Welcome to the Euro Intelligence Podcast. I'm Wolfgang Munchau and with me are Zasanna Monsenk and Jack Smith.

Today we are going to talk about Vladimir Putin's nuclear threat and the Italian elections which take place on Sunday.

Now we're recording this on Friday so we don't know the outcome, so this is still shrouded in uncertainty.

But let us talk about nuclear first, the nuclear threat first. We had in a... so we don't know the outcome, so this is still shrouded in uncertainty.

But let us talk about nuclear first, the nuclear threat first.

We had in Eurointelligence two days of discussions of whether or not to take the nuclear threat seriously.

We compared it to an improbable event with a probability that is not trivial. We cannot put a number on. We can't say

it's 5% or 10% or 1%. We cannot rule it out to such an extent that we can ignore it. We have

asking questions rather than providing answers. And one of the questions we've been asking,

would he gain any military advantages if he were to

use nuclear weapons? And our initial answer was probably not. It's hard to actually see a

rational reason for him to do this. And there are actually easy to see many irrational reasons for

him not to do this. But the scenario, the scenario we cannot quite rule out is that he, at his team, might have a different

view on the strategic implications of an attack that might be different from our own.

And secondly, he might use it as an act of desperation as the last resort as he is losing the walls, as we call

it the dictator in a bunker scenario. Jack, you have written today about how would the West

react in such an event, say an event of the use of a tactical nuclear weapon in Ukraine. What are the considerations? Can you just

take us through the kind of debates that we would be having? I think the first thing to say about

this, and I'm far from the only person to have ever said this, is that maybe there are some useful aspects of the tactical

versus strategic nuclear distinction, but I think it can be a bit of a misnomer in the sense

that regardless of whether it is a tactical nuclear weapon, so a lower yield nuclear weapon that might be delivered

through a different delivery system to longer-range ballistic missiles or a strategic weapon,

...