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Home » Scott Ritter: How NATO & Russia Came to the Edge of Nuclear War (Transcript)

Scott Ritter: How NATO & Russia Came to the Edge of Nuclear War (Transcript)

Read the full transcript of former chief weapons inspector Scott Ritter’s interview on Greater Eurasia Podcast, August 24, 2026.

EDITOR’S NOTE: In this timely discussion, Professor Glenn Diesen sits down with Scott Ritter—former U.S. Marine Corps intelligence officer, UN weapons inspector, and leading expert on arms control—to examine how NATO and Russia have repeatedly edged toward nuclear confrontation. Drawing on decades of experience, Ritter unpacks the collapse of arms-control treaties, the shift toward “usable” tactical nuclear weapons, and the dangerous escalations seen in Ukraine and beyond. The conversation offers a sobering analysis of why the risk of nuclear war remains higher than many realize—and what must be done to pull back from the brink.

Introduction

GLENN DIESEN (00:00:00 – 00:01:14): Welcome back. We are joined today by Scott Ritter, a US Marine Corps intelligence officer, also a former UN weapons inspector and a prolific author. Thank you for coming back on the program.

You’ve worked professionally in arms control and disarmament since, what, the 1980s? And unlike our political class, I think you still have a healthy fear of nuclear weapons and nuclear war.

Now, I’ve heard the rumours that there are discussions now in Washington about the possibility of using tactical nuclear weapons against Iran. Again, I have to stress rumours, but the premise here is that the conventional war is not going as planned. And well, furthermore, there’s already been attacks on Russia’s nuclear deterrent and early warning radars.

So a lot of the things we wouldn’t have done in the past is now being done, and one could expect the recklessness to only grow when panic sets in in both Ukraine and NATO. So I wanted to ask a very wide question. That is, how close are we actually to a possible nuclear war now?

The End of Arms Control

SCOTT RITTER (00:01:15 – 00:14:16): Well, let’s approach this this way. We no longer have any arms control treaties in place between the United States and Russia. There are no arms control treaties in place at all. Arms control is dead, which means there’s no break. There’s no off-ramp.

One of the key aspects of arms control was the fact that we had nations talking to each other. So there was a certain amount of confidence-building measure taking place, and there were no unknowns, especially on the strategic nature. We understood what the other side had. They understood what we had. We understood our doctrine, our respective doctrines, and we had people who were educated on these things, who understood the danger of nuclear weapons and nuclear war.

When you remove arms control, you replace it with a new mindset that doesn’t speak of containing nuclear power or eliminating nuclear power or reducing nuclear power, controlling nuclear power, but rather singularly focuses on how we can use nuclear power because we have these weapons. There’s no counter to this.

And so you see a tendency therefore for policymakers to, when they do things such as a nuclear posture review, they’re no longer constrained by arms control. In the past, for instance, the United States had to deal with the reality that we were limited to 1,550 deployed strategic nuclear weapons. And so was Russia.

There was a review that was done during the Biden administration while these caps were in place, caps that were mandated by the New START Treaty. The Biden administration had to take a look at how do we deal with a resurgent China, a China that was responding to aggressive nuclear posturing by the United States, in a manner that suggested there could be a preemptive nuclear strike against China.

China responded in a way that would make a preemptive nuclear strike almost impossible by modernizing its strategic nuclear deterrent and dispersing weapons to new silos in western China, et cetera. So the United States had to relook at its nuclear posture, how to maximize the destructive potential of a limited number of nuclear warheads.

Rearming Beyond New START

Now, this treaty no longer exists, so we’re no longer bound by that. There’s not much talk about it, but the reality is the United States is rapidly adding nuclear warheads to its arsenal. Part of the New START Treaty had seen the downsizing of, for instance, the Minuteman III missile from 3 warheads to 1 warhead. We kept a certain number of Minuteman III ready to be uploaded if needed, and now we are uploading them. So we’re increasing our numbers.

We saw the same thing with the Trident missile on the Ohio-class submarine. Had its warheads reduced to a classified number, but let’s call it 6 or 8. And now we’re seeing that some of these are going to be upgraded. You have to be careful because if you put too many warheads on, you affect the range of the weapon, which means that submarines have to get closer to their targets than operational doctrine. It’s complicated, but the point is there’s no more constraints on nuclear war planning.

And therefore, now that we’re in the business of talking about the potential of nuclear conflict, then we speak of, well, what weapons would we like to use or can we use? We know that the United States had previously developed what we call “usable nukes.” That’s a crazy term, but these are low-yield nuclear weapons.

We have the B61 bomb. It’s a gravity bomb that we have stationed in Europe as part of the NATO strategic deterrence, but they’re also part of the US strategic deterrence. And we know that some of these are being modified as we speak to give them greater penetration capability. We have the W76-2, a low-yield nuclear weapon put on the Trident missile, which again gives us a usable nuclear response.

Colby’s Push for Tactical Nuclear Weapons

And this used to be just theoretical, but now we have a situation where Mr. Colby, a senior Defense Department official, is actually redoing the American nuclear posture to include modifications of our implementation guidance so that we will use nuclear weapons or be considering the use of tactical nuclear weapons early on in any major crisis.

One of the reasons is that we found out that our conventional military deterrence is no longer sufficient to deter.