This is CBS Eye on the World.

Here's John Batchelor.

I welcome my colleague, Anatole Levin, the director of the Eurasia program at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft,

to comment and explain events that are swirling all around

us over the Ukraine-Russian war and the word ceasefire, the word peace, and what is to be done.

However, there is also another matter that's being debated heavily in Europe, and that is NATO, NATO with or without the United States, and especially the nuclear umbrella that the U.S. has extended over Europe for the last nearly 80 years.

At the same time, everyone aware of the fact that both Britain and France have nuclear

weapons and are part of the NATO defense. Most recently, a question came in from the Carnegie

Endowment for International Peace to a number of points of view in Europe, all of them well-informed

in different countries about nuclear weapons.

The question put to these experts,

can Europeans build their independent, extended nuclear deterrent?

And there are three answers that I find especially illustrative of the dilemma right now,

with or without the U.S., about nuclear weapons.

I mentioned they're not an idle thought.

There is, in a recent New York Times explication of the war these last years,

much talk of nuclear weapons by the American war planners

who are exercising total control over the Ukrainians on the battlefield.

And they were moving between 5% chance that Putin uses it to 50% chance that Putin uses tactical nuclear weapons

in the event of this or that happenstance. It didn't happen so far, but that tells us that nuclear weapons

are not just comic book stuff. Anatole, a very good evening to you. Dr. Ulrich Kuhn from the

University of Hamburg, directing the Institute for Peace and Research Security Policy,

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