US President Joe Biden says the world is at risk of nuclear ‘Armageddon’ for the first time since the Cold War, and he is trying to find an ‘off-ramp’ to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s one-way slide into the Ukraine conflict.
‘Armageddon’ is the final destructive battle between good and evil before the Judgment Day referred to in the New Testament.
“Not since Kennedy and the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 have we faced the possibility of Armageddon,” Biden said, referring to former US President John F. Kennedy’s speech at a Democratic Party fundraiser in New York on Thursday.
“Putin wasn’t kidding when he threatened to use nuclear weapons to launch his invasion of Ukraine,” Biden said.
Biden made his unusually harsh comments about the risks posed by Russian President Putin’s nuclear threat in a speech to party supporters at the Manhattan home of James Murdoch, the son of newspaper mogul Rupert Murdoch.
“If the current situation continues in the same direction, it will be the first time we have a direct threat of using nuclear weapons since the Cuban Missile Crisis,” Biden said, referring to the stagnation of the threat of an easy nuclear attack on the United States from the Soviet Union’s missiles deployed in Cuba 60 years ago.
“We’re trying to figure out what Putin’s ‘off-ramp’ is,” Biden said. In the face of stiff resistance from Western-backed Kiev, Putin has made unprovoked threats to use nuclear weapons if he feels his options for seizing Ukrainian territory have run out.
Experts say these will likely be relatively small, tactical attacks. But Biden warned that such an attack in a limited area would still pose the risk of a widespread wildfire.
“We have a guy who I know fairly well,” Biden said, noting, “When he talks about the possible use of tactical nuclear weapons or biological or chemical weapons, he’s not kidding, because his military is remarkably weak.”
(October 7/FA)