President Joe Biden said on Monday that Americans do not need to be worried about a nuclear war, after Russian President Vladimir Putin declared Sunday that he was putting his nuclear forces on high alert.
Asked by reporters as he was leaving a Black History Month event at the White House if Americans should be concerned, Biden responded: “No.”
Over the weekend, Biden administration officials said that Putin’s choice to put deterrence forces on alert was unnecessary and escalatory, and said that the Russian leader was not under any threat from the U.S., NATO or Ukraine.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki told ABC News on Sunday that Putin was “manufacturing threats that don’t exist in order to justify further aggression.”
