Biden’s ‘nuclear Armageddon’ warning unwise, says Macron

EMMANUEL MACRON last night rebuked Joe Biden after the United States president warned of a potential “nuclear Armageddon”.

National security officials in Washington scrambled to reassure US allies, and the American people, that Mr Biden’s comments were not triggered by any new intelligence that Vladimir Putin was preparing to use a nuclear weapon in Ukraine.

Speaking off-script at a private event in New York yesterday, Mr Biden said: “We have not faced the prospect of Armageddon since [President JFK] Kennedy and the [1962] Cuban Missile Crisis.

“I don’t think there’s any such thing as the ability to easily use a tactical nuclear weapon and not end up with Armageddon.” It was the latest example of Mr Biden making remarks that far exceeded carefully crafted White House and Pentagon positions.

In response, Mr Macron, the French president, said: “We must speak with prudence when commenting on such matters.”

Hours later, however, Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian leader, warned that he believed Moscow was laying the groundwork for a possible nuclear attack. “They begin to prepare their society. That’s very dangerous,” he told the BBC. “They are not ready to do it, to use it. But they begin to communicate.

“They don’t know whether they’ll use or not use it. I think it’s dangerous to even speak about it.”

Meanwhile, it emerged that the Russian president had been directly confronted by a member of his own inner circle over his handling of the Ukraine war, according to US intelligence.

The unnamed Kremlin insider was said to have challenged him over “extensive military shortcomings”.

That was seen in the US as a sign of growing alarm and tension in the Kremlin as Russian losses in Ukraine continued to mount.

Mr Biden said that he knew Mr Putin “fairly well” and the Russian leader was “not joking when he talks about potential use of tactical nuclear weapons, or biological or chemical weapons, because his military is, you might say, significantly underperforming”.

The US leader added: “We are trying to figure out, what is Putin’s off-ramp? Where does he find a way out?”

For 60 years, the Cuban Missile Crisis has been shorthand for staring down the barrel of nuclear oblivion. For much of the postwar period, it seemed to be as close as the world would ever get to annihilation.

With his warning that nuclear “Armageddon” is possible over the war in Ukraine, just as it was in that confrontation in 1962, Joe Biden has shattered that view of history.

The showdown over nuclear weapons in Cuba has been studied endlessly to glean insights into how better to behave in a crisis. Yet what is going on in Moscow today has little in common with the Cold War era.

Instead, it more closely resembles the fears of the post-1989 world that an unstable autocrat might obtain a bomb and use it to terrorise their neighbours.

Nuclear-tipped rhetoric was hardly absent in 1962: Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet leader, threatened annihilation in public and in private, but his pronouncements were mitigated by an insistence that it was the United States that would trigger any war.

Despite all the misunderstandings, miscalculations and poor communication, neither side in the Cuba stand-off wanted war.

Khrushchev had ordered missiles to be sent to Cuba in part for the simple reason that, despite Kennedy’s claims on the campaign trail that the Soviets had more and better missiles than the US, in reality, Moscow lacked sufficient capability to strike the US mainland from Russia.

Caught in a similar situation five years earlier, the Americans had placed medium-range missiles in Turkey, which bordered the USSR, giving Khrushchev another reason to act.

Khrushchev faced a young, inexperienced president whom he had outsmarted a year before at the Vienna summit, where Kennedy admitted the Soviet leader “beat the hell out of me” in failed negotiations over West Berlin.

Khrushchev miscalculated, but a nuclear stand-off was never his intention. Some in Washington were unperturbed. Robert Mcnamara, Kennedy’s secretary of defence, opined early in the crisis that “they’ve got enough to blow us up anyway”.

Yet, politically, Kennedy could never allow the missiles to stay, and for several days the US military’s preference for a strike against the Soviet facilities appeared set to prevail.

That fighting did not break out was in part down to luck, but also thanks to the reluctance with which each side contemplated nuclear conflict.

In 1962, the main fear was that US action might lead to a direct war between the superpowers.

That fear still exists, yet today the primary worry is that Putin might genuinely believe he can “escalate to de-escalate”, that is, launch a contained nuclear strike in order to convince the West to abandon Ukraine and give him what he wants.

Kennedy and Khrushchev did not understand one another, but ultimately they both faced a rational man operating within similar moral constraints. It is doubtful that Biden can say the same.