Monday, June 19, 2023

Scott Ritter: 'Can Nuclear War Be Avoided?'

Scott Ritter: “Can Nuclear War Be Avoided?”




Scott Ritter, former UN nuclear arms inspector, hears Johnny Cash’s cancer-ravaged voice, speaking those haunting words at the end of his song, “The Man Comes Around.” 

“That’s what we live in today,” the former US Marine intelligence officer said at a press conference aptly titled “Can Nuclear War Be Avoided?” 

“This isn’t some sort of, you know, future look into a hellish earth,” Ritter continued. “Death is on a pale horse riding to us as we speak! And if you don’t recognize that, if you’re not aware of that, then you’re just gonna blissfully go to the abyss.”

Ritter was one of five panelists who spoke at the online conference on January 8th, which was put on by Diane Sare (I-NY), a candidate for US Senate from New York. In addition to Ritter and Sare, there were three more speakers:

The webinar, which you can watch on Rumble, was organized in response to recent events which are escalating the tensions between Russia and the US and its NATO allies. Recent comments such as those of former German Chancellor Angela Merkel and former French President Francois Hollande, indicating that the Minsk II Peace Accords were never actually about peace, and were instead intended to buy Ukraine more time to arm itself against Russia and the break-away republics in the Donbass region. 

At this point, it may appear to Russia that there is no point in negotiating, since it’s now known that the US and its allies did not negotiate in good faith. The US/UK/NATO alliance is presently sending armored vehicles into Ukraine, and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky has cynically rejected an Orthodox Christmas ceasefire offered by Russian president Vladimir Putin. Senate Candidate Diane Sare believes it is up to us to change the policy of the US if we want to avoid a nuclear confrontation with Russia, which would be an Extinction Level Event (ELE). 

“In a literal sense, we are on the brink of thermonuclear war,” Diane said during her introductory comments, “largely as a result of policies from the West, particularly the United States. And as American citizens, we do have some control over that.”

How much control the American people have over the increasingly apocalyptic direction the US has been taking in this proxy war with Russia is a matter of debate, but Sare and the other panelists had some ideas. “The point is to change the policy so we avoid the immediate threat to human civilization,” Sare said.

“We are looking at the end of mankind. That’s what this danger implies. And we are moving right now so quickly towards an escalation,” said Helga Zepp-LaRouche, who favors a diplomatic solution and believes that the best hope we have may be the offer put forth by Pope Francis, “who said that he will offer the venue of the Vatican as a place for peace negotiations between Ukraine and Russia without any preconditions.”

Zepp-Larouche believes that lack of preconditions is essential if any kind of diplomatic settlement is to be reached. The Schiller Institute, she says, has begun a letter-writing campaign which has already garnered the signatures of more than 100 prominent individuals from 37 countries. She asked those present to sign the letter as well. If the Pope sees that there is support for his campaign, Zepp-Larouche says, it may be possible to “make an international pressure on the United States, on the other NATO countries.”

“And frankly I think at this point,” she continued, “that the only thing that will help to stop this is if you see around the world, millions of people in the streets. As you know we are very, very far from that.”

Indeed, peace protests seem to have gone to the same place where all the flowers, and flower children, of the 70’s, went. Only a few dedicated souls continue to protest against war, and their lone voices are often drowned out by the resounding choir of pundits who pound the drums of war, and the roar of armored vehicles and tanks from NATO making their way into Ukraine.

Zepp-LaRouche also referenced recent comments by former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev indicating that hypersonic nuclear missiles have been deployed off the coasts of the US and Europe. “Basically, they are so quickly coming,” she said, “that the US president would not even have the time to enter Air Force One.”


But the most recent example of terror, Black pointed out, was the attack on the Nordstream pipelines, which has been blamed on Russia despite evidence that a NATO country was the culprit. “Just moments after these massive detonations took place,” he said, “a text was intercepted. It was transmitted by British Prime Minister Liz Truss, directed to Secretary of State Tony Blinken, and it simply said ‘it’s done.’ That was the total sum of the message.”

“This was one of the greatest terror attacks in history,” Black continued. “The western media immediately jumped all on board and accused Russia of having destroyed one of its greatest engineering achievements in history. Somehow the Russians had done it. Why? Because the Russians always do it. And if an election doesn’t go the way of the Deep State, the Russians did it. Everything is easily attributed to the Russians. The claim needn’t be rational. It needn’t be logical. It can be totally irrational. As it was in this case.”

Indeed, the masses all too willingly seem to accept without question that “the Russians” destroyed one of their most valuable economic lifelines to Europe for no other reason than because Russians are just “really bad people who do really bad things,” Black said. And the lie, no matter how illogical or irrational, is repeated over and over until people believe it. Especially when all other explanations are censored.

“We are on the cusp of thermonuclear war,” said Maj. Scott Ritter. He recalled his former mentor, General Polk, who served under President John F. Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis. “You know how we avoided war during the Cuban Missile Crisis? Diplomacy. Old fashioned diplomacy. Americans talking to Russians and Russians talking to Americans.”


“Nobody is talking disarmament, everybody is talking arms race,” Ritter said. And though our so-called “representatives” on Capitol Hill believe in the course the US is taking, which is bringing us ever-closer to Armageddon, Ritter believes they are deluded. “The Russians will annihilate us in a nuclear conflict. There is no debate, no doubt in this.”

At one point in time, Ritter says, there was a belief that the US could launch a “decapitation strike,” that would nullify Russia’s leadership, and that our ballistic missile defense system could protect the world from the inevitable retaliatory strike launched by Russia’s Perimeter system, known as “the Dead Hand.” 

“Well, the Russians have not only checked us on this but check-mated us on this,” he said. “They have weapons today, and they’re deployed. It’s not theoretical weapons. Real weapons, deployed, that nullify all of this. So, America has no chance. If we ever initiated something like this, we would be destroyed before the people who initiated it realized they had failed! That’s how quick the Russian retaliation would be.”


Ritter said that the US is poised to spend trillions of dollars to modernize its weapons in the hopes of matching Russian capabilities. “But we can’t,” he said, “and I will tell you this without a shadow of a doubt, without a fear of contradiction: Every weapons system that we are currently talking about employing to replace the existing triad is not sufficient to the task. It won’t work, and they don’t intimidate the Russians at all!”


Ritter, who recently authored a book titled “Disarmament in the Time of Perestroika,” says that times were just as dangerous in the 80’s — except that then, we were talking. The US and Russia were negotiating. “We came up with a treaty,” he said. “Why? Because the negotiators were veterans. They’d been doing this a long time.”

Ritter believes that the only way the US/NATO can be brought to the negotiating table is through a defeat, which he compared to the US defeat of Japan in 1945, where the choice was “sign the document or die.”


“NATO will lose. The question is, will NATO lose gracefully?” Ritter asked, and referenced a poem by Dylan Thomas. “Is NATO willing to ‘go gently into the good night’? Or is NATO going to ‘rage, rage against the dying of the light’? And that’s the choice, unfortunately, that’s what we come down to. If NATO opts to ‘rage, rage against the dying of the light,’ ladies and gentlemen, it’s been a pleasure knowing you. 2023 will be the last year that we are all alive on this planet. Kiss your loved ones goodbye. Do what you need to do, it’s over.”


Ritter believes that there is no more hope for negotiations, because Russia can no longer trust the US or NATO. From this point forward, he believes, Russia will not be seeking negotiations. It will be seeking victory. And if NATO and the US do not find a way to accept that gracefully, we are all doomed to a nuclear annihilation.

I’d love to prove Ritter wrong. But, given Ukraine’s rejection of Russia’s Christmastime truce, the likelihood of negotiations seems further away than ever. And adding to this gathering “perfect storm” is the fact that younger generations are not as aware of the dangers of nuclear war as those of us who grew up during Cold War times.







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