Joe Biden raised the risk of Armageddon in October 2022, against the backdrop of the Russian nuclear threat in the conflict in Ukraine.
He reveals it in "New Cold Wars: The Rise of China, the Invasion of Russia, and America's Fight to Defend the West," a book by White House correspondent David Sanger, of which the New York Times publishes a extract.
"For the first time since the Cuban missile crisis, if things in Ukraine continue the way they are going, we are faced with the direct threat of the use of a nuclear weapon," the president confided during an evening with representatives of the American political and economic establishment in the New York home of James Murdoch, the liberal and rebellious scion of the publishing magnate.
It was October 6, 2022, coincidentally sixty years after the Cuban missile crisis that brought the world to the brink of nuclear holocaust.
"The more successful the Ukrainians are in repelling the Russian invasion - explained the commander in chief - the more likely it is that Putin will threaten to use a bomb. Or attempt to use one".
“I don't think there's the ability to easily use a tactical nuclear weapon and not end up with Armageddon,” Biden warned, saying he believed Putin was capable of proceeding: “We've got a guy I know pretty well. He doesn't mess around when he talks about the potential use of tactical nuclear weapons or biological or chemical weapons because his military is, one might say, underperforming.”
Biden spoke on the basis of US intelligence interceptions and his first reaction was on a diplomatic level, through a series of contacts between the top leaders of the US administration and the corresponding senior Russian officials, including a conversation between William Burns, the director of the CIA , with Moscow's spy chief, Sergei Naryshkin.
“I told him clearly that if Russia used unconventional weapons, there would be serious consequences on our part,” Burns himself recounts in the book.
"He swore to me that he understood and assured that Putin did not intend to use nuclear weapons," he continues.
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