Biden’s ‘Armageddon’ nuclear warning builds on increasing worries about a desperate Putin

But one longtime U.S. defense and intelligence official, Elbridge Colby, said Putin’s longstanding preoccupation with building up Russia’s nuclear capabilities, combined with his current predicament in Ukraine, “leads me to think that it is a serious possibility” that he could detonate some kind of nuclear device, most likely in a battlefield setting.

“I’ve been struck that the Russians have put a lot of money and effort into overhauling their nuclear forces and modernizing them,” said Colby, a former deputy assistant Secretary of Defense for Strategy and Force Development. In 2017 and 2018, he served as the Pentagon’s co-lead for the development of the U.S. National Defense Strategy.

USA Today