Why the president brought up the Cuban missile crisis
President Joe Biden traveled to New York on Thursday for an otherwise ordinary Democratic fundraiser.
Except that Biden’s remarks at the private event were a big deal.
The president issued a dire warning about the threat of nuclear war. “We have not faced the prospect of Armageddon since Kennedy and the Cuban missile crisis,” he said. It was a signal of the severity of the moment the world is in amid Russia’s war with Ukraine.
As Biden explained, “We’ve got a guy” — Russian President Vladimir Putin — “I know fairly well. He’s not joking when he talks about potential use of tactical nuclear weapons.” Putin said several times last month he would use “all weapon systems available” to Russia if its “territorial integrity” was violated, and he said he wasn’t bluffing.
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists warned even before Russia’s invasion that the globe sits “at doom’s doorstep.” The setting of its Doomsday Clock sits at 100 seconds to midnight, the most ominous position of the dial since its creation in 1947.
The nuclear experts I spoke with agree that Biden’s comments were, without a doubt, attention-grabbing. There’s decidedly less consensus on whether they were helpful or alarmist.
“It’s sort of the crazy stuff we used to talk about during the 1970s and ’80s,” Hans Kristensen, a researcher with the Federation of American Scientists, told me. “It’s pretty insane that three decades after the end of the Cold War, we still have to entertain these kind of thoughts.”
While worries about nuclear war have been present since Moscow invaded Ukraine nearly eight months ago, what’s different now is just how tangible the threat is compared to any point since the end of the Cold War. Between Putin’s menacing comments, Russia’s illegal annexation of Ukrainian territory even as Ukraine advances, and ever more US support for Ukraine, the danger is concrete enough that Biden is unnerved. What Biden is telling us
Putin is causing the threat right now. His decision to illegally annex four territories in eastern Ukraine in September raises questions as to how Putin, in his desperation, will treat these contested regions. Fears persist about whether he’d be willing to use a small nuclear weapon over those territories or elsewhere.
But Biden’s words, too, have power.
Nuclear experts agree that Biden’s statement was accurate, but there is not consensus as to whether Biden’s remarks were the right thing to have said aloud.
