Scott Ritter: Threat of Nuclear War as the Last Arms Control Treaty Collapsed (Transcript)

We’re giving away too much. We’re not getting enough.

So START was always viewed by the Soviets, then the Russians as sort of a vehicle of bullying, arms control bullying. Why? Well, because we no longer feared Russia. We felt that the Russian strategic nuclear deterrence was weakened. It was still dangerous. We still had to pay attention to it. But we didn’t fear it. We didn’t let it dominate our mind.

The Erosion of the ABM Treaty

And what happens when that happens is that we start thinking outside of the box. For instance, what about Iran? What about North Korea? What about their ballistic missiles? What defenses do we have against a rogue missile attack? And then we begin to talk about building ballistic missile defenses that are in violation of the ABM Treaty.

And when we were notified by the Russians—it was actually when Vladimir Putin came in, now it was Clinton still—that the Russians were like, if you do this, we’re going to—because there was original START. Then there was START II, which was almost ratified, and START III, which was being negotiated. The Russians said, we’re going to pull out the key out of START II. We’re not going to ratify it.

The key thing about START II was it de-MIRVed missiles. You downloaded these missiles that had multiple warheads. Again, part of arms control is, hey, we don’t need multiple warheads because there’s no ballistic missile defense to overwhelm. That’s why we went to MIRVs—missile defense. We need to overwhelm them. No missile defense. We can come down, see how it works, cause and effect.

But the Russians said, well, we may have to put warheads back on. And Colin Powell, the Secretary of State, said, we don’t care. We’re not worried about the Russians. They’re just not—they’re not us. They can do anything they want. It doesn’t impact us. The arrogance of that statement, and that carried over to George W. Bush, who then just did away with the ABM Treaty altogether because we didn’t care.

Vladimir Putin tried to warn everybody, there will be consequences. This is destabilizing. This is not a good thing. But we still viewed Russia as the weaker sister. You know, we didn’t fear them, we didn’t respect them.

New START: Bad Faith from the Beginning

START Treaty continues. It expired in 2009. Bush tried to negotiate a new START Treaty. Couldn’t get it done. Passed it off to Obama. It was interesting, though, because there was going to be a gap between START Treaty ending and New START coming into force. And the Senate said, hey, you can’t have this gap. See, right now we’re comfortable with the Russian nuclear capabilities because we know what they are. We have inspectors on the ground. We exchange data. We have this treaty, and it makes us comfortable. We know what they have, they know what we have, things are calm.

But if you stop the on-site inspections, we don’t know what they have anymore. And suddenly there’s uncertainty comes in and we have to assume the worst and this thing could spiral out of control. So they told the Obama administration to get it done quickly.

So New START came in, but the thing about New START is we didn’t negotiate in good faith. Rose Gottemoeller was the lead American negotiator. Her counterpart was Anatoly Antonov, the former Russian ambassador here to the United States. I had numerous lunches with Ambassador Antonov where we talked about New START, about this process. And he said, you know, the United States started playing games with language.

You know, what it means, for instance, to decommission a B-52 bomber, what it means to decommission a Trident submarine launch tube to get down to the deployed—because we’re dealing with talking about deployed nuclear weapons systems. They launch. And he said it was clear to us when we talked about decommissioning a B-52 that it was permanent, that it’s done. You decommission it, it can’t carry nuclear forever. The same thing with the submarine-launched ballistic missile tubes forever.

What happened is the United States just went into B-52 and cut a couple wires, said they can’t launch nukes. And the Russians are going, but what happens when you connect the wires? Yeah, but we’re not going to. But what—and the problem is, see, we had generals testify for Congress because Congress are going, well, what if the Russians cheat? What if the Russians have a breakout?

We can bring the B-52s back in very short period of time. We can bring the launch tubes back because they weren’t permanently decommissioned. Within months of Russians cheating, we can be right back to where we were. Don’t worry about that. Means the treaty is meaningless. And the Russians were saying this treaty is absolutely meaningless because you’ve admitted that you can reverse this instantaneously. And so already New START was a problem.

The Missile Defense Problem

The other thing is that the Russians said we can’t really talk about strategic arms control because when START Treaty was negotiated, the ABM Treaty was still in place. But now New START is being negotiated. There’s no ABM Treaty. And the Russians are like, you know, guys understand if you build a missile defense, we’re negotiating about strategic arms numbers and you’re building defense. That means our numbers, which are calculated on the premise that we’re not going to have a war and mutually assured destruction, we have to recalculate because we have to assume you’re preparing for a first strike. Then we need retaliatory capability. It changes our mix.

And Gottemoeller said, no, no, no, no, don’t worry about it. Obama told Medvedev, don’t worry about it. It’s just a political thing. You see, we got this thing called Congress and we’re having a hard time getting this New START thing through. So we’re going to get it through and then afterwards we’ll come back and we’ll do ballistic missiles.

They did a joint signing statement and the U.S.—you know, after doing what the Russians said to get this thing—came out afterwards and said, it’s meaningless. The signing statement is meaningless. Anatoly Antonov waited for Gottemoeller to call, as she promised to do. She didn’t. He called her. She said, now we ain’t doing ABM. They lied.

So New START was snake-bit from the very beginning with bad intention on the part of the United States and lies by the United States. But nonetheless, it’s an agreement that has a framework of stability attached to it. That’s why in 2021, when it was expiring, they went ahead and re-signed the five-year extension that the treaty allowed for automatically. But it was assumed at that time that they knew that there was no more extensions allowed, that you’d need a new treaty that would have to be negotiated.

The Death of New START

The Biden administration never made any effort to negotiate because of Ukraine. When Ukraine started, what happened was the European Union denied airspace to Russian aircraft that were sending inspectors to the United States. The United States sent inspectors to Russia. And Russia was like, okay, come on, you get to see everything, blah, blah, blah. When the Russians sent their inspectors, they got blocked.

And Russia turned to the United States and said, this is our treaty. You have to guarantee that our plane—and we went, no, no, that’s between you and Europeans. The Russians said, well, then no inspectors. And that was the end of—and then the United States started talking about the strategic defeat of Russia. And Russia was like, well, the only thing that prevents us from being strategically defeated is our nuclear arsenal. So we’re just not going to play this game. They stopped giving data.

Pretty much the New START Treaty died. 2022, 2023, it stopped functioning, but the caps remained in place and both sides committed to keep those caps in place. It’s interesting, Rose Gottemoeller, as we approach the termination, the expiration of New START, she said, it’s imperative—because we come back to when I was telling you about Nunn-Lugar, the two senators—she said it’s imperative that we have confidence if we’re going to do this extension, this moratorium, one-year moratorium, we have to have confidence in those numbers.

And because there’s been no inspections in two years, we need to re-baseline the inspection. That is just to get the inspectors back in and reconfirm that everything is the way it’s supposed to be so that when the cap comes in, you have a level of confidence that these are good numbers. Well, we didn’t even do that.

The China Factor and Nuclear Modernization

So what’s going to happen now is this treaty is going to expire. There’s no trust amongst the Russians towards the Americans. We just assume that the Russians just assume that we negotiate in bad faith and we are going to let the treaty expire because of China. And we need China because Donald Trump and Joe Biden threaten nuclear war against China if China dares to attack Taiwan and America intervenes on behalf of Taiwan and China kicks America’s ass, we’ll nuke China. And then we said, well, we might have to nuke China preemptively.

And the Chinese went, wait, wait a minute. Our current nuclear posture doesn’t work. Two hundred old delivery systems. We need to modernize. And so they began to modernize. And the United States accused the Chinese of seeking to match our numbers—1,500. Chinese said, no, we’re at 600. We’re sort of happy with this because we’re not here to play that game.

But we’re not going to—we’re not going to allow the United States to lump us together with Russia. We’re not Russia, we’re China. We have an independent nuclear policy. Before we can begin to talk to the United States, we need the United States and Russia to solve their bilateral nuclear disarmament issues, get their treaty in place and then maybe get your numbers to come down to us. And once your numbers come down to us, then we can all talk about the three-way treaty.

But the Biden administration, then later the Trump administration, under the Biden administration, we changed our nuclear weapons employment plan—that means our war plan—to take into account China. And so we redid our targeting, the way we target, the warheads we use, et cetera, so that we could launch a preemptive first strike against China and still have sufficient nuclear weapons left over for Russia.

But people said that’s just playing games. If the Chinese go even higher, that’s not going to work. We need more nuclear weapons. And so there’s no interest in the Trump administration to negotiate a new treaty because the Trump administration plans starting tomorrow to re-upload warheads onto our Tridents, take them back from 8 to 12 or 14, on the Minuteman III, from 1 to 3. So we can get our warhead count back up.

And with our warhead count back up now, we’ll be able to say we have parity with both Russia and China. The problem is what happens if Russia starts to upload their warheads too. Now we’re into an arms race and the trajectory of the stockpiles is going in the wrong direction.

The End of Nuclear Non-Proliferation?

And now we come back to one of the real problems here. Before ABM Treaty, there was the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. There was also the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty—has never been ratified, but it’s out there. Both sides have agreed to comply with it.

The Non-Proliferation Treaty basically solidified the five existing nuclear weapons states, said they get to have nuclear weapons, nobody else does. But you signed this treaty and it’s a commitment that you won’t develop nuclear weapons, you’ll have safeguard inspections, et cetera. But the other part of it was the nuclear weapons states were supposed to work to get rid of their weapons. That was the promise, that was the deal.

It’s been stalled and now we’re going in the wrong direction. This could be the end of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. This could be the end of the legacy of nuclear non-proliferation. There’s a real risk that if the United States and Russia get involved in a new nuclear arms race and begin to build new nuclear weapons, deploy thousands more warheads, that other nations are going to say we have to have nuclear weapons now.

This is as destabilizing as it gets. This is a disaster, absolute disaster. And again, I point out six decades of work, six decades of arms control experience flushed down the toilet because some idiots in Washington D.C. don’t know their history.

Repeating the Mistakes of History

Every argument they make today about why they need to do X, Y and Z are arguments that were made in 1960s and 1970s and showed to be fundamentally flawed arguments, which is why we transitioned into arms control. We shouldn’t have to reinvent the wheel. We shouldn’t have to relearn these lessons. But those who forget the lessons of history are condemned to repeat it.

So here we are going right back. This is a reset right

The Challenge of Balancing Power and International Law

GLENN DIESEN: In my opinion, though, the problem is I think you always need a balance of power as a condition for international law and treaties. And this is why, you know, the UN System and all of this functioned after World War II, but after the Cold War, I think the challenge for not just international law, but or any treaties would be that all states don’t constrain themselves.

And there was no constraints on the west, so it was essentially asked to constrain itself. And the relationship, you said, with Russia was largely defined by essentially managing its decline. So the whole concept of strategic balance, I think, was increasingly just rejected.

And as you said, the whole picture of doing strategic missile defense. Yeah. Giving up on the whole idea of mutually assured destruction. I think I fit nicely into this context because if you listen to the language back then, actually a lot of the European leaders in the 90s, when they heard talk of missile defense, they got concerned. They talked about strategic defense. They don’t do anymore anyways.

I think the old treaties, they unraveled. And you would think there’s an opportunity now, though, that the world is being rebalanced, that the states, you know, they grow some, again, some respect for each other, again the great powers realizing mutual security concerns and arms control.

But, you know, you really have a huge challenge. You need political giants these days. And it seems we’re all cursed with horrible leaders. And of course, the Ukraine war, as you said, complicates things much, much more.

But this, you mentioned China, that this is what could make it more complicated to get new treaties in place. And, well, Trump expressed this desire for a nuclear disarmament agreement that also includes China. So you think China could realistically be brought into such a strategic arms framework? Or is this out of the question? As you said, that the Chinese want a separate one from the Russian US One?

# The Chinese Response and Arms Control Strategy

SCOTT RITTER: Well, I mean, the Chinese have already answered this question. They published a white paper on disarmament policy and arms control back in either November or December of last year. And what they’ve said is, you know, China’s not seeking an arms race. China has a purely, you know, no first use policy.

But China has been confronted with the fact that the United States is seeking to develop a nuclear preemptive strike capacity basically to neuter China and hold, make China helpless in the face of American nuclear supremacy. And so China has reacted to that. The Chinese numbers now are part of a strategic posture the Chinese are comfortable with. They believe that they can survive an American first strike with sufficient strike capacity to inflict fatal harm on the United States. Therefore deterrence exists.

But what the Chinese don’t want to do is play a game where they’re drawn into negotiations where, you know, they’re going to be factored in with Russia when it comes time for their security, the United States is going to view them as being linked with Russia. And this could create some vulnerabilities for China.

So what the Chinese have said in their paper is what I already said. They said that the United States and Russia need to solve their arms control. Once they get an agreement, once the numbers are set in a treaty, then China is willing to step in and say, okay, now how do we do this? But it’s not going to be about, you know, numbers going up. China is basically going to say, we need all your numbers to come down, you know, because we’re all equal here.

This is problematic for the United States because we wrongly link Russian Chinese nuclear arsenals is that they operate under a joint operational control. They don’t. But you know, again, we have people in the United States right now who are sitting in positions that are nominally involved with arms control and this sort of thing who know nothing about it. These are pure ideologues. They’re pure, you know, peace through strength, might makes right kind of thinking, and they’re not going to do the right thing.

The Reality of Nuclear Overkill

There is a path forward that can be taken, that can safely. You don’t need more than 400 nuclear weapons to destroy the world. That’s sort of the reality of the situation. You know, right now we have 1,550, Russia has 1,550. You know, we already have massive overkill. China has 600. You know, we can be very realistic about bringing down the numbers of deployed missiles, except that at least in the United States, it’s attached to a military industrial complex that makes a lot of money off of this.

You know, this arms race that we’re getting ready to enter into is going to be a multi-trillion dollar affair that the United States simply can’t afford. But we’re going to do it because the defense industry is just sitting there, you know, cashing checks already. We’re going to do it because Congress, you know, gets elected by donations from the companies are going to benefit from Congress’s allocation of money to defense projects related to this new nuclear arms race.

It’s a vicious circle that Dwight Eisenhower warned us about when he gave his famous, you know, farewell address.

Russia’s Nuclear Superiority

I guess I’ll leave with this. Russia right now outmatches us across the board. They have more modern nuclear weapons across the board than anything we have. Many of our weapons are old and outdated. We don’t even know half these weapons work. Which brings up the next problem, which is when we do all of this increase, we’re going to be pulling, you know, W76, W82 warheads out of storage and putting them on missiles. But the question is, do they work?

I mean, without getting into too much nuclear weapons design, I think the W76 is a peanut design that, you know, basically, you know, people think in terms of a sphere, the old plutonium device that, you know, World War II. But a peanut device is actually shaped like a peanut. It’s two devices. And you’ll have one go off, generate a whole bunch of neutrons, and then the second one goes off, feeds off of that and you get your hydrogen bomb explosion. So you get a conventional atomic bomb explosion, which is fission. Then you get fusion and boom.

But to hold those in place, there’s a foam. And that foam isn’t just foam. That foam contains, is embedded with all the neutron generating stuff, so that when that first thing goes off and the foam disintegrates, it’s just throwing out all the things that then are necessary to create the fusion, enhance it, boost it. Boosted nuclear weapon. That’s why they call it that.

The Foam Problem

The problem is the foam deteriorates over time. And so now you got these weapons and the foam’s there, but they don’t know if the foam works. When they tried to refurbish the W76 a couple, I guess a decade or so ago, they found there is no formula. This was sort of just done by scientists who, you know, figured out, you know, how to do it and maybe handwritten some notes. And they did it, they produced the bombs. When that’s done, it went, they’re all dead, they’re all senile, drooling in a cup. And nobody knows how to make this foam.

It’s a very specific design because it, you know, you have to burn, boost the weapon in a very precise way. And so they spent a lot of time and effort trying to reverse engineer to try and figure out how to make this foam. They made something, but they don’t know if it works. The weapon’s supposed to work as designed.

The reason why we have weapons of different megatons. All that is, you know, we need a weapon to hit here, compress the ground so we can collapse, you know, silos. In order to do that, you know, we need to boost to, you know, the sufficiency necessary to achieve the result. But if the foam doesn’t give you that boost, you get a fizzle. So now we’re firing missiles into, you know, Russia expecting to collapse their silos, and we get a poof instead of a boom, and the silos aren’t collapsed, and now we got missiles coming back.

This is problematic. It means we don’t have deterrence anymore because everybody’s going to. And so there’s a lot of temptation now. This is why heading in the direction we’re in is very bad. I believe the Trump administration will probably succumb to pressure to resume underground nuclear weapons testing. And then when that does, the Russians will do the same thing, that all bets are off. Everybody’s going to be doing it. And like I said, we’re right back to square one.

This is a disaster, an absolute disaster. The American people have been asleep at the wheel. The American press has been asleep at the wheel, but the American press is bought out. This is why you can’t trust the New York Times. You know, David Sanger has been, you know, writing for the New York Times for some time, but all he is is a stenographer. He gets information from the Pentagon that tells the story they want to tell. He doesn’t expose reality.

You know, there used to be Seymour Hersh who could write about this stuff, but he’s, you know, he’s playing the administration game right now, repeating the nonsense. There’s nobody in the mainstream that’s telling the truth about this.

The Myth That Russia Cheats

And when people try to tell the truth, the next thing the mainstream will say is, well, the Russians cheat. I’m here to tell you right now, the Russians don’t cheat. I mean, Ray McGovern’s one of my best friends. I love Ray McGovern. You know Ray. Good guy, smart guy. But, you know, the other day we were talking, and he said, you know, that the Soviets cheated on the ABM treaty. And he cited the Krasnoyarsk radar. And I went, well, timeout, timeout. They didn’t cheat.

That radar is incapable of doing the technical functions necessary for the ABM Treaty. So there was no intention to cheat. To have the intent to cheat, you have to build a radar that’s capable of doing the things you’re not allowed to do. They positioned the radar because it was a satellite tracking radar, and this was where the gap was in their satellite tracking coverage. It turned out that the positioning of it was in technical violation of the ABM treaty. So the Russians agreed to destroy the radar, and they did.

But the Russians don’t cheat. I’ve worked with these people. They are assiduous. What’s in the treaty is what they do. I learned that in Votkinsk because, you know, we got shoehorned into building this thing called cargo scan. But it was thrown at the last second, literally days before Reagan and Gorbachev signed the INF treaty. They said, oh, my God, you got to put inspectors outside of Votkinsk. And they didn’t know how to do it.

And so what happened is they put all the onus on the inspectors to write the rule book. And so we’re in there trying to do this cargo scan thing, and the Soviets are going, no, you got to obey everything that was written down. If you’re not doing as it was written down, you can’t do it. And, you know, and then people like Senator Helms. So Russians are cheating. Russians don’t cheat. Russians don’t cheat. The Russians did exactly what they were supposed to do.

We’re the ones that bend the rules, that play loosey goosey, that cheat, that lie, that manipulate. But people will say, well, we can’t deal with the Russians because they cheat. I mean, I just attended a meeting with Christopher Ford, a former arms control guy with the first Trump administration. He’s the guy that helped kill the INF treaty. And one of his going in philosophies is the Russians cheat. I’m like, well, no, they don’t. You cheat, and I can prove you cheat, but you can’t prove the Russians cheat.

You know, they accused the Russians of cheating with this 9M729 missile. The Russians said, well, here’s the missile. Come on out. Send your inspectors in and look at it. And Christopher Ford went, now we ain’t sending inspectors. Why not? Because it’ll probably show that they’re not cheating, and that’s the outcome the Russians want us to see. And I said, well, it’s probably because it’s the truth. They didn’t want the truth. They created a fiction that the Russians are cheating, and they let that fiction ride. How do you do business with people like this?

Russia Has Already Won the Arms Race

So here are the Russians right now looking at the situation. Russians don’t want to have an arms race. First of all, the Russians already won the arms race. Vladimir Putin warned everybody about it. In 2016, he warned Bush about it when he withdrew from the ABM treaty. So you do this, there will be consequences. 2016, he told the American media there will be consequences. Why don’t you guys write more about this? They didn’t write anything.

2018, he announced that they’re building new weapons. And these weapons, the Sarmat avant garde and other Poseidon, they’re now deployed operational. Russia outclasses us in every category of nuclear weapons. So this arms race isn’t going to be really a race because the Russians are already across the finish line. It should be about the United States trying to buy a pair of shoes and tie them at the starting line, see how far we can get.

We’re so far behind and we can’t afford any of it. We can’t afford any of it. The ground launch deterrence system, they were talking it was going to be initially $75 billion. Then they said $120 billion. I will tell you right now, it’s going to cost between $1 and $3 trillion by the time it’s done. And that’s just that we can’t do that. We can’t afford that.

New submarines. In order to replace the Ohio class submarines, we have to produce submarines at a rate of, I don’t know, 2.7 a year. Our maximum output right now is 1.5. We don’t have the shipbuilding capacity to do this. The B-21 bomber is just too damn expensive. We can’t afford too many of. And we’re going to break free of the security of the New START treaty to engage in an arms race that we’ve already lost.

The Loss of Fear and Respect for Nuclear War

GLENN DIESEN: I feel part of the problem with letting all of this arms control die, though, is not just the lack of trust, but it’s the lack of fear of a nuclear war. I feel every generation, as a cliche would go, have to learn the horrors of war to respect it. But I even now hear European leaders refer to, whenever Russia refers to its nuclear deterrent, they dismiss it as well as nuclear blackmail. So we can’t respect it because then the Russians will be allowed to use it. I mean, it’s very dangerous way of thinking.

But I’m worried about ignoring the security competition here because he said once this weapon starts to roll out, you know, one country’s security is another country’s insecurity. So they will have to be some kind of an arms race coming out of this. So, yeah, I guess there’s a. Well, what kind of question. Sorry, what kind of weapons do you think we should expect to see being rolled out over the next months or years?

# The Collapse of America’s Nuclear Weapons Industry

SCOTT RITTER: Well, first of all, when we talk about American weapons, we don’t roll anything out in months. You know, we’re talking decades. So, you know, they’re now talking about extending the Minuteman 3, which is already, you know, good Lord, 50 years old. They’re talking about extending it through 2050. I mean, I’ll be 81 years old, 2050, you know, so. And how do you even begin to operate that way?

So we’re not going to have a new missile until 2050. I mean, when we started the Minuteman program, it was conceived and built in a couple of years. Today we can’t because our defense industry is just as corrupt as the day is long. It’s all about making money, making money, making money. We don’t do anything, right? It’s bottom line, bottom line, they won’t do anything for the national good. So I’m not expecting new weapons.

This golden dome system that is already, again, let’s just assume that Donald Trump said, okay, I want to extend the New START treaty, the caps. The Russians had caveats. They said, well, you can’t build a golden dome because we come back to the same ABM equation. This isn’t the first time we’ve been through this. The Russians have said this over and over and over again. It was a good argument, which is why we signed the ABM treaty.

But the Russians are saying we can’t even begin to talk about numbers, control, etc. if you’re building a missile defense system. Because that missile defense system now requires us to overwhelm it, to defeat it. And we got to be able to do that. Now the Russians have already built systems that are designed to overwhelm and defeat, you know, any conceivable defense system. I mean, the golden dome, the contracts were let, the initial contracts were let again.

The Sentinel missile, which is the ground based deterrence system or whatever they call it, that’s the one we were going to replace the Minuteman with. Congress learned from other programs that if you, you know, that the defense industry lies, they start off by under bidding. So they know that it’s going to cost a, you know, but they underbid. Boom. And then they say, oh, there’s new technologies we have to bring into. And they, and so they increased the bid and all this. And next thing you know, you have a system out of control.

So Congress has put in automatic brakes. So if a contract deviates by a certain percentage it gets the brake put on. The Sentinel system started running in it immediately deviated. I think the first time was like 54%. Bam. Congress put the brakes on it said reconsider. They said we’re going to reconsider. They reconsider, said we’re ready. They restarted it, spiked to 81%. They shut it down. We can’t afford Sentinel because the defense industry is so damn corrupt. They don’t know how to build something responsibly. It’s always designed to make money.

And so where are we going to get that missile? God forbid we have to develop a new submarine launched ballistic missile. Right now we have a new submarine coming out and as I said, we don’t have the shipbuilding space to produce it. So we’re going to run the problems there. But if we needed a new missile, you know, we went from what Polaris to Poseidon to Trident. Now we’re up to the Trident D5. If we needed a new missile, I don’t think we could build a new missile. Right now we’re building the Trident. We upgrade the Trident. But to build a new missile we’re not.

Russia’s Superior Weapons Development System

The Russians on the other hand, they have the Nataraji design bureau now Moscow Institute of Thermal Technology. Those guys have been designing solid rocket motors since the 1960s and they’ve never stopped. And they have the Vodka machine building plant where I inspected that does the production. They have relationships and they’ve never stopped. They are always looking to improve existing systems and they’re looking to the next follow on system.

They understand that when you build a missile it has a life expectancy, operational life expectancy of 20, 20 years. They’ve worked it during the 1990s to get 30 years out of it. But they say in 30 years we have to have another missile ready to go. So this is why you had the SS-25 Topol still in service when the Topol M came out, the 27. Because you know, you didn’t run into this panic where you had a gap where everything got retired. You had to run it.

It’s a phased, here comes Topol M, they get all the Topols out, here comes Yars to replace Topol M. And Topol M slowly getting phased out. Yars then after Yars comes the Cedar, the K there it’s going to replace that. They’re always one step ahead and they produce these missiles quick. They’re modern, they’re efficient and the cost is low because they don’t have to reinvent the wheel when we build a missile system.

We have to basically say, oh, we need to build a whole new factory and we have to train whole new people. The Russians don’t have to do that. They got people, they get new technologies, they train them up, they use the same workshops, and their costs go way down. The Russians are kicking our ass across the board.

But you’re not going to see any new weapon systems from the United States. What you’re going to see is an effort to upload onto the D5 and upload on the Minuteman 3. And then you’re going to see a panic where they say, well, we don’t know if these weapons that have been storage work and we need. And now there’s talk about, you know, in the defense budget, this $1.5 trillion budget, you know, they’re talking about building, what, 10,000 nuclear pits for the next weapon, 10,000 for a new design, which means you’re probably going to want to test it. This is absolute insanity. It gives me a headache just to think about where we’re going on this one.

GLENN DIESEN: Just seems like a strange time to do this as well, though, because the whole idea of the US pulling back from the Ukraine war was that the United States should seek to improve its relations with Russia. That is, you know, Trump’s old mantra that it’s a good thing to get along with Russia. And, you know, the focus was on improving bilateral relations. And this is one of the reasons why we have to solve the Ukraine war. But it seems if bilateral relations will improving it, and it’s hard to understand how this can be done without arms control. I mean, this is where trust is built, isn’t it?

The Historical Precedents of Nuclear Brinkmanship

SCOTT RITTER: Look, again. Yeah, I apologize because I’m. There’s nothing every. I told you six decades of arms control legacy. We’ve, there’s nothing happening today that we already haven’t handled, that we already haven’t confronted. Today they talk about the Russians, you know, nuclear blackmail.

Well, Richard Nixon, when we transitioned from, I don’t know, SIOP-62 to SIOP-64 or whatever, the single integrated operations plan, which was what they used to call the nuclear war plan. You know, Nixon was briefed on it and he said, you guys got to give me options. Basically, you’re telling me that if we have a little crisis here, we’re going full scale nuclear war, and I’m going to be responsible for killing, you know, hundreds of millions of people, including, you know, up to 60 million Americans, I don’t like this. This is crazy. I need options.

And the Pentagon was thinking thing, they said, well, we could take our European nuclear war plan. And you know, we have this plan that says that we can hit a couple Russian cities and then the Russians will be, won’t retaliate to Europe because that could trigger a full scale American attack. And Nixon said, well, couldn’t the Russians do the same? They said, oh, yeah, yeah, we already thought about that and we don’t know what the answer is.

Meaning the United States admitted that if Russia nuked the Soviet Union, nuked European cities, we hadn’t made the decision yet whether or not we would retaliate with that we would commit suicide. This is in 1968, 1969, 1970. We haven’t solved that problem yet. I’m here to tell you.

And the Russians are sort of caught on. I mean, you know, Sergey Karaganov, if you ever get a chance, you should talk to him. He’s an interesting guy to talk to, but he’s the guy that wrote a paper a couple years ago, it said, you know, we should nuke Posen as a demonstration. And he said, the United States will do nothing because no American president can sacrifice Boston for Posen. And he’s right.

Europe needs to wake up to the fact that we will not die for you. That it’s always been a myth, the nuclear umbrella has always been a myth that if you, and especially if Europe creates a situation where you provoke Russia into using nuclear weapons against a European city, you’re on your own. We’re not going to die for you. This is, you know, another one of these things that, you know, needs to be discussed now because now as we go into this arms race, understand the arms race the United States is getting engaged in is totally disconnected from the European real France and Germany.

Europe’s Dangerous Nuclear Gambit

France and England did themselves any favor. You know, they just did something. I forget the Nottingham or Nottingham, I don’t know the name of the accord where they met. And basically they have a unified nuclear response plan now that they will coordinate with each other in nuclear war. The French have promised, I think I got this right. England promised Poland and France promised Germany the nuclear umbrella. So now they’re saying we have to replace the United States. We’re putting our own nuclear umbrella in.

All this guarantees is that the Russians are going to take out all of Europe now, including France. And of course, England and the United States will do nothing. We’re not going to die for Europe. And so this is also. The Europeans have to understand that when this arms control goes away. The premise of the arms control was always the fiction that the American nuclear umbrella extended over Europe. We get into this new arms race, that American nuclear umbrella is gone and Europe will be on its own.

And now we run into a situation where Germany decides they don’t want a French nuclear umbrella, Germany wants nuclear weapons. Sweden decides they want their own nuclear weapon. These are both programs, nations that have nuclear weapons programs. We just don’t talk about it. The Swedes have been secretly working on nuclear weapons potential. The Germans. I spoke to the German nuclear weapons scientists who said, yeah, we could do it. We could. We build nuclear weapon tomorrow. We just don’t.

That’s the other danger of losing this arms control is we’re going to look at a global proliferation. Japan, South Korea, Brazil, nations are going to be developing nuclear weapons because the foundation of security that existed with New START Treaty, the premise that, you know, there won’t be a nuclear war, that we’re going to be, we’re working on controlling this. When that’s gone, it’s the Wild West all over again. People could be strapping on six guns, walking the street looking for people to shoot.

GLENN DIESEN: Actually, Sergey Karaganov, I’ve had him on this podcast because he used to be my boss. He was the head of my department in Moscow. And he told me in his office, though more than one occasion, that he doesn’t buy the Article 5 premise of NATO, that there’s no chance the Americans would come to the well to commit suicide for the Europeans.

And again, he pushed hard for several years for Moscow to change the nuclear doctrine. At the end, Putin went along with it and as you said, now he’s arguing that perhaps it’s necessary to consider using a nuclear warhead against the Europeans, given what they’re doing against Russia in Ukraine. So it’s quite serious stuff we’re talking about.

SCOTT RITTER: But.

The Dangerous Normalization of Nuclear Proliferation

GLENN DIESEN: But everything seems to be falling apart, as you said, because if, you know, in the past when people talk about Iranian nuclear weapons, how could they even consider something like this? This is nuclear proliferation. Now the casualness of this, where the Germans say, perhaps we should get a nuclear weapon. So, I mean, this is, I mean, even if they think they are the good guys, it doesn’t do any good if this is going to only result in other countries doing exactly the same. So, no, I think we’re going down a very dangerous path. So I’m hoping, yeah, some statements will come along.

The Loss of Arms Control Expertise

SCOTT RITTER: There’s another aspect to this too, and this is again from a former Russian arms controller who I knew. I’m getting senile now, so I can’t remember all names anymore. I’ve never been good with names, but I’ll get it. But he wrote an article where he talked about the fact that we’re not exercising the arms control muscles.

I mean, if you think about the INF treaty was negotiated by Paul Nitze. Nitze was at Hiroshima, wrote one of the studies. After that, Nitze wrote NSC 68, which was the foundational document of the Cold War containment policy. Nitze was a Cold Warrior, he understood all. Nitze was there at ground zero to talk about nuclear non-proliferation treaty, to talk about ABM treaty, SALT, etc. And so this is a man who understood the Cold War, understood every aspect of it, and could negotiate arms control responsibly because he was there. He had big arms control muscles.

I mean, all of our guys had big arms control muscles. We used to be able to do this. Arms control treaties are extraordinarily hard to negotiate. If you ever read, gosh, Gerard Smith, I think was his name. I know the last name was Smith, but he was the negotiator for the SALT treaty and he’s written some great books, a series of books about that experience. This should be mandatory reading for everybody because you see the complexity, the nuance, the patience.

It’s not brinksmanship, it’s not Donald Trump transactional, this, that. You have to understand where they’re coming from. You have to understand their calculations, they have to understand yours. You have to get each other to understand. And it takes a long time and a lot of effort to get these things out. People just don’t sit down overnight and go—it’s hard work, very hard work. And you need people who know how to do this hard work, who think this way.

The Dying Generation of Arms Control Experts

They’re gone, they’re dead. I mean, look, I was one of the young guys when this started. When I started my work in 1988, I was 27 years old, all right, one of the youngest guys doing it. I’m 64 now. I was the young guy. I go to INF reunion, and they’re just dying off. All the guys that, the colonels, they’re just dying off. They’re dropping like flies. Everybody else is just old.

And so I come in with a handful of other guys, and we’re the young people. We’re in our mid-60s. We’re young people. We’re the last people who trained on this. The people who followed us didn’t train on real arms control. They trained on arms control as a vehicle to guarantee American nuclear supremacy, American nuclear superiority. That’s not arms control. That’s something totally different.

Christopher Ford is not an arms control specialist. He’s an American nuclear supremacist who views arms control only as being effective if it guarantees American nuclear supremacy. Arms control requires people who view the other side as your equals, who believe in mutually beneficial relations, reciprocity. We don’t have people that think like that today. The muscles are gone.

Russia’s Shift in Arms Control Approach

And the Russians are the opposite. The Russians, their Ministry of Foreign Affairs used to be the sort of the lead arms control people. Now it’s the Ministry of Defense. And their job isn’t to think about how to get rid of nuclear weapons. Their job is to look at America and say, “These guys lie, they cheat, they steal, and we have to be prepared to deal with liars, cheaters, and thieves.” And so they build a Russian nuclear weapons capability designed to operate in that environment.

They’re not conditioned to think diplomatically because they look at America and the Americans don’t operate diplomatically. We don’t. Nobody has arms control muscles anymore. They just don’t exist. Not in the United States, not in Russia.

The Challenge of Rebuilding Arms Control Capacity

So we’re going to have to retrain a whole new generation of people to do this. So it’s not just that we have to negotiate treaties which are extraordinarily hard to do. We have to find people who are capable of negotiating treaties. And where do they come from?

Our academic institutions are corrupted with Russophobia. We’re not training arms control specialists because to be an arms control specialist, you not only have to have the technical knowledge, you have to have a fundamental understanding of your opponent. Genuine Russian area expertise. We don’t teach Russian area expertise. We teach “Putin as a dictatorial thug.” I mean, that’s it.

You want a PhD in Russia area studies? I’m just telling you right now: Make your thesis “Vladimir Putin is a dictatorial thug,” and you will get a PhD and you can go off and do anything you want. But God forbid you write “The Path Towards Reciprocal Arms Control.” You’ll fail because they say, “What do you mean, reciprocal arms control? You mean treat the Russians with respect, treat the Russians as legitimate, treat their—” No.

This is academia, where we’re supposed to be teaching people to think. We don’t create thinkers, we create ideologues who are anti-arms control, which is why the media isn’t reporting on this. As one of your first questions, why is the media ignoring this? Because they’re not conditioned to understand the reality of the threat and they won’t be conditioned until they vaporize and then it’s too late.

GLENN DIESEN: No. Well, that’s a grim note to end on, but I know. I couldn’t agree more. Yeah. Someone who—I’m a professor at the university here—it’s ideologues, I think is the right description. And they all march in line and there’s no good explanation either. I think if you want to explain how the media has absolutely no interest in this seemingly, that the arms control has now come to an end. But here we are.

Anyways, Scott Ritter, thank you very much as always. I appreciate—I don’t know who would be better to explain the severity of the decision to let this arms control expire. So thank you very much.

SCOTT RITTER: Thank you for having me.

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