05/14/09 – Scott Ritter – The Scott Horton Show

All right, everybody, welcome back to the show, Anti-War Radio on Chaos 95.9 FM in Austin, Texas.
We're streaming live worldwide on the internet at chaosradioaustin.org and at antiwar.com slash radio.
And introducing our first guest and welcoming back to the show, it's Scott Ritter, former U.S. Marine and U.N. weapons inspector.
He writes regularly at Truthdig.
He's the author of Endgame, Iraq Confidential, Target Iran, Waging Peace, and the new one, ready to come out here pretty soon, On Dangerous Ground, Following the Path of America's Failed Arms Control Policy.
Welcome back to the show, Scott.
How are you?
I'm doing good.
Thanks.
Thanks for having me.
Well, it's very good to talk to you again.
And I found myself sitting around wondering, I wonder what Scott Ritter thinks of America's well, Obama's Iran policy and the way things are shaping up in terms of Israel and America's relationship with each other and with that country since the dawn of the Obama era.
What do you think?
Well, I mean, look, the bottom line is that the United States and Israel have very close links and will continue to maintain very close links.
I don't see any change in that fundamental proposition, but I think there is a big difference between the approach taken by the Obama administration and that which was taken by the Bush administration before it in terms of who's going to take the lead in terms of defining this relationship.
You know, Israel was very successful in interposing its policy objectives vis-a-vis Iran and the Middle East as a whole on the foreign policy of the United States during the Bush administration.
And we see the Obama administration clearly making an effort, and not necessarily an absolutely successful effort, but an effort to deviate away from some of the more hardline policies that had been embraced by the Bush administration.
And this includes the nature of the relationship between the United States and Iran.
And I think we've seen that Obama, in the prelude, in the buildup to his meeting with Prime Minister Netanyahu, has let it be known that we will not tolerate an Israeli preemptive strike against Iran, that that is not something that the United States wants to occur, and it's not in Israel's best interest to head down that path.
And so, you know, I'm sort of optimistic that we are going to see a shift in terms of American national interests taking the lead, and, you know, when they coincide with Israeli national interests, so be it.
But the day and age of Israel calling the shots in an absolute manner, I think, is over, at least for the time being.
Well, that's sure nice to hear.
I guess, you know, Joe Biden, the Vice President, used the most explicit language and said the policy is no longer regime change.
I mean, basically, not all options are on the table.
Yeah, and that is a tremendous break, and again, it's one that's caused Israel, you know, no small amount of concern.
At least, when I say Israel, I don't like to, you know, get everybody wrapped up in that term.
You know, this is the right-wing element of the Israeli body politic, no end of concern.
They have said for some time now, predating the 2003 Iraq War, that the theocracy in Iran is the number-one threat facing the Israeli state, and that what needs to occur is that that theocracy needs to be removed from power.
And the Bush administration had bought into that, the notion as part of their overall policy of, you know, global dominance in a post-Cold War environment.
The Bush administration had bought into, you know, the concept of regional transformation inclusive of regime change, and we see now the Obama administration recognizing the reality that that is not sound policy, and that is not the direction that the United States needs to be heading in.
The Obama administration seems to be looking down the road toward, you know, national elections in Iran.
If you want regime change, if you want Ahmadinejad removed, the best way to do this is to foster an environment where moderate voices inside Iran are empowered politically, and Ahmadinejad and his conservatives get voted out of office.
This is the direction I think the Obama administration is heading.
It'll be far easier to deal with a moderate Iranian government in terms of redefining U.S.
-Iranian relations than it would be to deal with a very conservative Iranian government that would emerge in a post-military confrontation, because I don't think anybody honestly believes that military action, either initiated by Israel or initiated by the United States, would succeed in removing the Iranian regime from power.
It might retard a nuclear program, but it will not remove the Iranians from power, and all it will do is guarantee that the anti-Western, anti-Israeli, anti-American elements further entrench themselves.
And I think there's a lot of wisdom right now in Washington, D.C.
It's not perfect.
There's a lot to pick on in terms of the fringes, but the general direction that the Obama administration seems to be heading vis-à-vis Iran is sound.
Well, you know, it's interesting.
For years now, we've been talking about this issue, and there's something in the news about their nuclear program, and issues this way and that, all the time, and I really am starting to feel like the boy who cried wolf, and the idea that, you know, I'm starting to think maybe Dick Cheney is just playing all of us in the anti-Iran war movement all along, that he never meant to do any of this, and, you know, it's all for nothing.
But then, I'm reading the Jerusalem Post, and as you mentioned, Barack Obama has sent an official message to Benjamin Netanyahu saying, hey, you better not start a war, and surprise me with some war.
And I'm also reading here the IAF is practicing MiG-29 F-16 dogfights over the Mediterranean Sea somewhere, or something, and, you know, the more I read the Israeli press, the more it seems like they believe that there's some kind of terrible red line that's about to be crossed, and if we don't bomb them now, then we won't be able to bomb them later, and then where will we be?
Look, the Israelis have always had a very, again, the right-wing element of Israel, and even the moderate wing has had little tolerance for Iran's nuclear ambitions.
Iran, I believe correctly so, has stated that it is an ambition that has manifested itself solely in the realm of atomic energy, but the problem is the Iranians have chosen to go down the path of having an indigenous enrichment capability that uses the same technology that one would use if you wanted to create high levels of enriched uranium for a nuclear weapons program.
From the Israeli perspective, that is a red line.
That line has been crossed.
I mean, Israel for some time now has said that they will not tolerate Iran perfecting that technology.
Well, that technology has been perfected.
Iran has it.
It's now the Israelis are left in a very difficult situation, having articulated a very hard line.
You know, now the question is, you know, do they need to act?
Under the Bush administration, the Israeli government actually believed that if they initiated a strike, because I will say again, Israel cannot initiate and sustain a conventional military assault on Iran that will successfully retard the Iranian nuclear program.
Israel simply does not have the military capability to do this mission.
They can initiate, but that's it.
They'll blow all their effort in one shot.
They don't have an air force big enough.
They don't have logistic support capabilities to sustain this.
Iran is a huge country.
These targets are spread all over the place, and Iran, unlike Iraq, has not suffered from economic sanctions.
It's retarded.
It's military capability.
Iran has depth.
Iran has capabilities.
Iran can strike back.
Israel can't do this on its own.
Under the Bush administration, Israel was working with the office of the vice president and other elements under the precept of a joint effort, maybe Israel initiating the United States finishing the job.
That's no longer on the table, though the Obama administration is clearly stating that this is not the direction we want to head.
What Israel is doing right now with its exercises is basically flexing muscle for domestic consumption, because again, even though Obama is looking at these exercises and is somewhat concerned and has articulated his concern, the fact of the matter is Israel can't do this without the United States.
Maybe Israel believes that if they initiate the attack, the United States will have no choice but to come to Israel's assistance.
I hope Obama's sending the signal that that's not the case.
If you initiate this attack, that doesn't necessarily mean that we're getting dragged into this conflict, and then that'll create a world of hurt for Israel as well.
I think this is a lot of bluster on the part of Israel.
It's a very dangerous game, because there are some hard-line elements.
I don't think anybody will sit there and say that Lieberman or Netanyahu are not incapable of irrational thought.
They have both articulated policy stances vis-à-vis Iran and other Middle Eastern nations that border on the irrational, and so we can't be guaranteed that Israel will behave in a totally rational manner.
But the Obama administration, I think, is putting the markers on the table that Israel shouldn't have any false hopes that they can drag America into an Israeli-initiated conflict with Iran.
Well now, I know you're a veteran of the Marine Corps and a very America-first, patriotic kind of guy and all that.
You don't carry a lot of truck for the ayatollahs, clearly.
What is your best assessment of the Iranian nuclear program?
Are they working toward a day, one day, where they'll withdraw from the Non-Proliferation Treaty and go ahead and thumb their noses and start making nuclear weapons, or do you really believe they have no intent to do so?
Well, you know, I'm of the old Ronald Reagan School of Arms Control Trust, but verify, I began my arms control work under the Reagan administration, and look, the bottom line is we need to be moving in a direction that de-emphasizes weapons of mass destruction, nuclear weapons, chemical weapons, etc., and strengthens non-proliferation regimes.
Right now we have a Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which Iran is a signatory of, that under its Article 4 allows signatory nations to have a uranium enrichment program so long as that program is dedicated for peaceful purposes, energy purposes, and is subjected to stringent monitoring by the International Atomic Energy Agency.
Right now all those conditions are being met.
I believe that if this Non-Proliferation Treaty is to have any meaning, any viability, then we have to adhere to it, strictly.
We can't have exceptions, we can't have cut-outs.
Right now Iran is doing that which it says there's no evidence that Iran is pursuing a nuclear weapons program.
You know, it's hard to judge intent, but I will tell you that the religious leaders of the theocracy that is Iran have said that nuclear weapons and Islam are incompatible concepts, that it's not, you know, that's not something Iran is going to do.
I'm willing to take that at face value, backed up by a strong verification regime, and that's what we have right now.
I'd like to see it strengthened, but you know, I am not someone who believes that the Iranians are lying.
When one takes a look at Iran and what its needs are, there is a need for an alternative energy source.
They claim that nuclear energy is that alternative source.
It makes no sense for Iran, a nation that, you know, very much wants to interface with the Western world, at least economically, to further isolate itself by building a nuclear weapons capability that will bring with it no security whatsoever, only invite Iran's destruction.
Having said that, I also believe in self-fulfilling prophecies, and when people continue to shout at the top of their lungs that Iran is pursuing a nuclear weapons program, therefore the only policy direction that makes sense is to isolate Iran and further put pressure on Iran, even to militarily attack Iran, if this happens, you may find a situation where Iran does in fact shift gears and make the determination that the only true defense that they can have is the development of a nuclear deterrent, and you might see them reconfigure their program.
And then everybody will say, aha, I told you all along that's what the Iranians were up to.
And if that's what they're up to right now, I do believe with sound policy we can work with the Iranians to ensure that we have a future that does not include Iran as a nuclear weapons power state.
But if we continue to head down the path of isolating Iran and alienating Iran, one can never tell what policy decisions the Iranian government might be compelled to make.
Well, you know, it's interesting.
It sounds like as much dissent is kind of built into your argument there, you're basically saying exactly what the National Intelligence Estimate of 2007, November 2007, says and what the Director of Intelligence, Admiral Blair, testified under cross-examination by John McCain in the Imperial Senate just a couple months ago, right?
That they have not decided at this point to begin making nuclear weapons.
They're still in a position where they could go either way.
We don't have any evidence whatsoever that Iran is pursuing a nuclear weapons program.
None whatsoever.
All the data sets that are brought together consist of rhetoric from concerned elements in the United States and Israel, but when it comes time to put the facts on the table, the bottom line is there are no facts that point to Iran pursuing a nuclear weapons program.
And void of that, we really have no axe to grind with Iran.
So, you know, one of the problems I do have with the 2007 estimate is they talk about intent, and there continues to be this notion that although there is no active nuclear weapons program ongoing today, that Iran somehow, A, intended in the past to have nuclear weapons, and B, intends to get that capability sometime in the future.
And again, this intent cannot be quantified with fact.
It's purely speculation on the part of those who are inclined to, you know, impart any sort of bad intent on the part of the Iranian government.
I don't believe the Iranians ever intended to acquire nuclear weapons, and I don't believe they intend to acquire nuclear weapons today.
That doesn't mean that sometime down the road they can't change their minds.
And again, if we embark on policies that put pressure on Iran, you know, we head down the path of a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Well now, here's the thing.
Obama has said, okay, let's talk.
And what the Bush administration, of course, said was, you bow down to every one of our demands and then we'll sit at a table with you if you're lucky.
And so Obama's clearly, you know, making steps in the right direction here, but I was reading on Robert Dreyfuss' blog that Nicholas Burns, who's one of the very high-level State Department weenies in charge of this stuff, has said that he wants to put a two-month fuse on negotiations.
Everything better be resolved in two months or else we'll just give up.
And actually, when I read that, the first thing I thought of was your article back from 2005, where you said, this is not Plan A, Plan B, Plan C. This is Step 1, 2, and 3.
And if you set up negotiations that are made to fail, and the ultimatum, I don't believe, has changed, Scott, from you're not allowed to enrich uranium on your own soil, period.
You have to import it from somebody else, I believe is still the ultimatum.
And if the negotiations are designed to fail, then that seems like it just strengthens the position of Avigdor Lieberman, doesn't it?
Absolutely.
And this is where the Obama administration needs to articulate quite clearly what its objectives are.
But this is where Obama runs into a lot of domestic political difficulties, whereas Obama himself seems to have no problem standing up to Lieberman and Netanyahu and saying no to an attack on Iran, we know that the Israeli lobby has very significant political influence in the Congress of the United States of America.
And a dramatic shift, a redirection of U.S. policy on Iran would cause a political backlash, especially at a time when Obama is wrestling with the possibility of troop withdrawals from Iraq, an expansion of the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
He doesn't need to create a third front, so to speak, in terms of political difficulty with Congress.
And so it's very slow going.
And the other thing is, he has inherited a policy that is very difficult to, from the Bush administration and beforehand, it's very difficult to, again, dramatically depart from.
And some policy makers, Nicholas Burns among them, who were very hardline under the Bush administration, continue to be in place, influencing policy under the Obama administration.
So it's a difficult time.
I don't think that the intent of the Obama administration is to have negotiations and deliberately set them up to fail.
However, you know, sometimes neglect brings about failure.
And I think what we're seeing with Iran is this effort to avoid confrontation with the United States Congress and with, you know, pro-Israeli political element here in the United States, the Obama administration isn't being as forceful as it needs to be in terms of saying, you know, guys, let there be no doubt that we're not just going through the motions here, that we actually want these negotiations to succeed.
Putting artificial timelines on any negotiation is a recipe for failure.
Well, and you have a lot more experience in this kind of thing, you know, firsthand or at least kind of secondhand.
Does any kind of negotiation on this level work in two months?
No, absolutely not.
First of all, you can't even get both sides to sit down and agree.
Because remember, we're not talking about a war here.
We're not talking about, you know, a situation where we have a crisis level with all the, you know, the massive amount of attention that both sides will play on this.
What we have is a long-simmering, you know, deep-seated disagreement, and, you know, we haven't been talking with the Iranians.
We don't have a history of diplomatic engagement.
So one of the first things that has to occur is that we have to agree on the forum, the format, the, you know, how we're going to talk, not necessarily what we're going to talk about, but how we're going to talk, who is going to carry out the discussion.
And that's going to take more than two months just to figure that answer out.
Then once we get that, you know, now we have to come up with the mechanisms of, you know, what our objectives are.
You know, how do we move forward here?
You know, we're talking about two years, you know, before we could see anything positive, not two months.
And so, yeah, you put forward an artificial timeline of two months is setting up the failure.
But again, Nick Burns is old school.
He's not the voice of the Obama administration.
And I think you'll find that there will be a correction in that down the road, because nobody who seriously endorses a diplomatic solution could realistically buy into a two-month deadline.
Now, Scott, let's talk about actual nuclear weapons, Russia and America, both armed to the teeth.
There's obviously Israel, India, Pakistan, France and Britain and China.
But the biggest threat to life on this planet is the American and Russian nuclear arsenals.
And in fact, I think paraphrasing Pat Buchanan, there is no issue of more importance anywhere in the whole world as far as quantifying importance than disarming America and Russia's nuclear arsenals.
And yet, as you've written about at Truthdig, we seem to be continuing down the path that Bush and Cheney set us on toward a new Cold War with Russia.
Obama left it kind of mysterious whether he was going to continue the Bush program of putting the anti-missile missiles in Poland and the Czech Republic.
And then he went to the Czech Republic and he gave a speech about how, yes, we're going to rid the world of nuclear weapons, by the way.
And then, you know, later on in the few paragraphs below in the speech, by the way, we're going to continue the Bush policy of putting the anti-missile missiles here in the Czech Republic and in Poland.
To protect you from Iran.
And yet, nobody in the whole world believed that at the time that the Bush administration originally claimed.
Apparently, we're all supposed to pretend that we believe that now, that these anti-missile missiles are for Iran, Scott.
But they're really for Russia, aren't they?
And how good of an idea is that, to put anti-missile missiles in Poland and the Czech Republic?
Well, the interesting thing is, you know, people today look at, you know, these issues such as missile defense and they think it's a fresh issue.
I mean, everybody's talking about, you know, the imperative to get a missile defense system in place to defend against Iran, et cetera.
First of all, one should listen to the Polish prime minister when confronted about the reality of the missile interceptors.
He said, look, they're not for Iran.
They never were for Iran.
They're for Russia.
End of story.
You know, Obama can say what he wants, but the Russians know exactly what this kind of strategic capability can be used for.
There is no Iranian threat that can reach the operational range of these missiles.
So it's an absurdity.
Two, you know, when we talk about a reduction of nuclear arsenals, and that's what the Bush administration talked about, and that's what Obama talked about, you start reducing the levels of missiles in either side, and suddenly a small, you know, theater missile defense system in Europe takes on tremendous strategic importance, because, you know, missile defense makes no sense when you get overwhelmed with thousands of missiles, but you start cutting missiles down to, you know, hundreds of missiles, and now with America, you've got a first-strike capability where we could safely, you know, take out 90, 95% of Russia's strategic nuclear forces in a preemptive strike, not that we would, but the Russians have to operate under the premise of, you know, a retaliatory capability.
Now the United States can knock out 90, 95% of your missiles, and now we have a viable missile defense system in place that can theoretically take care of the few remaining missiles.
Russia no longer has a strategic nuclear deterrent.
This is what we're talking about here.
No one else seems to be talking about this.
This is why this doesn't work, because what's going to happen now is Russia will not allow the strategic balance to be altered in that manner.
You're going to see Russia putting new systems in place.
They're already testing new missiles.
There's going to be a new arms race, which proves the point that we've learned since the 1960s.
Missile defense systems simply don't work.
Have worked, and they never will work, not just technically, but from a strategic point of view.
It makes no sense to talk about putting a missile defense system in place.
You should know this if you studied any history, and this is one of the reasons why I wrote the book on dangerous ground, is it discusses this.
We're not doing this for the first time.
This is actually the fourth time that we've gone through a missile defense debate in this country, and every time the debate ends the same way.
Missile defense systems don't work, and it's folly to go down that path.
You know, the other thing that we need to realize is that there's no such thing as nuclear deterrence.
It's a myth.
It's an absolute myth.
What we have in the United States isn't a policy of nuclear deterrence, but rather a policy of nuclear supremacy.
We have been a nation pursuing nuclear supremacy since we first tested the atomic bomb in New Mexico back in July of 1945, since we dropped it on Japan twice, in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August of 1945.
Since that time, we have made it the policy of the United States that we will not accept nuclear parity, we're not even talking about inferiority, we won't accept parity with anybody.
We don't believe in equality when it comes to nuclear weapons, we believe in nuclear supremacy.
But I learned from the time I was a kid that the reason, probably the number one overriding reason that there was not any kind of nuclear exchange between America and Russia through the Cold War, and you know when I was a kid it was still the Cold War, and why there hadn't been a nuclear war up until then was because of mutually assured destruction, that both sides knew they'd lose their capital city, the politicians themselves would have to die in the thing.
Nobody wants to start a war like that, and so that was why we've had peace.
Well, if we believe in mutually assured destruction, then we'd only need 400 missiles on each side.
400 missiles on each side guarantee that both sides will be destroyed.
But what happens is, because we don't believe in mutually assured destruction, we never have believed in mutually assured destruction, what we want to do is we have to put in more missiles so that not only will we be able to withstand a Russian first strike, but then we can launch a second strike.
We had a policy of prevailing, counter-prevailing, prevailing, where we will win a nuclear war.
People need to understand that.
We don't fight nuclear wars to lose, we don't fight nuclear wars to have mutual suicide.
America plans and fights nuclear wars to win.
We have a war-winning strategy when it comes to nuclear warfare.
That's not mutually assured destruction.
We have been developing missile systems that are so accurate as to give us a legitimate first strike capability.
We possess one today.
We have the ability to launch a decapitating strike, not with 100% certainty, but the ability to eliminate the vast majority of the nuclear arsenals of Russia, et cetera.
The mutually assured destruction was basically, in spite of America's best efforts, there was really nothing they could do about the fact that the Russians figured out how to make three-stage rockets and thermonuclear weapons and so forth and so on.
We figured it out first.
Remember the horse that drove this cart wasn't America responding to a Russian threat.
Certainly not.
It was Russia responding to an American threat.
America had the nuclear weapon.
When policy makers said we should share this with the Russians, share this technology and make sure no one develops these weapons, we said no.
We're going to exploit the fact that we are the only possessors of nuclear weapons.
We're going to exploit that to put pressure on Russia, to contain Russia.
When Russia developed their own atomic capability, we went to the hydrogen bomb.
We upped it up.
They got missiles.
We got more missiles.
There was never a missile gap.
The Russians never had the ability to drown us with missiles.
Once we went down the path of building ballistic missiles, we had the ability to drown the Russians in ballistic missiles.
We had the ability to drown Russia in nuclear-armed bombers.
We have never been in a nuclear-inferior position.
We have always been in a nuclear-supreme position, and that's a posture the United States is not willing, currently, to back away from.
Mutually assured destruction is one of those artificial concepts thrown out there to make people feel good about our nuclear weapons.
If the American people knew the truth about nuclear weapons, how we deploy them and how we plan on employing them, they'd be a lot more frightened.
I'll tell you what, the Russians, in taking a look at this new concept of America as a sole remaining superpower, are very concerned about America's nuclear weapons.
They are building a response, and this makes the world an even more dangerous place.
If we put a ballistic missile defense shield in place in Europe, we now are putting the Russians even more on a hair-trigger in terms of how they respond to an American action.
Once the first nuclear missile flies, they all fly.
There's no such thing as limited nuclear warfare, especially between Russia and the United States.
People talk about it, but the bottom line is the way nuclear war plans are written, once we go into an exchange, it's pretty much an automatic to full-scale general nuclear war.
People need to realize that.
Well, you know, in Andrew Coburn's book, Rumsfeld, his Rise, Fall, and Catastrophic Legacy, talks about how in the 1990s they would do all these continuity of government practice exercises, and Rumsfeld would always get to play the president, and how no matter how the scenario worked out, he would never, ever take an opportunity to limit the war.
He would always end up blowing up the whole world each time, which I guess is pretty standard.
But even if the president wanted to have a limited strike, the bottom line is it just doesn't work that way.
There's talk about cutouts and single options and major options, etc., but the bottom line is once we initiate, it's pretty much an automatic escalation.
It won't be all-out general release of weapons, but the escalation that will occur is fairly automatic and almost impossible to stop.
Yeah.
Well, and especially this is scary when you look at how many times we've almost had an accidental nuclear war with the Russians, when there was no real malevolent intent on either side, but the doomsday machines all started going off.
Well, look, this is why I think we can't just treat Obama's Czechoslovakian speech as sort of a political oddity.
He's the first commander-in-chief that's put the American nuclear arsenal on the table, saying, we need to think about a world free of nuclear weapons, inclusive of the American nuclear arsenal, and I think the anti-war movement especially, but all Americans, indeed the entire world, should put pressure on Obama to follow through on this.
It's going to be a difficult road, but we need to live in a world free of this kind of nuclear weapon suicide pill that's in existence.
Well, he announced during that speech, Scott, didn't he, that this isn't going to happen in any of our lifetimes, and he's only, what, like 42 or something?
I mean, he was basically saying, forget it.
I don't really mean that.
Well, you know, but the thing is, I don't think he wanted to create false expectations, but the bottom line is, it can happen in our lifetimes.
Nuclear weapons were created in the lifetime of people who are alive today.
My parents were alive when the atomic bomb went off.
You know, that's just absurd to say that it's not going to happen in our lifetimes.
It can happen in our lifetimes.
It can happen a lot sooner than Obama thinks, if he had the political courage to make it an issue.
But remember, Obama made this speech void of any pressure placed on him by the American people, by Congress, by the anti-war movement.
Right.
Imagine what would happen if tremendous pressure was placed on him to follow through.
Suddenly he has political capital, because, see, I think he made the statement, it's not going to happen in our lifetime, because he didn't want to engage in that domestic political struggle.
Let's make it a domestic political struggle.
Let's say no more nuclear weapons.
You know, when we take a look at the percentage of the American defense budget that goes into nuclear weapons programs, it's a huge amount of money, and getting rid of nuclear weapons will make America stronger, make America safer, and it'll make America more economically viable.
We have this massive infrastructure dedicated to maintaining and sustaining nuclear weapons.
The brains, the brainpower that goes into that, if you could redirect it, man, who knows what we could do.
But right now we're wasting them on developing the means of global destruction, not on developing the means of global health.
Yeah.
Well, you mentioned before how we've been through this with the missile defense, quote unquote, four times now, and correct me if I'm wrong, but the first time this missile defense pie-in-the-sky, kind of pipe-dream, make-believe garbage is what thwarted Reagan's mission from God, right?
He was like the Blues Brothers, and he thought that God had put him here to get rid of nuclear weapons, but he just could not break his promise to the American people that he would build a missile shield to protect them.
That's right.
I mean, when the history of disarmament is finally told, people go back and take a look at 1986 and Reykjavik, the meeting in Iceland between Reagan and Gorbachev, where both leaders basically looked at each other and said, why don't we get rid of them all, get rid of all nuclear weapons?
This is why Obama's wrong when he says it can't happen in our lifetime.
When the political leaders who possess nuclear weapons make the decision to get rid of them, we can get rid of these weapons.
But the thing that stopped it is that Gorbachev said, look, we're going to get rid of the weapons.
That means you no longer need to have a strategic defense initiative.
You don't need to go down that path.
And because the Russians' concern were, you get rid of nuclear weapons, but you have this missile defense shield in place, what if the United States decides to rearm?
Now Russia, in addition to having to rearm, has to also build a missile defense shield that will be behind the power curve, and the United States could be in a position where we have nuclear weapons and a missile shield, and now we have the goods on Russia.
So Gorbachev said, let's just get rid of that SDI.
Reagan wouldn't.
Now, Gorbachev's mistake, he went back to Russia, or to the Soviet Union, and his advisors told him, look, Andrei Sakharov, the genius physicist who designed the hydrogen bomb, said, it will never work.
You should actually go back to Reagan and say, build it all you want.
He said, it won't work, it can't work, and it will just cost the money.
The Americans will stop this madness.
In any case, let's go down the path of getting rid of nuclear weapons.
The problem is, by the time Gorbachev came to that realization, the hardliners had once again seized control of the reins of policy, and we were in a position where we were talking about arms reductions, not arms elimination.
Wow, that's funny.
Now, if you really think about it, that could be the greatest failure in all of human history there, for that summit to have broken down that way.
Well, especially if events unfold in a very tragic way, and we have a nuclear exchange.
That was an opportunity for the major superpowers to preserve humanity.
And that's the way we have to look at nuclear weapons now.
Nuclear weapons aren't about securing defense.
Nuclear weapons are about destroying humanity.
That's all they're good for.
And there's no reason for us to have it.
It's like being a parent and saying that I have to have cyanide capsules lying around the house.
No, get rid of the cyanide so that your family isn't endangered by it.
Nuclear weapons are a poison for society, for humanity, and we need to get rid of them.
And Obama needs to have more courage than what he exhibited.
Yes, it can be done in our lifetime, and Americans need to realize that and put pressure on Barack Obama to take, yes, we can, to the nuclear front.
Yes, we can get rid of nuclear weapons.
Well, let me ask you this.
I often argue, and it's quite possible you disagree with this, but it seems to me like America could unilaterally disarm and not even necessarily have to make a deal with the Russians, British, Chinese, et cetera, to also disarm.
That we have enough conventional forces to deter if that really is our purpose, which as you point out, it's not.
But we have enough conventional force to flatten the capital city of any power on earth that wants to try to attack the United States, even if they have nukes, and we don't, right?
So couldn't we just go ahead and dismantle all of ours and say, see, now what excuse do you have for your nukes, everybody else?
I would say that that would be an extremely difficult solution to sell publicly.
I believe that if you're going to have...
Well, yeah, I don't really think that I could win out the policy debate that way, but it I think what we can do...
If that's still true anyway, then any kind of half-measure toward that ought to be good enough, or ought to be, you know, right.
What we can do is take your logic and apply it to rogue states.
You see, I believe right now that the problem isn't sitting down with Russia, China, India, Pakistan, Israel, and the others, and saying all of the nuclear powers, you know, we're going to come together and come up with a mechanism to disarm.
The problem is people sit down and go, but what happens if?
For instance, let's say we all got rid of nuclear weapons, and then North Korea does a test of a nuclear device.
Now North Korea is the only nuclear weapons power in the world.
Does that mean the whole world kowtows to North Korea?
Not on your life, because as you said, we have more than enough conventional military power to flatten North Korea and eliminate that state.
We don't need nuclear weapons to handle rogue states.
We wouldn't need a nuclear weapon to handle Iran if it went down the path of a nuclear nation-state.
Our conventional military power is enough to destroy Iran as a nation-state, and everybody knows that.
So this concept that we have to maintain nuclear deterrence against the potential of rogue states or a non-state entity acquiring a nuclear weapon is absurd.
First of all, our possession of nuclear weapons will never deter an al-Qaeda from using a nuclear device if they ever acquired one.
So I think your logic makes sense when we apply it to potential rogue nuclear powers.
We do not need to maintain a nuclear arsenal to protect ourselves from rogue nations down the path.
Our conventional power is more than sufficient to deal with that.
Well, as a worst-case scenario, if the argument is, well, Russia, China, the EU under the control of a new Hitler or something, what about them?
Well, first of all, none of this is going to happen overnight.
Remember that getting rid of nuclear weapons, we don't get rid of the ability to produce nuclear weapons.
But again, that just heads us down the path of legitimizing nuclear weapons.
None of this is going to happen overnight, and I think that if we build not just a mechanism of disarmament, but a mechanism of verification of compliance with nuclear disarmament, we're not going to be taken by surprise that a non-proliferation regime with a sufficient safeguard mechanism in place will give us an early tip-off whether or not a nation is heading in the direction of violating its obligations.
And then, it's not just the United States that needs to step up to the plate, but now we're talking about a global coalition of nations that can intercede economically, politically, militarily, if necessary, again, in a non-nuclear fashion.
If a new Hitler emerged in Europe, I don't think for a second that the United States and Russia would just sit by and do nothing.
I don't think they're ever going to happen in Europe.
The concept of a unified Europe operating in that fashion is absurd.
Well, yeah, I was trying to come up with the absurdity, because, you know, usually that's what you've got to argue with, is the right-wing war party, and their arguments don't really have to make sense very much, they just have to sound like something.
No, I agree, I agree totally.
But the bottom line is, if you build a sufficient, you know, the problem is there's people out there that don't have confidence in a verification regime.
The fact is, you know, technically, it's very easy to build a verification regime that's almost foolproof.
The problem isn't the technical aspects of it, the problem is the political aspects of it, to have people willing to trust such a regime.
And you're right, hardliners, you know, people on the political right are not inclined to be trustful of verification regimes.
They would prefer that the United States maintain its nuclear supremacy, because they view that as the safe direction.
It's actually a direction of national suicide, but they don't see it that way.
All right everybody, that's Scott Ritter, he's a former U.S. Marine Intelligence Officer and U.N.
Weapons Inspector.
He's the author of Endgame, Iraq Confidential, Target Iran, Waging Peace, and the new one coming out is On Dangerous Ground, Following the Path of America's Failed Arms Control Policy.
You can find what he writes quite often at truthdig.com.
Thanks so much for your time on the show today, Scott.
Thank you.