In a scathing attack on the West, Russian President Vladimir Putin declared that the world faces the most dangerous decade since the Second World War.

He spoke of nuclear blackmail and the West's dangerous bloody and dirty tactics.

Yet at the same time Putin has been playing his own dangerous game with nuclear weapons.

Not only is President Putin reaffirmed that he will use every available weapon in the Russian

arsenal, which includes tactical nukes, but Russia has also made unsubstantiated claims that Ukraine is preparing to deploy a dirty bomb,

which is a mix of explosives and radioactive waste.

This has led many in the West, including President Biden, to wonder if such claims are laying the ground

for the launch of Russia's own tactical nuclear strikes.

I'm your host James Rogers and here on the warfare podcast I wanted to put these latest tensions into their

proper historical context by taking a deep dive into what tactical nuclear

weapons actually are. To do this I've invited my old friend Dr Jean-Francois J.F. Belanger back onto the

podcast. Now J.F. is our regular nuclear expert by now and an advisor to the Canadian Ministry of Defense. He's also a post-doctoral

fellow in Defence and Security at the University of Waterloo in Canada.

Put simply, JF is exactly the person we need to understand the history behind these latest nuclear

escalations. Enjoy. Hey Jean-Francis, welcome back to the Warfare Podcast. I think by this point you've become

our resident nuclear expert and seeing as we live in worrying times we really had to get you back on.

Glad to be of service.

It's always a pleasure.

Well you say that, but the US has said that the world faces the gravest nuclear danger since the 1962 Cuban missile

crisis and that's because Russian president Vladimir Putin has not ruled out

the use of tactical nukes on the battlefield.

In fact, him and others within the Kremlin have explicitly stated that Russia is prepared

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