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Manchester Evening News
Manchester Evening News
National
Kieran Isgin

Joe Biden warns nuclear risk is at it's highest since Cuban Missile Crisis over tensions in Ukraine

US President Joe Biden warned that the risk of a nuclear threat has reached its highest point since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, following harrowing threats from Vladimir Putin.

Mr Biden said the Russian President should be taken seriously when speaking of using tactical nuclear weapons in response to his difficulty in invading Ukraine. Similarly, the EU has also warned that Putin's nuclear threats are no laughing matter.

Despite this, the US National Security Adviser, Jake Sullivan, tried to quell fears of nuclear war last week after he said the US has seen zero signs that Russia is preparing to fire off any nuclear weapons. It comes after Ukrainian forces took back territory previously occupied by Russia.

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Mr Biden told his fellow Democratic Party members: "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. We have not faced the prospect of Armageddon since Kennedy and the Cuban Missile Crisis."

The missile crisis the President was referring to happened in 1962 when the American and Soviet tensions were at their highest. At the time, it was believed that President John F Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev were extremely close to enacting a battle with nuclear weapons after Russian deployed them in Cuba.

Last Friday, Mr Putin warned that the US had created a "precedent" when it used nuclear weapons against Japan near the end of World War Two while hinting that he will protect Russian territory by any means available to him.

Earlier this morning, Russian foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, said that Volodymyr Zelenskiy's comments about Nato making "preventive strikes" proved that Russia needed to carry out "special military operations" within Ukraine's borders.

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