US President Joe Biden has said the risk of a nuclear "Armageddon" is at
its highest level since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.

Mr Biden said Russia's President Vladimir Putin was "not joking" when he
spoke of using tactical nuclear weapons after suffering setbacks in
Ukraine.

The US was trying to discern Mr Putin's way out of the war, Mr Biden added.

The US and the EU have previously said Putin's nuclear sabre-rattling
should be taken seriously.

However, the US National Security Advisor 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.

Speaking at a private fundraising event, President Biden said the Russian
leader was "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," Mr Biden told fellow Democrats.

"We have not faced the prospect of Armageddon since Kennedy and the Cuban
missile crisis."

In 1962, the US and the Soviet Union - under President 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 Biden told fellow Democrats the use of tactical nuclear, biological or
chemical weapons could quickly spiral out of control.

"We're trying to figure out what is Putin's off-ramp," the president added.

For several months US officials have been warning that Russia could resort
to the use of weapons of mass destruction, if it suffered setbacks on the
battlefield in Ukraine.

Mr Putin has also threatened to use every means at his disposal to protect
Russian territory. He has also made it clear that he regards the four
Ukrainian regions illegally annexed by Moscow as "new territories" of the
Russia Federation.

During a speech last Friday, the Russian leader said the US had created a
"precedent" by using nuclear weapons against Japan at the end of World War
Two. A comment that would not have gone unnoticed by Western governments,
our Russian Editor Steve Rosenberg points out.

While Paul Stronski, of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
told the BBC that Russia's "destabilising rhetoric" is aimed at deterring
the West, even though the West appears resolved to push back on it.

There has also been some pushback against Moscow's nuclear threats in
Russia itself. An editorial in the country's mainstream Nezavisimaya
Gazeta newspaper was heavily critical of "senior Russian officials" for
"talking about the nuclear button".

"To allow, in thoughts and words, the possibility of a nuclear conflict is
a sure step to allowing it in reality."

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-63167947