Yet Biden’s remarks, as one official noted, do reflect reality – a reality that may be difficult to grasp due to the combination of a far-off war and a post-Cold War era when nuclear threats have simply disappeared from daily risks. The divergence in tone between Biden and his top national security officials is striking, with the President moving sharply away from the coordinated effort to calmly warn against saber rattling, but not rhetorically escalate anything. There simply isn’t much – if any – precedent in the last six decades of a president so bluntly warning of looming catastrophe. “If there was some new piece of alarming information, it obviously would.” “Our posture hasn’t changed,” one official said of the US preparations. But there was no moment, briefing or new information that Biden was privy to that signaled any actual shift in Russian posture.Īnd the morning after Biden’s comments, administration officials said the US’s nuclear stance has not changed.

The threat has long been high on the minds of the administration’s national security officials, and the battlefield failures have only served to elevate regular discussions and contingency planning about the issue.

One senior administration official said Biden was speaking “frankly” in his remarks at a Democratic fundraiser in New York, reflecting heightened concern based on Putin’s recent nuclear threats. But Biden’s comments – laid out in starker terms than other US officials have used to date – reflected heightened concerns inside his administration about the risk of Russia carrying out a nuclear strike in Ukraine, where Russian forces have recently faced a string of defeats.īiden’s blunt assessment caught several senior US officials by surprise, largely due to that lack of any new intelligence to drive them and the grim language Biden deployed. The US still has seen no evidence that Putin is moving toward using Russia’s nuclear capability, nor is there any intelligence showing he’s decided to do so. President Joe Biden’s stark warning Thursday night that the world faces the highest prospect of nuclear war in 60 years was not based on any new intelligence about Russian President Vladimir Putin’s intentions or changes in Russia’s nuclear posture, multiple US officials told CNN.

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