as Gabbard warned, is a high-risk environment filled by increasingly aggressive rivals, and our deterrent grows less credible by the year.
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Finally, here's Gabbard's video so you can watch and make up your own mind.
I recently visited Hiroshima, and stood at the epicenter of a city scarred by the unimaginable horror caused by a single nuclear bomb dropped in 1945. What I saw, the stories I heard, and the haunting sadness that remains, will stay with me forever. pic.twitter.com/TmxmxiGwnV
— Tulsi Gabbard 🌺 (@TulsiGabbard) June 10, 2025
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