President Joe Biden’s spoken words frequently get him into hot water with friend and foe alike. He’s a random word generator, prompting eye rolls and head shakes whenever he opens his mouth.

Standard fare for Biden is commentary that plays to his base and infuriates his opponents — but is often too outlandish to take seriously. He routinely denounces his political adversaries as racists, threats to democracy, and even “semi-fascist.” We get it, he’s on the other side — but surely he doesn’t believe his own rhetoric.

By contrast, his remarks at a Democrat fundraiser last week regarding Vladimir Putin’s implied threat to deploy nuclear weapons in Ukraine struck me as refreshingly genuine.

And truly frightening.

Biden’s unscripted, meandering observations accurately summarized the current situation: Putin is backed into a corner, losing his self-initiated war with Ukraine; his political power is in peril; and he’s reminding the world of the deadly arsenal at his disposal. Biden then expressed his own view that “I don’t think there’s any such thing as an ability to easily [use] a tactical nuclear weapon and not end up with Armageddon.”

Biden’s use of the “A” word evoked legitimate criticism from all sides. He projected weakness, not strength, in effect ceding the upper hand to Putin in the ongoing nuclear stalemate. His remarks were impolitic at best, a murky message delivered at the wrong venue.

But in substance, Biden was right. The threat posed by Putin is very real. Perhaps unwittingly, Biden put his finger on the monumental challenge of preventing nuclear war in an arena of nuclear-armed bullies — and Putin is the biggest bully and has the largest nuclear arsenal on the planet.

For all the buzz about the existential threat of climate change, that worry pales in comparison to the raw destructive power of the world’s thousands of nuclear weapons, vastly more powerful than the primitive nuclear peashooters that leveled Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end WWII.

For almost eight decades, the world’s nuclear powers have been facing one another in an uneasy standoff — an OK Corral where each gunslinger eyes the other warily, but (so far) does not draw his weapon.

In 1985, Presidents Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev together confronted that stark reality, declaring (in the preface to the START treaty) that “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.” Nevertheless, nearly 40 years later, the combined arsenals of these two nations include approximately 11,000 nuclear warheads. Neither side can find a way to put the nuclear genie back in the bottle, so the world is condemned to maintain war chests powerful enough to destroy the planet and hope no one ever uses them.

What are the chances that Putin shares his predecessors’ restraint? Given Putin’s wanton barbarity in Ukraine, I’d suggest zero. And don’t forget China’s designs on Taiwan and North Korea’s provocative ICBM tests — both are already taking advantage of U.S. preoccupation with Russia, and both are nuclear armed.

As always, the public reaction to a major news story reveals a great deal about our perceived priorities. News of Biden’s Armageddon comment was well covered by the media but seems not to have earned even a mention on the list of issues on the minds of midterm voters. Evidently, nuclear war is of less concern to the public at large than abortion, immigration, the cost of gasoline, or even climate change.

I suspect that’s because modern society has lived with the nuclear menace for far too long. I was not yet two years old when the last nuclear weapon was detonated in wartime — now I’m 78. The potential for Biden’s Armageddon has become a seemingly idle threat, unrealized for decades and therefore easy to ignore.

But whether the threat is visible or not, it is relentless vigilance by our Armed Forces that has kept it at bay for all those years. Letting our guard down now would be an enormous mistake.

The only way to prevent Vladimir Putin (or Xi Jinping, or Kim Jong-un, or anyone else) from breaking the nuclear standoff is to make it absolutely ruinous — suicidal, in fact — for them to do so. The consequences must completely outweigh any conceivable advantage.

If America is to be a credible deterrent on the world stage, our adversaries must recognize our overwhelming military capability and our willingness to use it. That in turn demands single-minded focus on the mission of national defense, with no ambiguity and no distractions. We’re not there yet.

There can be nothing partisan about it. This is the challenge of our time. Period.