Glenn Greenwald on Monday on Tucker Carlson's FOX News show expressed dismay at the lack of seriousness around the threat of nuclear war with Russia. "There is a very real threat of a nuclear exchange, or even a direct confrontation with Russia and the United States. And over what? Over who governs and rules, not even Ukraine, but the Donbas, the eastern region in Ukraine, where a majority of people actually identify as ethnic Russians and want to be part of Russia, and yet there's almost no debate about whether we should be sending huge amounts of money there and risking the lives of American citizens through the possibility of a nuclear war, because everyone knows that the minute you step up and step out of line, there's a hoard of people ready to call you unpatriotic, or a traitor, or an admirer of Vladimir Putin, as I know is being done with our very segment right this minute by all those Media Matter people and all those other people online," Greenwald said. <blockquote>TUCKER CARLSON, FOX NEWS: It seems to me, no matter how you feel about Putin, or Ukraine, or the war, or anything, the threat, the very real in-your-face threat of a nuclear exchange right now that they're openly talking about would require the media to start telling people, hey, this is real, but nobody is. I wonder why that is. GLENN GREENWALD: If you look at the history of American wars, Tucker, over the last several decades, they're incredibly similar. The way they convince Americans to support U.S. involvement in a war is they personalize a particular leader, get us to hate that leader. Oh, Saddam Hussein in Iraq is a terrible guy. Bashar al-Assad in Syria is this tyrannical force. Mullah Omar in Afghanistan is somebody we have to go take out. Gadhafi in Libya. Our emotions get go take out these tyrants. And then, you know, hundreds of billions dollars later, and lives lost, polls always show that Americans come to realize that they regard those wars as a mistake. And the reason is they realize that no benefits came to the United States and American citizens by virtue of U.S. Involvement in those wars. So let's apply that framework here. The consensus in Washington is that we are closer to the use of nuclear weapons than at anytime since the Cuban missile crisis 60 years ago. There is a very real threat of a nuclear exchange, or even a direct confrontation with Russia and the United States. And over what? Over who governs and rules, not even Ukraine, but the Donbas, the eastern region in Ukraine, where a majority of people actually identify as ethnic Russians and want to be part of Russia, and yet there's almost no debate about whether we should be sending huge amounts of money there and risking the lives of American citizens through the possibility of a nuclear war, because everyone knows that the minute you step up and step out of line, there's a hoard of people ready to call you unpatriotic, or a traitor, or an admirer of Vladimir Putin, as I know is being done with our very segment right this minute by all those Media Matter people and all those other people online. So it's a really repressive atmosphere and squashing a debate that we absolutely have to have. CARLSON: We're losing track of reality. If a nation has nuclear weapons, and you believe even theoretically they might use them, you have to treat that nation differently. You may not want to, it may be unfair, but that's why nations seek nuclear weapons, because you can't boss them around. If you ignore the possibility that your entire population could be killed, you are not fit for leadership, because you're insane. And it feels like our leaders are right there. They're insane. GREENWALD: I think there's almost this sense purposely cultivated to believe that the use of nuclear weapons really isn't a realistic possibility, even though we have had the use of nuclear weapons in the last century, when the U.S. did it in Japan for World War II. And we came very close on at least two or three occasions, the U.S. and Russia did, these very same countries, to exchanging nuclear weapons and risking nuclear annihilation, including in the Cuban Missile Crisis because the U.S. president felt that the Russian presence over the border in Cuba was so threatening that we were going to have a nuclear war over it. That's how Russia has seen what is happening in Ukraine right across their border. It is madness to assume that for Russia, what is an existential war, if they actually start losing it, or NATO really starts escalating as we've been doing, that the chances of Vladimir Putin using nuclear weapons is zero. This is a dangerous delusion that I think a lot of people are operating under. </blockquote>