US President Joe Biden said Thursday that the world is closer to Armageddon than it has been since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis at the height of the Cold War.
“For the first time since the Cuban Missile Crisis, we have the threat of a nuclear weapon if things continue the way they are now,” Biden told a fundraiser organized by the Democratic Party in New York state.
The American president indicated that his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, is in a situation where it is difficult to find a way out – especially after the latest military setbacks in Ukraine – and that he is probably looking for solutions that will allow him to save face.
Biden also commented that he knows him “very well” and that he knows he was not joking when he said he could use tactical or biological nuclear weapons, since his Armed Forces are showing a lower level than expected.
“I don’t think you can use tactical nuclear weapons without ending up in Armageddon,” the president commented.
The missile crisis dates back to October 1962, when the US discovered on the 15th of that month that the Soviet Union had installed 42 missiles in Cuba with medium-range nuclear warheads aimed at its territory.
The return of the Guantánamo base, the lifting of the financial embargo and the end of subversion and ideological propaganda, acts of piracy on the Cuban coast and sabotage were the points that the then Cuban leader, Fidel Castro – who died in 2016 -, led to the negotiation.
On the brink of nuclear confrontation, then US President John F. Kennedy and then Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev negotiated a solution to the crisis against the clock through an exchange of letters between October 25 and 28, 1962.
The Cubans practically learned of the deal from the press, though the agreement included the dismantling and withdrawal of the missiles from their territory — along with the withdrawal of 56 American missiles located in Iran and Turkey, near the southern border of the Soviet Union.
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