Charles Kupperman, Trump’s acting national security adviser since the ouster of John Bolton earlier this week, claimed in the 1980s that nuclear war with the USSR was winnable and simply a “physics problem,” HuffPost reports. The former Reagan administration official said during an interview with journalist Robert Scheer in the early 1980s that “nuclear war is a destructive thing but still in large part a physics problem.”

Kupperman, who was appointed on Tuesday, argued America could win in the “classical sense,” and that possible mutual total destruction was inaccurate. “It may take 15 years, but geez, look how long it took Europe to recover after the Second World War,” Kupperman said. He reportedly went on to say of Hiroshima, the Japanese city hit by the first atomic bomb in 1945: “After it was bombed, was back and operating three days later.”