By Adeyemi Olusoga with Agency reports
The world is getting closer to the end as the threats of a nuclear “Armageddon” is now at the highest level since the 1962 Cuba Missile Crisis, President of the United States of America, Joe Biden has warned.
Mr. Biden is convinced that Vladimir Putin, Russian president was “ not joking” after speaking of using tactical nuclear weapons in the war in Ukraine.
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 seen a turnaround in the war, recently getting the better of Russia and even retaking some territories previously occupied by Putin’s army.
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. We have not faced the prospect of Armageddon since Kennedy and the Cuban Missile Crisis,” Biden told his fellow Democrats.
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.
Mr. Putin has also threatened to use every means at his disposal to protect Russian territory.
