Is Tulsi Gabbard running for a new political office? Did she just discover the horrific potential of nuclear weapons and wants to share it with the world? Or has she been watching too much Russia Today?

It’s hard to know what to think after watching the U.S. director of national intelligence’s depictions of nuclear Armageddon.

Gabbard’s video clearly took preparation. She visited Hiroshima, in Japan, and the production values are top drawer. (One infelicitous exception: the word for Japan’s nuclear survivors is hibakusha, not “hibokusha.”) She speaks earnestly to camera, stares pensively into the distance against beautiful vistas and shots of a nuclear bomb’s terrifying consequences. The three big points she had to make were less impressive.

The first was that a nuclear war would be really, really, really, bad. All too true, but hardly a discovery. The second assertion was that the world is closer to annihilation than at any time in its history, which is wrong on the facts. And finally, that a nuclear apocalypse looms ever closer because — unlike “we the people” — global elites and warmongers have bunkers, which is just bonkers.

The grade-school level of this intervention is disturbing, though not for the reasons intended. As the principal intelligence adviser to the world’s most powerful man, Gabbard can access vast quantities of information. So, it’s concerning that she offered no facts, let alone revelations, to support her case or justify making it now. When she wasn’t describing the horrors of nuclear fallout, she was just parroting Kremlin propaganda.

Is there a faceless global elite out there that just can’t wait to spend the rest of their lives in their five-star nuclear shelters, while their estates, companies and yachts burn outside? Has she canvassed her cabinet colleagues for their opinions? After all, they include some of the planet’s wealthiest people.

Moreover, the most immediate source of the current nuclear danger is not hard to find, even without the resources of the U.S. intelligence community: Vladimir Putin is the only leader of a nuclear superpower threatening to launch his missiles, with his new steadfast ally Kim Jong Un coming a close second.

Next, although we are indeed in a new and disturbingly volatile nuclear-armed world, it takes willful ignorance to say we are closer to a nuclear conflict than we have ever been.

During the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, to name one Cold War-era close call, the U.S. discovered the Soviet Union was sending nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles to Cuba, 90 miles off the Florida coast. In the ensuing standoff, both powers placed their nuclear arsenals on land, air and sea into extreme readiness. Bombers stayed in the air with nuclear weapons on board. One Soviet submarine commander sent out into the Atlantic wrongly thought himself under depth charge attack and had to be persuaded not to fire his nuclear payload before getting hit. No single element of that cascade is happening today.

Putin has certainly threatened to go nuclear and is “intentionally blurring the lines between nuclear, conventional, and sub-threshold threats,” as the UK’s latest Strategic Defense Review puts it. His goal is to make escalation-management harder for Ukraine and its allies and so cow them into submitting to his will rather than risk a nuclear exchange.

But more than three years into the war, Ukraine and its Western allies have repeatedly done what Putin said they mustn’t, and he hasn’t carried through his threats. It would make no sense for him to do so. His invasion of Ukraine is a war of choice; Russia’s survival is not at risk, so why invite suicide? That Japan, the only country to suffer a nuclear attack, has been among the countries supporting Kyiv’s defense, should also give Gabbard pause.

Perhaps Gabbard is sounding the alarm to discredit efforts — including a sanctions bill held up in Congress pending a green light from Trump — to pressure Putin into a meaningful negotiation on ending his war. The U.S. president is proving reluctant to go that route, so Gabbard’s nuclear warnings may aim to provide him with the ammunition to resist growing pressure to punish Putin’s very real warmongering.

Gabbard’s intervention makes for terrible policy. For an administration rightly concerned about China as a rising conventional military and nuclear power, caving to the Kremlin in this way would be self-defeating. For if Putin sees he can change U.S. behavior and secure his goals by threatening to go nuclear, he will do so again. China, Iran and North Korea are paying close attention and would draw the same lesson.There are genuine nuclear concerns for Gabbard to focus on, beginning with the perilous fate of Europe’s largest nuclear power plant in Ukraine, which is under Russian occupation, neglected, and close to the battlefield.

Likewise, the Trump administration should be trying to revive the arms treaties and understood codes of conduct that helped to stabilize the Cold War’s nuclear standoff — and good U.S. intelligence will be crucial to that effort. So long as top U.S. officials are instead echoing Kremlin scaremongering, then neither Russia nor other nuclear-armed U.S. rivals will have an incentive to engage in threat reduction. Quite the opposite.

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This column reflects the personal views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Marc Champion is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering Europe, Russia and the Middle East. He was previously Istanbul bureau chief for the Wall Street Journal.

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