Biden: “Nuclear Armageddon” Is Closer Than Ever Since the Cuban Missile Crisis | International

The Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 still reverberates in the psyche of average Americans as close as the country ever came to hurtling toward the Apocalypse. Hence, the mention this Thursday of that episode by the president, Joe Biden, during a fundraiser in New York for the Senate Democratic Campaign Committee, cannot be taken lightly. Biden went further, stating that the risk of a nuclear “Armageddon” is closer than ever since, due to the Russian threat to use tactical nuclear weapons to respond to the setbacks suffered at the hands of Ukraine on the front lines of the war that It has been raging for eight months on European soil.

Biden said he did not think Russian President Vladimir Putin "is joking when he talks about the use of tactical nuclear weapons or biological or chemical weapons." And then he added: "We haven't faced the prospect of Armageddon like this since [la presidencia de] Kennedy and the Cuban Missile Crisis”.

The US president is also wary of the possibility that the Kremlin plans to use lower-ranking weapons. “I don't think that's easy to use without triggering Armageddon,” he said.

The statements have been collected by the AP agency. The journalist in charge of reporting the president's movements this Thursday for the rest of the accredited journalists in Washington has clarified that the group of regular White House reporters has followed the event "from the stairs" and that the "sound was not exactly fantastic ” when Biden has “said those words about Putin”.

The statements by Biden, a president with a proven ability to get into trouble with things he blurts out lightly, contradict the analyzes of some senior US officials, such as spokesman for the National Security Council, John Kirby, who have assured this same week that they have seen no signs in the Russian forces suggesting a change in attitude towards the idea of ​​a nuclear escalation.

Since the beginning of the Ukrainian crisis (and especially in the weeks leading up to the beginning of the invasion), the US intelligence services have used a tactic that some analysts have defined as "the megaphone strategy", consisting of keeping very little of the information they were gathering about the intentions of the Kremlin. At times it seemed like an exaggerated option, but many of the forecasts launched during those weeks of last winter ended up being fulfilled.

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