President Biden Admits Russia's Nuclear Threat Is Biggest Since Cuban Missile Crisis

President Joe Biden. (Twitter/@POTUS)

JAKARTA - US President Joe Biden said Russian President Vladimir Putin's threat to use nuclear weapons was the biggest threat since the Cuban Missile Crisis.

President Biden said the United States was "trying to figure out" Putin's way out of the war, warning the Russian leader "not to joke when he talks about the potential use of tactical nuclear weapons or biological or chemical weapons, because his military does not have the maximum performance on the battlefield." .

"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 on the path they have been on," President Biden said in New York, citing Reuters, October 7.

"We haven't faced the prospect of 'Armageddon' since (President) Kennedy and the Cuban missile crisis," he said.

In the 1962 crisis, the United States under President John Kennedy and the Soviet Union under its leader, Nikita Khrushchev, almost used nuclear weapons, due to the presence of Soviet missiles in Cuba.

"I don't think there's such a thing as the ability to easily (use) tactical nuclear weapons and not end up with 'Armageddon'," President Biden said.

Meanwhile, President Putin, who turns 70 this Friday, had previously warned that he would use all necessary means, including Russia's nuclear arsenal, to protect Russian soil, which he now says includes the four annexed Ukrainian territories.

Russia annexed Ukraine's Donestk, Lugansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions, which represent about 15 percent of the country, after holding what it called a referendum, despite being denounced by the Kyiv government and the West as illegal and coercive.