With the “mighty” Red Army on the ropes in the Russia-Ukraine war, a desperate Vladimir Putin, who woefully misjudged Ukraine’s willingness and ability to fight back against the Russian dictator’s attempt to gain control of independent Ukraine, continues to threaten the use of nuclear weapons in the war.

And if Putin is stupid (insane) enough to carry out his threat, how will the United States respond?

Given the decline in mental acuity of the fool in the White House and his left-wing handlers, will Joe Biden follow his own tough talk against Putin with commensurate actions? If so, what might those actions be?

Joseph Cirincione, a national security analyst and leading expert on nuclear warfare, predicted a likely U.S. response during an interview with Yahoo News.

[The U.S. and NATO] could destroy the Russian forces in Ukraine in a matter of days. That would be the end of the Russian army in this.

But Cirincione also said a direct U.S. or NATO military strike against the Russian military, even in response to the Russian use of tactical nuclear weapons on the battlefield, could spiral out of control.

There are no good responses once you start down the nuclear path. It’s extremely difficult to terminate it for the same reason that a poker player losing a hand is hesitant to fold. They keep thinking there’s one more move they could make, one more bet they could raise to try to cause the other side to fold. So there’s no good responses.

In my initial analysis of Putin, as Russian forces began to show their incompetence on the battlefield, I thought that while Putin might be crazy, he certainly isn’t insane enough to pull the nuclear trigger, despite Russia’s ownership of the world’s largest nuclear stockpile. Now I’m not so sure.

That said, I remain convinced that such an order by Putin would lead to his ousting, if not a bullet between the eyes, fired by a top Russian general unwilling to carry out the dictator’s last-gasp order.

Cirincione also suggested to Yahoo News that if Putin were to actually follow through on his nuclear threat, it wouldn’t be a large-scale thermonuclear attack, but a more limited deployment of tactical weapons — far more limited in scope but still a major and unprecedented escalation.

Cirincione believes a U.S. military response would not be limited to the battlefield, and that an escalation in psychological warfare would be used against top Russian generals and leaders in the Kremlin — sans Putin, whom the U.S. would attempt to further isolate.

Recent satellite images show that Russia is maneuvering some of its nuclear assets toward the front lines of the illegal invasion, and as I suggested at the top, Putin is an increasingly desperate and likely paranoid psychopath who gets more unpredictable by the day. But if he goes nuclear, it’s my belief he’ll be removed from power — one way or another.