With news that Putin is taking steps to lend reality to his nuclear threats, we must hope that the administration is taking him seriously. Whether he’s genuinely planning to launch a nuclear attack, which would indicate that he’s crazy, or is merely doing an elaborate head fake, making him crazy like a fox, is a matter of life and death for the Western world. What’s concerning is that the Biden administration seems so blasé about the whole thing.

Since early in the Russia-Ukraine war, Putin has been making noises about dropping a nuclear bomb, if necessary—that is, if he thinks it’s necessary. For the second time in just three months, he’s preparing a long-range missile:

Footage released Wednesday shows the installation of a massive Russian Yars rocket into a silo at the Kozelsk military compound in the Kaluga region southwest of Moscow.

The intercontinental ballistic missile has a range of 7,500 miles and was installed in a silo launch pad using a special transport and loading unit, according to the Mirror.

The Yars missile complex has a capacity “12 times greater than the American bomb that destroyed Hiroshima,” Russian newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda reported.

[snip]

Missile force commander Col. Alexi Sokolov said the latest drill was meant to send a message to the West, since both the US and Europe are within the missile’s range.

“The importance of this operation lies in the fact that the missile will be put on combat duty on schedule,” he said.

What Western intelligence forces must determine, of course, is whether Putin is posturing or planning. Is he crazy like a fox, or just plain crazy?

 Image: Putin’s nuclear missile. New York Post video screen grab.

One of the reasons we may be seeing a genuine nuclear threat to the West is that the Biden administration is not only flooding Ukraine with weapons, which means we’re effectively at war with Russia but is also sending increasing numbers of military personnel:

U.S. military personnel are now on the ground in Ukraine, keeping track of and inspecting weapons the U.S. has shipped to Ukrainian forces, a senior defense official announced during a Pentagon background briefing on Monday. These U.S. personnel are some of the first the Pentagon has acknowledged have entered Ukraine since Russia launched its large scale invasion of the country in February.

The senior defense official who spoke on background during an official Pentagon event, said, “U.S. personnel have recently resumed on-site inspections to assess weapon stocks in country whenever and wherever the security conditions allow.” The official said “the return of our defense attaché and Office of Defense Cooperation personnel in country has allowed us to resume this critical function.”

Sending in “advisors” was how America got its foot in the door in Vietnam. Putin’s increasingly aggressive displays of nuclear strength may be his way of saying that he will not stand for active American intervention in Ukraine.

What’s completely unnerving is how blasé the Biden administration is about this. Perhaps it believes that Putin is just engaging in attention-seeking behavior and that the best way to address it is to ignore him. However, when that “attention-seeking behavior” includes weapons of mass destruction, one would think that our administration might at least comfort the American people that we’re not facing nuclear Armageddon.

One person who is taking this seriously is Tucker Carlson—who also believes that the administration’s relentless focus on transgenderism, which it knows riles up conservatives and other normal Americans, is intended to disguise just how dangerous the situation really is: