By asking the Delaware judge to ratify the CBS board’s decision to issue the dilutive dividend, Kindler told me, Wachtell was seeking “an advisory opinion” from the court. But, he added, the dividend is “an absolutely preposterous thing and it will never be litigated.” He said Bouchard would never rule on the dividend issuance because Shari’s change to the bylaws made the issue moot. “This is not even a close call,” he said. Much of the media described the CBS board’s decision to issue the dividends and to seek the approval of the Delaware court as being a kind of “nuclear option.” I suggested to Kindler that Shari’s move to change the CBS bylaws before the board vote to require a 90-percent board approval to issue the dividends was also a nuclear option, and that both sides had their nuclear weapons out. “No, no, no,” he said. “They don't have a nuclear weapon. They did something nuclear but it wasn’t a weapon because this dividend will never, ever, ever, ever be paid and it will never, ever, ever be litigated as to whether they can pay it.”

The lawsuit, Kindler continued, was nothing more than “good theater” on CBS’s part. Why, I wondered? “They declare this dividend subject to a court saying it was O.K.,” he said. “Which is an advisory opinion. So for example, they could’ve passed a resolution on Thursday saying, ‘We’re gonna hire a hit man to assassinate Shari but we’re not gonna do it until the court tells us we could do it,’ right? It’s just a meaningless action, but it’s particularly meaningless since any time before a record date, under Delaware law, a dividend can be rescinded. So even if [Shari] hadn’t amended the bylaws, if they ever did actually declare a dividend at the record date for a dividend which is 10 days out, we could just remove the board before the dividend and rescind it.”

He reiterated that by CBS choosing the “nuclear option,” it has given Shari “real justification” to get rid of the CBS directors. “Because they’re clearly under the thumb of Les Moonves and Wachtell,” he said. “They're clearly trying to entrench themselves and they’re clearly trying to hurt her as the controlling shareholder having nothing to do with the merger.” He doubted Shari would fire the CBS board imminently. “But it makes it much easier two months from now if she basically says, ‘You know what? I’m putting five more Dick Parsons on the board. These people clearly can’t be trusted. I never planned on throwing them out before the merger, if they’d turned down the merger, but now I know they’re not to be trusted.”

He acknowledged that removing more members of the CBS board would be tantamount to firing Moonves, who has a provision in his contract that, under such circumstances, would enable him to get a pay package worth as much as $250 million, if more of the original CBS board members are removed. “He’s one of these guys that really is as good as his press,” Kindler said. “He’s a really good manager. There’s no doubt about that. But as I’ve often said to people about other C.E.O.s, Les Moonves is not Steve Jobs, and the reason I say that is because Steve Jobs was not Steve Jobs, and he’s out of there in two years anyway. So is anyone seriously telling me that 18 months matter? No one in their right mind will.”

Kindler blamed Wachtell for giving CBS bad legal advice. In the process, he resurrected the tribal warfare that has long existed on Wall Street between Wachtell and Cravath. (Cravath has represented Viacom in the past and Wachtell has long advised CBS. Both CBS and Wachtell are in the same Eero Saarinen–designed Midtown office building, known as Black Rock.) He said he’s not sure what Shari will do next. “But because of the Wachtell ‘nuclear option,’ they’ve empowered her to do something that she otherwise really could not have done,” Kindler said, “and she could do it with her head held high because everyone believes these people have lost their minds and are under their thumb, and when you add the additional fact that they literally had agreed to an exchange ratio, they literally had acknowledged the strategic sense of this deal, and it blew up because Les did not want Bob Bakish even on the board, it makes them look pretty unattractive whereas before they wouldn’t have looked as bad.” He continued, “What Wachtell has basically done, whether it’s three months from now, six months from now, nine months from now, they have signed the death warrant for every person on that board not because they didn’t approve the merger but because they agreed to this absolute lunacy.”

I suggested to Kindler that Shari must be pleased, then, by the recent turn of events. If he’s right, Shari has the opening she has long wanted to get rid of the current CBS board of directors and replace them with new board members who would approve the combination of CBS and Viacom. That merger is a prelude to the ultimate sale of the Redstones’ stakes in both companies, in a tax-efficient manner, to a company such as Verizon, Apple, Amazon, or Facebook. But he disagreed with my premise. “She wanted the merger,” he said. “She didn’t want to have warfare. Who the heck wants warfare?”

This article has been updated.