[/devil's advocate]
There is always the possablility that he finally just grew tired of gettin picked on all the time by the other world leads and countries in general, and finally grew a spine. If you pick on someone enough even the smallest weakest nerd can go find a big gun and shoot someone with it, and with him only saying he will retaliate against a 'large scale' attack and not defining what 'large scale' is he could be hoping that potential terrorists will think "well is this large scale enough to make them nuke us?' thereby allowing him to nuke over any terrorist attempt no matter what size. [/devil's advocate]

But seriously this isn't good for anyone. If you and someone else are pointing guns at eachother and the other person, chirac, says on the count of three hes going to shoot you. . . whos going to shoot first.