Biden says nuclear risk highest since 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis

On Oct 7, 2022

The risk of a nuclear “Armageddon” is at its highest level since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, US President Joe Biden has said.

Biden said Russia’s President Vladimir Putin was “not joking” when he spoke of using tactical nuclear weapons after suffering setbacks in Ukraine.

The US was “trying to figure out” Putin’s way out of the war, he added.

The US and the EU have previously said Putin’s nuclear saber-rattling should be taken seriously.

However, the US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan last week said that, despite Moscow’s nuclear hints, the US had seen no signs that Russia was imminently preparing to use a nuclear weapon.

Ukraine has been retaking territory occupied by Russia, including in the four regions Russia illegally annexed recently.

For several months US officials have been warning that Russia could resort to the use of weapons of mass destruction if it suffers setbacks on the battlefield.

President Biden said the reason the Russian leader had not been “not joking” when he talked about using tactical nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons – “because his military is, you might say, significantly underperforming”.

“For the first time since the Cuban Missile Crisis, we have a direct threat to the use of nuclear weapons, if, in fact, things continue down the path they’d been going,” Biden told fellow Democrats.

“We have not faced the prospect of Armageddon since Kennedy and the Cuban Missile Crisis.”

In 1962, the US and the Soviet Union – under President John F Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev – came close to a nuclear showdown over the deployment of Russian nuclear weapons in Cuba.

The confrontation is considered by many experts to be the closest the world has ever come to a full-scale nuclear war.

During a speech last Friday, President Putin said the US had created a “precedent” by using nuclear weapons against Japan at the end of World War Two – a comment that would not have gone unnoticed by Western governments, our Russia editor Steve Rosenberg points out.

Putin has also threatened to use every means he can to protect Russian territory.

Agencies