The Director of National Intelligence has released a startling warning about nuclear conflict in a video shared on her personal account, emphasizing that “this isn’t some made up science fiction story.”
Tulsi Gabbard is the latest voice raising concerns about the risk of nuclear warfare as tensions heighten in the ongoing Russia-Ukraine conflict, with potentially global ramifications.
Earlier this week, NATO’s head, Secretary General Mark Rutte, sternly advised member nations to increase their defense spending or “get your Russian language course out.”
“Putin’s war machine is speeding up, not slowing down,” Rutte remarked during a meeting in London.
“Wishful thinking will not keep us safe,” he continued. “We cannot dream away the danger. Hope is not a strategy. So NATO has to become a stronger, fairer and more lethal alliance.”
Furthermore, the Russian president suggested at the St Petersburg International Economic Forum last year that Europe would be “more or less defenceless” if nuclear tensions were to escalate.
Nuclear conflict seems to be at the forefront of many minds currently, including that of reformed Republican and former Hawaii congresswoman Gabbard, who was appointed DNI by Trump earlier this year.
On her personal Twitter account, the military officer shared her reflections on her visit to Hiroshima, Japan, and the “haunting sadness” instigated by the atomic bomb dropped by the U.S. during World War Two.
In the three-minute video, she noted that the city remains “scarred by the unimaginable horror” caused by the bomb dropped in 1945, which killed over 300,000 people.
Gabbard stated: “Yet this one bomb that caused so much destruction on Hiroshima was tiny compared to today’s nuclear bombs.”
The Hiroshima bomb had a yield of 15 kilotons of TNT, whereas current warheads can range from 100 kilotons to over one megaton, she detailed, potentially killing millions in mere minutes.
The video depicts a grim scenario of what such an attack would mean for the U.S., using a simulation of a nuclear strike on San Francisco, California, showing the Golden Gate Bridge collapsing and vaporizing.
Gabbard cautioned that while the bomb would obliterate buildings, structures, and countless communities within moments, the subsequent ‘fallout’ would be equally devastating, with radioactive poison permeating the air, water, and soil, “condemning survivors to agonizing deaths or lifelong suffering.”
The world could be cast into darkness, with smoke and ash blocking the sunlight, leading to crop failures. Meanwhile, acid rain would devastate whatever remains.
“This isn’t some made-up science fiction story. This is the reality of what’s at stake, what we are facing now, because as we stand here today, closer to the brink of nuclear annihilation than ever before, political elite and warmongers are carelessly fomenting fear and tensions between nuclear powers,” Gabbard emphasized.
“Perhaps it’s 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.”
She concluded her message by encouraging people to “speak up and demand an end to this madness.”
“We must reject this path to nuclear war and work toward a world where no one has to live in fear of a nuclear holocaust,” she concluded.
Her statements follow her 2019 accusation against Trump for dismantling the Iran nuclear agreement and pushing “us closer and closer to the brink of nuclear war” step by step.
However, she later shifted her stance, endorsing Trump during his 2024 presidential campaign, and criticized the Biden administration for bringing “us facing multiple wars on multiple fronts and regions around the world, and closer to the brink of nuclear war than we ever have been before.”