In 1999, at the start of the Second Chechen War, Zhirinovsky, an ardent supporter of the first war in Chechnya in the mid-1990s, advocated hitting some Chechen villages with tactical nuclear weapons. He has also advocated using nuclear weapons and naval blockade-imposed starvation in the event of a Russian war against Japan. In 2008, during the resulting political row between the United Kingdom and Russia, he suggested dropping nuclear bombs over the Atlantic Ocean in an effort to flood Britain.