Scott Ritter on US Withdrawal from Disarmament Treaties with Russia

Bruce Gagnon / Space Alert

(May 20, 2022) — Our guest this time is Scott Ritter, former United States Marine Corps intelligence officer. He also served with the United Nations implementing arms control treaties.

We thank Scott for coming on Space Alert and we thank GN board member Will Griffin for doing all the tech work to make this show happen.

These are some of the questions that I placed before Scott.

• Soon after the 2003 US-initiated ‘Shock and Awe’ military attack in Iraq I was watching C-SPAN one evening. The speaker at a big event (loaded with Pentagon and CIA brass) was then-Naval War College professor Thomas Barnett. He spoke about his new book called ‘The Pentagon’s New Map’.
  During his talk, Barnett said the US would not ‘do treaties’ anymore. In recent years, we’ve seen the US withdraw from the ABM and INF treaties. Why is the US moving away from ‘Arms control’ — particularly with Russia and China?

• The ABM Treaty was a 1972 arms control treaty between the US and the former Soviet Union on the limitation of the anti-ballistic missile (ABM) systems used in defending against ballistic missile-delivered nuclear weapons. Talk a bit about the treaty and why George W. Bush pulled the US out of it.

• The INF Treaty was an arms control treaty between the US and the Soviet Union. Ronald Reagan and Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev signed the treaty in 1987. The treaty in part was created due to huge international protests against US and Soviet nuclear missile deployments in Europe during the early 1980’s. Talk about the treaty and what happened to it.

• Today the US has built two missile launch facilities called ‘Aegis Ashore’ in Romania and Poland that can fire so-called ‘missile defense’ systems (the shield after a Pentagon first-strike attack) or nuclear-capable cruise missiles. Isn’t this a Cuban missile crisis in reverse for Russia?

You can watch this interview here.

Bruce Gagnon is the Founder and Coordinator of the Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space.