White House officials over the weekend moved to clarify President Joe Biden’s remarks on Russia’s potential for using a nuclear weapon.
“The stakes are very high right now,” John Kirby, a spokesman for the White House National Security Council, told ABC News. But President Biden’s warning of possible “Armageddon” wasn’t about an imminent threat. “These comments were not based on new or fresh intelligence or new indications that Mr. Putin has made a decision to use nuclear weapons and, quite frankly, we don’t have any indication that he has made that kind of decision,” said Kirby, adding: “nor have we seen anything that would give us pause to reconsider our own strategic nuclear posture in our efforts to defend our own national security interests and those of our allies and partners.”
Kirby’s comments come after Biden’s unusually stark remarks at a fundraiser on Thursday. Biden said then that Putin, the Russian president, was “not joking when he talks about the use of tactical nuclear weapons or biological or chemical weapons” and that “we have not faced the prospect of Armageddon since Kennedy and the Cuban missile crisis” in the 1960s
Source-ABC
