President Joe Biden said Thursday that the risk of nuclear “Armageddon” is at the highest level since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, as Russian officials speak of the possibility of using tactical nuclear weapons after suffering massive setbacks in the eight-month invasion of Ukraine.
Speaking at a fundraiser for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, Biden said Russian President Vladimir Putin was “a guy I know fairly well” and the Russian leader was “not joking when he talks about the use of tactical nuclear weapons or biological or chemical weapons.”
Biden added, “We have not faced the prospect of Armageddon since Kennedy and the Cuban Missile Crisis.” He suggested the threat from Putin is real “because his military is — you might say — significantly underperforming.”
U.S. officials for months have warned of the prospect that Russia could use weapons of mass destruction in Ukraine as it has faced a series of strategic setbacks on the battlefield, though Biden’s remarks marked the starkest warnings yet issued by the U.S. government about the nuclear stakes.
It was not immediately clear whether Biden was referring to any new assessment of Russian intentions. As recently as this week, though, U.S. officials have said they have seen no change to Russia’s nuclear forces that would require a change in the alert posture of U.S. nuclear forces.
Meanwhile, Only a handful of people know the exact location where President Vladimir Putin is celebrating his 70th birthday in St. Petersburg on Friday, but critics say he spends more and more of his time isolated deep inside nuclear bunkers.
The Kremlin has announced that Putin will spend his birthday working. Mired, as he is, in the biggest self-made disaster of his presidency, that just raises more worrying questions about what kind of orders he’s going to issue on his big day. Backed into a corner, what is Putin considering next?
People who’ve known Putin for many years claim the Russian leader is “nervous” and “tense” these days; online political groups speculate on Telegram that Putin is planning “to use tactical nuclear weapons out of a bunker, far from Moscow,” while Kremlinologists debate how to prevent a looming doomsday scenario.
Putin himself has said he will respond to the grim daily news from Ukraine—where his army is suffering defeat after defeat—with “all the means at our disposal.” That, he added, “is not a bluff.”
In an alarming symbolic gesture, he promoted one of his closest and most notorious allies on Wednesday, the leader of the Chechen republic, Ramzan Kadyrov, who is now a general. His elevation came just a couple of days after Kadyrov called for more drastic escalation in Ukraine, including the declaration of martial law in Russia’s border areas and “the use of low-yield nuclear weapons.”
