Senior Conservative MPs stated the menace ought to be taken severely.
Sir Iain Duncan Smith, the previous Tory chief who’s a candidate to be the subsequent chair of the overseas affairs choose committee, advised The Telegraph: “He wouldn’t be saying this if he hadn’t been authorised by Putin.”
He stated that Russian navy techniques had all the time thought of nuclear weapons to be “battle combating weapons, whereas within the West we see them solely as weapons of escalation and due to this fact we wouldn’t use them”.
“I would not underestimate the likelihood that he might use these weapons, that’s not simply an empty menace,” he stated, including that Putin was “making an attempt to up the stakes” to “get the West to again down”.
He famous that in response, the West should “double down” on its navy and financial assist to Ukraine.
“The one option to take care of that is to face as much as him and his surrogate and say, ‘should you use these weapons, we is not going to again down’,” he stated.
Sir Iain added that the West also needs to clarify that anybody concerned in deploying nuclear weapons could be pursued by “the swords of justice”.
