New York: US President Joe Biden on Thursday warned that the world faced the threat of a nuclear “Armageddon” for the first time since the Cold War following Russian President Vladimir Putin’s threat to use nuclear weapons, AFP reported.
“We have not faced the prospect of Armageddon since Kennedy and the Cuban missile crisis in 1962,” Biden said at a Democratic party fundraising event in New York.
“Putin is not joking when he threatens to use nuclear weapons to pursue his invasion of Ukraine,” he said.
“We’ve got a guy I know fairly well,” Biden said. Putin’s “not joking when he talks about potential use of tactical nuclear weapons or biological or chemical weapons, because his military is, you might say, significantly underperforming,” the AFP report said.
On Putin’s threat, experts say these would most likely be relatively small, tactical strikes. But Biden warned that a tactical strike in a limited area would still risk triggering a wider conflagration. “I don’t think there’s any such thing as the ability to easily (use) a tactical nuclear weapon and not end up with Armageddon,” Biden was quoted in the report as saying.
