He takes Putin seriously. US President Joe Biden ruled on Thursday that Russian threats to use nuclear weapons in the conflict in Ukraine put the world at risk of an “apocalypse” for the first time since the Cuban Missile Crisis in the midst of the Cold War.
“We haven’t faced the prospect of Armageddon since Kennedy and the Cuban Missile Crisis” in 1962, he said at a fundraiser in New York where he felt that his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin “wasn’t joking” making these threats. “There is, for the first time since the Cuban Missile Crisis, a direct threat of the use of nuclear weapons if things continue to go the way they are going now,” the US president said.
Faced with stubborn Ukrainian resistance, fueled by Western military aid, Vladimir Putin alluded to the atomic bomb in a televised speech on September 21. He said he was ready to use “all means” in his arsenal once morest the West, which he accused of wanting to “destroy” Russia. “It’s not a bluff,” he assured.
Tactical nuclear weapon
Experts say such attacks would likely employ tactical nuclear weapons — smaller in explosive charge than a strategic nuclear weapon. But Joe Biden has warned that even a tactical nuclear strike might ignite a wider conflagration.
“I don’t think you can easily (use) a tactical nuclear weapon without ending up causing the apocalypse,” he said. Vladimir Putin “is not joking when he talks regarding the potential use of tactical nuclear weapons or biological or chemical weapons, because his army, one might say, is very inefficient”, still judged the American president.
From October 14 to 28, 1962, the missile crisis installed in Cuba by the Soviet Union and spotted by the United States shook the planet, raising fears of a nuclear war.
