The Director of National Intelligence has issued a shocking nuclear war warning in a video posted to her personal account, as she made clear 'this isn't some made up science fiction story'.
Tulsi Gabbard is the latest to sound the alarm over the threat of nuclear war as tensions continue to boil over in the conflict between Russia and Ukraine - with implications for the rest of the world.
The head of NATO, Secretary General Mark Rutte, bluntly urged members to hike their defense costs or 'get your Russian language course out,' just earlier this week,
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"Putin's war machine is speeding up, not slowing down," Rutte said at the meeting in London.
"Wishful thinking will not keep us safe," he continued. "We cannot dream away the danger. Hope is not a strategy. So NATO has to become a stronger, fairer and more lethal alliance."
Even the Russian president hinted from the St Petersburg International Economic Forum last year that if things were to escalate on the nuclear scale, Europe is 'more or less defenceless.'
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Indeed, nuclear war appears to be on everyone's minds at the moment, including reformed Republican and former Hawaii congresswoman, Gabbard, who was appointed DNI by Trump earlier this year.
'Kill millions in mere minutes'
Taking to her personal Twitter account, the military officer reflected on her trip to Hiroshima, Japan, and the 'haunting sadness' caused by the atomic bomb dropped by the US in the World War Two.
In the three-minute video, she said the city is still 'scarred by the unimaginable horror' from the bomb that dropped 80 years ago in 1945 and killed more than 300,000 people.
Gabbard added: "Yet this one bomb that caused so much destruction on Hiroshima was tiny compared to today's nuclear bombs."
The Hiroshima bomb had a yield of 15 kilotons of TNT, whereas today's warheads can weigh in from 100 kilotons to more than one megatone, she said, which would kill millions in mere minutes.
'Agonizing deaths'
The video paints a bleak picture as to what that would mean for the US, with a simulation of how a nuclear attack on San Francisco, California, would look with the Golden Gate Bridge crumbling and vaporizing.
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Gabbard warned that while the bomb would wipe out buildings, structures and countless communities within moments, the 'fallout' is just as brutal, with radioactive poison spreading through the air, water and soil, 'condemning survivors to agonizing deaths or lifelong suffering.'
The world could then be plunged into darkness, with plumes of ash and smoke blocking the sun, in turn killing crops. Meanwhile, acid rain would only scorch whatever is left.
'Closer to the brink of nuclear annihilation than ever before'
"This isn't some made-up science fiction story. This is the reality of what's at stake, what we are facing now, because as we stand here today, closer to the brink of nuclear annihilation than ever before, political elite and warmongers are carelessly fomenting fear and tensions between nuclear powers," Gabbard continued.
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"Perhaps it's because they are confident that they will have access to nuclear shelters for themselves and for their families that regular people won't have access to."
She ended her post by urging others to 'speak up and demand an end to this madness.'
"We must reject this path to nuclear war and work toward a world where no one has to live in fear of a nuclear holocaust," she concluded.
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Her comments come as in 2019, Gabbard accused Trump of tearing up the Iran nuclear agreement and that he had 'step by step' pushed 'us closer and closer to the brink of nuclear war.'
However, she later backtracked and endorsed the POTUS during his 2024 presidential campaign, instead turning to say the Biden administration 'has us facing multiple wars on multiple fronts and regions around the world, and closer to the brink of nuclear war than we ever have been before.'
Topics: Russia, Ukraine, Politics, US News, History, Japan, Donald Trump
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