Biden says Putin's nuclear threat brings risk of "Armageddon"

US President Joe Biden has said that Russian President Vladimir Putin's threat to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine has brought the world closer to "Armageddon" than at any time since the Cold-War Cuban Missile Crisis.

Biden said the prospect of defeat could make Putin desperate enough to use nuclear weapons, the biggest risk since U.S. President John Kennedy and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev faced off over missiles in Cuba in 1962, Reuters reported on October 7.

"We have not faced the prospect of Armageddon since Kennedy and the Cuban missile crisis," Biden said in New York. "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."

Putin was "not joking when he talks about the potential use of tactical nuclear weapons or biological or chemical weapons, because his military is, you might say, is significantly underperforming," Biden said.

Concern so far has been over the prospect of Russia deploying a so-called "tactical" nuclear weapon - a short-range device for use on the battlefield - rather than the "strategic" weapons on long-range missiles that Washington and Moscow have stockpiled since the Cold War.

But Biden suggested it made little difference: "I don't think there's any such thing as the ability to easily (use) a tactical nuclear weapon and not end up with Armageddon."