A senior administration official said on condition of anonymity that Biden and other U.S. officials have been concerned in recent weeks that Putin will take increasingly harsh measures as the war in Moscow continues to go badly.
U.S. officials stressed on Friday that they had seen no evidence that Russia had taken the necessary steps to use its nuclear arsenal and that the United States had no reason to change its nuclear posture. But several officials said they were taking Putin’s threats seriously and said the U.S. was in direct, secret talks with the Russians about the consequences of taking measures such as the use of nuclear, chemical or biological weapons.
White House press secretary Karin Jean-Pierre said on Friday: “We do not see any reason to adjust our strategic nuclear posture, and there is no indication that Russia is preparing to use nuclear weapons immediately.” She added, “What we have seen The kind of irresponsible rhetoric that leaves the leader of a nuclear-armed country speechless, and that’s exactly what the president has made clear.”
Biden surprised many Americans by saying at a fundraiser Thursday night that Putin, who he “knows quite well”, “is not joking when it comes to the possible use of tactical nuclear or biological or chemical weapons.”He added: “I don’t think I have the ability to easily [use] Tactical nuclear weapons, not the end of the world. “
Biden said the threat was reminiscent of the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, when the United States and the Soviet Union came close to a nuclear confrontation during the Cold War.
Andrea Kendall-Taylor, a senior researcher, said: “My sense is that this is obviously a heavy burden on President Biden, and we can all intellectually say the risk of using nuclear weapons is low, but the reality is that the risk has risen. .” Director of the Transatlantic Security Program at the Center for a New American Security.
“On a very human level, he now has the potential to be a president who has to govern nuclear use for the first time in 70 years,” Kendall-Taylor said. “I’d probably prefer that he didn’t use the term ‘nuclear…apocalypse,’ but I think it’s useful for the president and the administration to have a dialogue with the public about the risks.”
U.S. officials and outside experts said Biden’s remarks reflected his longstanding distrust of Putin and his understanding of what Putin was willing to do to achieve his goals. His suspicions about Putin began long before he became president — long before Putin became one of America’s biggest adversaries.
Biden’s gloomy assessment of Putin dates back to at least 2001, when President George W. Bush first met the Russian leader shortly after taking office. While Bush raved about him — calling him “very blunt and trustworthy” — Biden, then a Delaware senator, disagreed, saying he didn’t trust Putin.
Biden, who has focused on foreign policy throughout his career and chaired the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, placed a high value on his intuition and assessment when assessing foreign leaders and the environment. During his presidential campaign, he often talked about how many foreign leaders he met in person, such as his long trip with Chinese President Xi Jinping.
While Biden’s reference to “doomsday” was his most vivid warning yet, the president has been warning about Putin’s actions in Ukraine for weeks, including his sham referendums on four Ukrainian territories and then annexing them. In a speech to the United Nations General Assembly last month, Biden went straight to the referendum and the nuclear threat, saying Moscow’s “shameless” forcible invasion of its neighbor violated the heart of the United Nations Charter.
“Just today, President Putin publicly threatened Europe with a reckless disregard for the responsibility of the non-proliferation regime,” Biden said. “A nuclear war cannot be won. And it must not be fought.”
Putin has threatened to use nuclear weapons since the conflict began in February, but officials said they had long recognized that the threat of such attacks would increase if Putin’s military position in Ukraine was threatened. In recent weeks, Ukrainian forces have launched a counteroffensive and have made significant strides on the battlefield.
But U.S. officials took pains to stress Friday that nothing they have seen on the ground in recent days has prompted them to expect a possible nuclear strike anytime soon.
“We have been doing contingency planning for various scenarios throughout the conflict,” said a senior State Department official. “But I haven’t seen a reason to adjust our strategic nuclear posture.”
“We do not see any reason to adjust our nuclear posture, nor do we see any indication that Russia is preparing to use weapons immediately,” added Vedant Patel, a deputy spokeswoman for the State Department.
Other senior U.S. officials said they believed any movement of Russian nuclear warheads would not only be detected through various monitoring methods, but would require detectable internal coordination and could be observed in real time by U.S. surveillance.
Still, some officials admit that these methods are never 100 percent certain.
Asked on Sunday whether the U.S. would actively participate in the war if Putin used nuclear weapons, national security adviser Jack Sullivan told CNN, “I said before that we have an opportunity to communicate directly to Russia the set of consequences of using nuclear weapons. Nuclear weapons and all kinds of actions that the U.S. is going to take. I’ve said before that we’re not going to publicly wire these things.”
Some leaders said Friday that Biden’s remarks were unnecessarily provocative. French President Emmanuel Macron said “we must proceed with caution” on issues such as nuclear weapons.
Jeffrey Lewis, a nuclear weapons expert at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies in Monterey, also questioned Biden’s tone, saying it would be better for U.S. officials to make limited, sober statements about Putin’s nuclear threat.
“When you go into this ‘doomsday’ and ‘World War III’ language as an official, I think you’re raising anxiety without really communicating the threat of deterrence,” Lewis said. “The White House should be communicating at this time. The main message is strength and confidence.”
However, he added that even if the White House’s message is flawless, Putin will always misjudge. “Even if they did well, he could have misread them because he had done it with Zelensky,” Lewis said.
Other European officials have pointed to Putin as unpredictable and dangerous, saying Russia’s losses on the battlefield are creating a pressure he has rarely faced before. For months, the war didn’t go as planned for Putin, who took more outrageous and far-reaching steps to try to stem his losses.
After the defeat in Kyiv, Russian troops withdrew from the Ukrainian capital in early April and refocused on capturing more territory in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions of eastern Ukraine, the Donbas region.
The reorganization turned the conflict into more of a traditional artillery battle. Russian troops captured a series of new towns in June and July, much to the dismay of Ukrainian forces, which found themselves overwhelmed by Russian long-range artillery.
But the U.S. and other European allies have equipped the Ukrainians with more advanced weapons, including the U.S.-made High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS), and found ways to alleviate some ammunition shortages, helping to level the playing field.
By the time Kyiv launched a counteroffensive in late August, Putin’s forces had already suffered heavy losses and were short of personnel to defend such a vast territory. Russia’s frontline defenses in the Kharkiv region quickly collapsed and Ukrainian forces quickly recaptured thousands of square miles, throwing Moscow off balance.
As the Ukrainian military has advanced further in recent weeks, Putin has made a move that U.S. intelligence officials have said he would avoid at all costs: ordering a partial military mobilization of up to 300,000 reservists. Putin has been reluctant to act sooner because he realizes it could hamper domestic support for the war, and since the announcement, many Russian men have tried to flee the country to avoid conscription.
At the same time, Putin brought forward the timetable for the fake referendum and annexation, declaring that the people living in the annexed area will “always be our citizens” and warning that the land now belongs to Russia and will be like any other part of the country.
These urgent – some say desperate – actions form the backdrop for Putin’s escalation of his nuclear threat. Some analysts say the Russian president may see the threats as a way to make the United States and Europe think twice about moving Ukraine far enough to provoke the Kremlin to use weapons of mass destruction.
“If the territorial integrity of our country is threatened, we will undoubtedly use all available means to protect Russia and our people,” Putin said on September 9. 21. “This is not bluff.”
Still, Ukrainian forces have continued to advance on territory that Putin now claims belongs to Russia. Putin delivered a fiery speech on Friday at a ceremony to formally annex Ukrainian territory, warning that the United States “set a precedent” when it used nuclear weapons against Japan in 1945.
“President Biden has a good grasp of Putin and understands Putin’s capabilities,” Kendall-Taylor said. “Unlike many Western leaders, he knows him very well, which makes this moment all the more serious in his eyes.”
John Hudson contributed to this report.