Welcome to the Eurointelligence podcast. This is Wolfgang Munchau and with me are Zuzana Monsheng and Jack Smith.

Today we want to talk about the stuff that might intrude to change the unity of the West in the Ukrainian war.

By that we mean the events that might divide political opinion inside countries or between countries.

And we are looking at three possible intruding events, not that they're the only ones, but there are three that we can think of.

One is the launch of a tactical nuclear missile by Russia.

One is a massive deterioration of food security. And a third one is a, what might

some consider an unexpected Russian offer of a ceasefire. Let's talk about nukes first. Now,

there is a consensus among Western political analysts that a nuclear strike by Russia is

very, very, very unlikely. Is it therefore sensible to reduce its probability to zero and

pretend it's not going to happen, or should we think of it as a tail risk, something that has a low

probability, but not a zero probability.

I mean, I don't think that so long as Russia actually possesses nuclear weapons, the capability

to do this, and so long as they're actually engaged in an act of conflict, I mean, the risk

isn't like absolutely zero. So I don't think, I don't think you could ever say there's absolutely

no chance that they would do it.

You might say it's very, very unlikely that they do it because what do they really stand to

achieve by doing it? There are obviously a number of considerable bad consequences that the

Russian government would suffer if they did use nuclear weapons or any other kind of WMD,

but you couldn't say it was zero because that would presuppose you knew exactly what Vladimir

Putin was thinking, which nobody does.

I mean, it really depends on what we're talking about.

What sort of nuke strike are you talking about?

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