President Biden’s warning this week that Russia’s threats to use nuclear weapons amounted to the “most serious prospect of Armageddon in 60 years” was not based on any new intelligence or information gathered by the government, they said Friday American officials, but in Biden’s own assessment of what Russian President Vladimir Putin might be capable of.
Biden and other U.S. officials have worried in recent weeks that as the war continues to go badly for Moscow, Putin would resort to increasingly drastic measures, said a senior administration official, who as others spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations.
US officials stressed on Friday that they had seen no evidence that Russia had taken the necessary steps to use its nuclear arsenal and that the US had no reason to change its nuclear posture. But several officials said they are taking Putin’s threats seriously and have said the United States is in direct talks with the Russians about the repercussions of taking steps such as using nuclear, chemical or biological weapons.
“We have seen no reason to adjust our own strategic nuclear posture, nor do we have any indication that Russia is preparing to use nuclear weapons imminently,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Friday. He added: “The kind of irresponsible rhetoric we’ve seen is no way for the leader of a nuclear-armed state to speak, and that’s what the president was making abundantly clear.”
Biden surprised many Americans by saying at a fundraiser Thursday night that Putin, whom he knows “pretty well,” “wasn’t kidding when he talks about the potential use of tactical nuclear weapons or biological weapons or chemicals”. He added: “I don’t think there’s anything like the ability to do that easily [use] a tactical nuclear weapon and not ending Armageddon.”
Biden suggested the threat was reminiscent of the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, when the United States and the Soviet Union came close to nuclear confrontation during the Cold War.
“My sense is that this is clearly weighing heavily on President Biden, and we can all say intellectually that the risk of the use of nuclear weapons is low, but the reality is that the risk has increased,” he said. Andrea Kendall-Taylor, Principal Investigator. and director of the Transatlantic Security Program at the Center for a New American Security.
“On a very human level, he now has the potential to be a president who has to manage nuclear use for the first time in 70 years,” Kendall-Taylor said. “I might have preferred that he didn’t use the phrase ‘nuclear … Armageddon,’ but I think it’s helpful for the president and the administration to have a conversation with the public about the risk.”
Why the world cares about Putin’s tactical nukes
Biden’s comments reflected his long-held mistrust of Putin and his understanding of what Putin is willing to do to achieve his goals, U.S. officials and outside experts said. His skepticism about Putin began long before he became president, and long before Putin became one of America’s greatest adversaries.
Putin’s bleak assessment of Biden dates back to at least 2001, when President George W. Bush met the Russian leader for the first time shortly after coming to power. While Bush praised him, describing him as “very straightforward and trustworthy,” Biden, then a senator from Delaware, disagreed and said he did not trust Putin.
Biden, who has focused on foreign policy throughout his career and has chaired the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, places great value on his own instincts and judgments when assessing leaders and landscapes. foreigners During his presidential campaign, he often talked about how many foreign leaders he had met personally, for example citing the long trips he took with Chinese President Xi Jinping.
While Biden’s mention of “Armageddon” was his most vivid warning yet, the president has been sounding the alarm for weeks about Putin’s actions in Ukraine, including his holding of mock referendums in four Ukrainian territories and then annexing them. In a speech to the UN General Assembly last month, Biden directly addressed the referendums and nuclear threats, saying Moscow had “blatantly” violated the core of the UN charter by forcefully invading its neighbor .
“Just today, President Putin made open nuclear threats against Europe, disregarding the responsibilities of the non-proliferation regime,” Biden said. “A nuclear war cannot be won. And it should never be fought.”
Annexations bring nuclear war closer
Putin has threatened to use nuclear weapons since the conflict began in February, but officials said they have long recognized that the threat of such an attack would increase if Putin’s military position in Ukraine is compromised. In recent weeks, Ukrainian forces have launched a counteroffensive and made significant gains on the battlefield.
But US officials were at pains on Friday to stress that nothing they have seen on the ground in recent days has led them to expect a potential nuclear strike in the near term.
“We have been doing contingency planning for a wide range of scenarios during the conflict,” said a senior State Department official. “But I have seen no reason to adjust our strategic nuclear posture.”
Deputy State Department spokesman Vedant Patel added: “We have seen no reason to adjust our own nuclear posture, nor do we have any indication that Russia is preparing to use weapons imminently.”
Other senior U.S. officials said they believe any movement of Russian nuclear warheads would not only be detected by various monitoring methods, but would require detectable internal coordination and could be observed by U.S. surveillance in real time.
Still, several officials acknowledged that these methods are never 100 percent safe.
Asked Sunday if the United States would actively go to war if Putin used a nuclear weapon, national security adviser Jake Sullivan told CNN: “I’ve said before that we’ve had the opportunity to communicate directly to Russia a series of consequences for using nuclear weapons and what kind of actions the United States would take. I’ve also said before that we’re not going to telegraph these things publicly.”
Some leaders suggested Friday that Biden’s comments were unnecessarily provocative. French President Emmanuel Macron said “we must speak carefully” on issues such as nuclear weapons.
Jeffrey Lewis, a nuclear weapons expert at the Middlebury Institute for International Studies in Monterey, also questioned Biden’s tone, saying it would be better for US officials to make limited and quiet statements in response to the threats. Putin’s nukes.
“When you get into that kind of ‘Armageddon’ and ‘World War III’ language as an officer, I think you’re raising anxiety without really conveying the deterrent threat,” Lewis said. “The main message the White House should convey at this time is strength and confidence.”
Still, he added, Putin could always miscalculate even if the White House’s messages were impeccable. “Even if they were doing it perfectly, there will be a risk that it will misread them, because it already did with Zelensky,” Lewis said.
Other European officials pointed out that Putin is unpredictable and dangerous, saying that Russian losses on the battlefield are creating a kind of pressure that he has not faced before. For months, the war has not gone according to plan for Putin, and he has resorted to increasingly brazen and far-reaching measures to try to stem his losses.
After making a failed run in Kyiv, the Russian military withdrew from the Ukrainian capital in early April and refocused its efforts on taking more territory in Ukraine’s eastern regions of Donetsk and Luhansk , an area known as Donbas.
The regrouping changed the conflict into a more traditional artillery war. Russian troops seized a number of new towns and villages in June and July at a daunting time for Ukrainian forces, which found themselves outgunned by Russia’s long-range artillery.
But the U.S. and other European allies armed the Ukrainians with more sophisticated weapons, including the U.S.-made High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS), and found ways to alleviate some ammunition shortages, helping to level the playing field.
By the time Kyiv launched its counteroffensive in late August, Putin’s forces had suffered heavy losses and lacked the personnel to defend such a wide swath of territory. Russia’s front-line defenses in the Kharkiv region quickly collapsed and Ukrainian forces retook thousands of square miles in a rapid advance that has thrown Moscow off balance.
In recent weeks, as Ukrainian forces have made further advances, Putin resorted to a move that US intelligence sources had said he would try to avoid at all costs: ordering a partial military mobilization of up to 300,000 reservists . Putin had previously been reluctant to take the step, aware that it could hamper domestic support for the war, and since the announcement, many Russian men have tried to flee the country to avoid conscription.
At the same time, Putin advanced the timetable for referendums and mock annexations, declaring that people living in the annexed regions “would be our citizens forever” and warning that the land now belonged to Russia and would be defended as if it were. any other part of the country.
These urgent, some say desperate, actions form the backdrop to Putin’s escalating nuclear threats. Some analysts say the Russian president may see the threats as a way to make the United States and Europe think twice about letting Ukraine advance far enough to provoke the Kremlin to potentially use a weapon of mass…