Robert F Kennedy has warned that the neocon-backed candidate Kamala Harris would trigger an atomic conflict between the US and Russia.

In his latest campaign video he argues that supporters of Harris in the US presidential election would effectively be voting for a global thermonuclear war.

RT reports: Kennedy, a long-time Democrat who ran against President Joe Biden in the party primaries, endorsed Republican candidate Donald Trump in August. Harris, who was elevated to the nomination after the Democrats pressured Biden to drop out of the race, was recently endorsed by former Republican VP Dick Cheney.

“A vote today for Kamala Harris is a vote for Dick Cheney, who lied to get a war started, in which more than a million people died,” Kennedy said in a video message released on Thursday.

Cheney, he explained, was a leading “neoconservative” during the presidency of George W. Bush (2001-2009), and the “driving force” of the unprovoked US invasion of Iraq in 2003, that claimed the lives of around a million Iraqis and some 4,800 American and allied troops.

The US claimed the invasion was a pre-emptive defense against Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (WMD), but “there were no WMDs,” Kennedy said. “It was all a neocon lie.”

Nor was it the first time that a portion of the US establishment lied to get a war, RFK Jr. argued. He pointed to President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s 1961 warning about the “military-industrial complex” seeking a conflict with the Soviet Union. His uncle, President John F. Kennedy, pushed back on proposals to launch a surprise nuclear attack on the USSR or shoot down a civilian airliner as a pretext for invading Cuba.

After the assassination of JFK, the US military-intelligence establishment faked an attack in the Gulf of Tonkin to justify a war in Vietnam, he said.

“I’m concerned that today not only do we have a faction of our military and intelligence establishments that desire war, they want a war right now with Russia, over Ukraine,” Kennedy said.

Noting that Russia has more nuclear weapons than the US, and in some cases better ones, RFK Jr. that the US had come close to war just weeks ago, when Biden almost gave permission to Ukraine to use American missiles for long distance strikes into Russia, and Moscow responded by updating its nuclear doctrine.