Biden claims that the nuclear risk is at its highest level since 1962 because of the conflict in Ukraine. Nuclear Crisis in Cuba
According to US President Joe Biden, the risk of a nuclear “Armageddon” is higher than it has ever been since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.
Vladimir Putin’s threat to use tactical nuclear weapons after suffering setbacks in Ukraine, according to Mr. Biden, was “not joking.” He added that the US was “trying to figure out” Mr. Putin’s exit strategy from the conflict. The US and the EU have already stated that it is important to take Mr. Putin’s nuclear saber-rattling seriously. Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser for the US, stated last week that the US had not observed any indications that Russia was getting ready to deploy a nuclear bomb in the near future despite Moscow’s nuclear hints. Russia has been losing territory to Ukraine, including the four recent illegitimate annexations by Russia.
US officials have been cautioning Russia that if it encounters difficulties on the battlefield, it may turn to the use of weapons of mass devastation.
The reason the Russian leader had mentioned employing tactical nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons, according to President Biden, was “because his military is, you might say, badly underperforming. If events continue on their current course, nuclear war might be imminent for the first time since the Cuban Missile Crisis, Mr. Biden told his fellow Democrats.
Since Kennedy and the Cuban Missile Crisis, “we have not had to deal with the possibility of Armageddon.” Presidents John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev of the US and the Soviet Union nearly engaged in a nuclear conflict in 1962 over the placement of Russian nuclear weapons in Cuba.
Many experts believe that this conflict represents the closest thing the world has ever gone to a full-scale nuclear exchange. President Putin stated in a speech last Friday that the US had set a “precedent” by using nuclear weapons against Japan at the close of World War Two. As our Russia editor Steve Rosenberg notes, this statement would not have gone ignored by Western governments.
Additionally, Mr. Putin has promised to defend Russian territory by any means necessary.
While Mr. Putin was technically annexing Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson from Ukraine, Kyiv’s soldiers were advancing inside the territories he had annexed.Many Russian males have started leaving the country in their hundreds of thousands rather than wait to be drafted to fight in Ukraine.The nuclear threats from Moscow have previously been disregarded by Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, as a “continuous narrative of Russian authorities and propagandists.”
In Russia itself, there has been some opposition to Moscow’s nuclear threats. The leading newspaper of the nation, Nezavisimaya Gazeta, published an editorial that harshly criticised “top Russian authorities” for “talking about the nuclear button.”
“It’s a sure step to letting a nuclear conflict in reality to accept it in ideas and words,” said Winston Churchill.
On Thursday, a spokesperson for the Russian foreign ministry told reporters that Moscow had not modified its stance on the need for nuclear war to be avoided.
During a Democratic fundraising dinner, Mr. Biden made his remarks at James Murdoch’s New York residence, the son of media mogul Rupert Murdoch.
