In case you didn’t know, nuclear weapons are destructive. That’s the message from Tulsi Gabbard, the U.S. director of national intelligence, in a social-media video this week warning of a “nuclear holocaust.” This is a scary moment, all right, though not in the way Gabbard intends.

Gabbard relates in her three-minute video that she recently visited Hiroshima, “a city that remains scarred by the unimaginable horror caused by a single nuclear bomb dropped in 1945.” As “we stand here today, closer to the brink of nuclear annihilation than ever before, political elite and warmongers are carelessly fermenting fear and tensions between nuclear powers.”

If this is what passes for current U.S. thinking on nuclear weapons, we are in more danger than we thought. Start with her blinkered history of World War II. The human suffering in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was horrendous. But the bombs finally shocked Japan to end a war that had killed millions.

The bomb spared hundreds of thousands of Americans and Japanese from dying in what would have been an inevitable U.S. invasion of Japan. Gabbard’s seeming regret for the U.S. decision to drop the atomic bomb is another example of the historical illiteracy that is now so common on the right.

But why offer this distorted history lesson now? The reason is the debate inside the Trump Administration over Ukraine and Iran. Gabbard wants the U.S. to stop aiding Ukraine, and she has opposed using military force to stop Iran from gaining a nuclear weapon. She is trying to scare the public about nuclear war to mobilize public pressure on Trump.

On Russia, Gabbard is implicitly suggesting that the U.S. should bend to Vladimir Putin ’s nuclear blackmail. If the Russian dictator threatens to drop a nuclear weapon because Ukraine dares defend itself, then the invaded party must surrender—or else the world may suffer another Hiroshima.

This is a false choice and an invitation for rogues and U.S. adversaries to conquer neighbors with impunity. You can bet the video was viewed with approval in Beijing, which would certainly wield its nuclear arsenal to dissuade the U.S. from aiding Taiwan in a crisis.

Gabbard doesn’t seem to appreciate that her argument would lead to much more nuclear proliferation. One reason Israel attacked Iran’s nuclear program on Friday is because Tehran is violating the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), as the latest report from the International Atomic Energy Agency shows.

The IAEA board voted Thursday that Iran is in breach of its obligations under the treaty, to which it is a signatory. Iran responded by saying it will accelerate its uranium enrichment. If Iran were allowed to get away with it, the NPT becomes a dead letter. Israel chose to use hard power to enforce non-proliferation, and the world should be grateful.

If Iran gets a bomb, the threat won’t merely be from a revolutionary regime that might use it. Nuclear proliferation would spread as other powers seek their own nukes to avoid being hostage to nuclear threats from Iran. The Saudis, the Turks and Egypt would all want a nuclear deterrent. The risk of a nuclear exchange would grow exponentially. Imagine multiple Pakistan vs. India tight-rope walks.

Gabbard’s logic recalls the left’s “nuclear freeze” campaign in the 1980s, as Ronald Reagan tried to deploy mid-range nuclear weapons in Europe to counter the Soviets. Reagan prevailed and pushed the Strategic Defense Initiative. His show of strength was able to win the Cold War and reduce the nuclear threat. Trump seems to admire the Reagan playbook but for some reason is surrounding himself with advisers whose thinking on deterrence and war is as shallow as Gabbard’s video.

The larger truth is that the U.S. nuclear deterrent has been a force for peace in the world for 80 years. The world is the most volatile it’s been at least since the Cold War, and it’s a shame that Gabbard chose to slander those who disagree with her as elites who don’t mind a nuclear war because they “will have access to nuclear shelters for themselves.”

The real threat to the U.S. is an imperial China, a revanchist Russia, and a possibly nuclear Iran. If Gabbard believes what she said in that video, her advice to the President is the real risk of nuclear Armageddon.