The word carries with it a strong image: Armageddon, the final and apocalyptic battle between good and evil which will give a definitive victory to one and a disastrous defeat to the other.
On Thursday evening, in a rare statement by a US president, Joe Biden warned that thinly veiled threats over Moscow’s use of nuclear weapons in the ongoing Russian invasion war in Ukraine are now driving the risk of nuclear war on a higher level than during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962.
‘We haven’t faced the prospect of Armageddon since Kennedy and the Cuban Missile Crisis,’ Biden tells Democratic Party donors gathered in New York at fundraiser . “We are trying to figure out what Putin’s way out is going to be. How can he get away with it? How can he position himself so that he neither loses face nor loses a significant portion of his power? [en Russie] ? »
And to add: “There is a guy I know quite well, said Mr. Biden about his Russian counterpart. He is not joking when he talks about the potential use of tactical nuclear weapons or biological or chemical weapons because his military is, one might say, grossly underperforming. »
Since the rise in tension between Moscow and Washington against the background of Soviet nuclear missiles installed on Cuban territory in the fall of 1962 by Nikita Khrushchev and pointing towards the United States, few American presidents have spoken with a direct and striking tone. the possibility of Armageddon.
Since early September, the Ukrainian army’s gradual recovery of territories occupied by Russia has raised the nuclear threat that Vladimir Putin has posed to this conflict since the start of his war of invasion. Last week, the strongman of the Kremlin indicated that he would use “all available means” to defend Russian territory, also referring to the four regions of Ukraine that Russia has just unilaterally annexed, at the end of referendums with Stalinist results widely denounced by the international community.
In February, Putin ordered his army to put his country’s nuclear forces on alert.
Since then, Washington has been analyzing the scenarios in which the Russian president could use a tactical nuclear weapon to compensate for the obvious setbacks of his troops on a battlefield that has thwarted his forecasts and his territorial ambitions. But American military strategists put this risk into perspective by considering it, at present, as low.
On Friday, the White House tempered the remarks of its first occupant by indicating that it had “no reason to modify [sa] own nuclear posture” and clarified that she had “nor any indications that Russia is preparing to use nuclear weapons in an imminent manner”, said the spokeswoman for the American executive headquarters, Karine Jean-Pierre , the day after Joe Biden’s disturbing statements.
Divergent visions at the top?
Strangely, these statements followed the broadcast Thursday, earlier in the day, by the Russian Foreign Ministry, of a video in which a spokesperson bluntly minimizes the Russian nuclear threats yet made by Vladimir Putin, who clarified that this was not “a bluff”. “The Russian Federation is fully committed to the principle of the inadmissibility of nuclear war,” explains Maria Zakharova. We have said it over and over again. There can be no winners in such a war. We should never trigger it. »
This statement may illustrate a certain division that would be taking hold at the top of the Russian state, forced to deal for more than seven months with the failure of a “lightning war” launched against Ukraine, undermining the image of the Russian army as the head of the Kremlin.
By recalling the Russian doctrine on nuclear weapons by his ministry, Sergei Lavrov, head of Russian diplomacy and close to Putin, could thus seek to initiate a strategic detachment from the president with a view to a process of replacement at the summit of the state that a defeat of Russia on Ukrainian territory could trigger.
Promoting this doctrine puts Lavrov at odds with Putin, who, the Institute for the Study of War (ISW), an analysis group with a presence in Washington, reminded us a few days ago, is far from having done so ” a decisive factor” in the ongoing conflict, he “who micromanages this war down to the operational level”.
In late September, Mr. Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, did not speak about Armageddon, but claimed that any use of nuclear weapons would have “catastrophic consequences” for Russia, even adding that ” explained” how America and the world would react to any detonation during private communications with counterparts and senior Russian government officials. He did not detail these exchanges.
Since the beginning of the conflict, the movements of material on the 47 storage sites known on Russian territory by the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research (UNIDIR) have been widely scrutinized by Western satellites, and those For the moment, they have not detected any changes that could foretell an imminent use of nuclear weapons by the Kremlin.
“I am convinced that the United States would see in advance any Russian preparations to use nuclear weapons,” summarized Mark Cancian, a former official in the United States Departments of Defense and Energy and expert at the Center for Washington International Strategic Studies, quoted by Agence France-Presse.
A use which, for the moment, seems above all to strike the collective imagination, an imagination that Putin has been trying for months to feed with his sensational declarations, in order to maintain an escalation of which he is still the only one to know the outcome.