Scott Ritter - Scorpion King

PRAISE FOR SCORPION KING

A comprehensive and illuminating account of Americas paralyzing infatuation with nuclear weapons. This expanded edition of Scott Ritters 2010 book drives home the point made in the original: The ominous threat of Doomsday persists, with U.S. policymakers unable to extricate themselves from the reckless pact with the devil made by their predecessors more than a halfcentury ago.

ANDREW BACEVICH, President of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft

Scott Ritters Scorpion King is an important and necessary wake-up call. Nuclear weapons, in the quantities that now exist, are a threat to our very existence. They have no rational military use, yet we still cling to them, modernize them, and undermine the international agreements designed to keep them under control. This book should be required reading for political leaders, media pundits, and citizens who want to leave a future to our children and grandchildren.

JACK J. MATLOCK, JR., author of Superpower Illusions: How Myths and False Ideologies Led America Astray

In this urgently timely updating of his 2010 critique of U.S. nuclear disarmament policy, Scott Ritter drives home Americas addiction to nuclear weapons and to an insane predilection for preemptive attack. From his titular allusion to Oppenheimers two scorpions in a bottle, to his closing discussion of a U.S. nuclear war game using a low yield warhead to target Russian troops while NATO carries out its biggest military exercise in years on Russias border, Ritter provides a compelling narrative depicting the suicidal mania that is American nuclear weapons policy. Scorpion King is must reading for all those who should be concerned about the danger of our nuclear weapons policies. Thats everyone.

DANIEL ELLSBERG, author of The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Cold War Planner

MORE PRAISE FOR SCORPION KING

Wow! Scott Ritter has written an epic tale of the myriad opportunities the U.S. has had to implement pathbreaking nuclear disarmament agreements, and how these opportunities, under both Democratic and Republican administrations, have been stopped, dropped or flopped. Ritter details how decades of failed attempts to break the U.S. addiction to nuclear weapons have led to a deadend, trillion-dollar modernization plan to produce more usable nukes. But as Ritter so brilliantly argues, giving up is not an option. Read the book to understand why, and get inspired to take action.

MEDEA BENJAMIN, codirector, CODEPINK for Peace

2020 Scott Ritter
ISBN: 978-1-949762-18-1
EBOOK ISBN: 978-1-949762-19-8

Cover design: R. Jordan Santos
In-house editor: Diana G. Collier

COVER PHOTO: Operation Buster-Jangle-Dog testwith troops participating in exercise Desert Rock I at the Nevada Test Site, 1 November 1951. It was the first U.S. nuclear field exercise conducted on land; troops shown are a mere six miles from the blast.

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED: Except for purposes of review, this book may not be copied, or stored in any information retrieval system, in whole or in part, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Library of Congress Control Number 2020935965

Clarity Press, Inc.
2625 Piedmont Rd. NE, Suite 56
Atlanta, GA. 30324 https://www.claritypress.com

To my daughters, Victoria and Patricia,
that they may raise their future children in a
world free of the scourge of nuclear weapons.

Contents

Foreword

Scott Ritter has the great advantage of having been there and experienced that and so can bring the sharp edge of realism to the delicate task of separating fact from fiction. In this book he moves from the inspection mode that made him famous to introspection on the often obscure, usually veiled, and occasionally deliberate deceptions of high policy. The result is an engrossing account of sixty years of attempts, as he puts it, to put the genie of nuclear weapons back into some sort of bottle.

In some ways, Mr. Ritters account parallels McGeorge Bundys study, Danger and Survival: The Political History of the Nuclear Weapon, but Mr. Ritters work focuses more on what has been attempted to bring it under control.

Because of my own experience as a member of the crisis management committee during the Cuban missile crisis, I found particularly fascinating the parallels and contrasts Mr. Ritter draws between the Kennedy administrations attempt to find some basis for dealing with the Soviet Union and President Obamas own venture with the Russians. The contrast is striking. John Kennedy was much more a child of the Cold War than many outsiders prefer to remember, whereas Barack Obama, who had little experience with it, seemed determined to put the Cold War behind him. As Mr. Ritter points out, history will judge that Obama failed.

If we are to bequeath to our children and grandchildren a livable world, we must find a way to succeed where Obama did not. Unfortunately, the current occupant of the White House does not seem up to the task. This is a problem not only for the United States, but humanity as a whole. As I had painfully engraved in my thoughts during the missile crisis, nuclear weapons anywhere are a danger to people everywhere. Yet, as Mr. Ritter makes clear:

The United States is a nation addicted to nuclear weapons and the power and prestige, both real and illusory, that these weapons bring. Breaking this addiction will prove extremely difficult. This is especially true given the lack of having any real nuclear disarmament policy in place since the dawn of the nuclear age. The failure of the United States to formulate or to implement effective nuclear disarmament policy has placed America and the world on very dangerous ground. The longer America and the world continue to possess nuclear weapons, the greater the likelihood of nuclear weapons being used. The only way to prevent such a dire outcome is through the abolition, and not the reduction or control, of all nuclear weapons.

Mr. Ritter brings great personal experience to his task. Literally on the ground, he was charged with finding out the truth of the belief that Saddam Hussein was hiding nuclear weapons. His work was carried on under difficult and even dangerous circumstances and what he found was not what his patrons wanted him to find. With great intellectual courage, he reported what he found. He has carried that mindset into this book: he tells it like it is, regardless of whose feet he steps on.

Dealing with the Russians has required more subtle ways than searching, and it sometimes came down to personal contacts, as it did with Paul Nitzes famous walk in the woods with his Russian counterpart. I had a somewhat similar encounter that I should contribute to his account. In 1968, I went to Moscow to lecture at the Soviet Academy of Science and visited the city then known as Leningrad with Evgeni Primakov, who was at the time with the Academy and ultimately became Prime Minister of Russia. We had a different sort of walk in the woods. Ours was through the massive graveyard where 900,000 victims of the Nazi onslaught were buried. We were both awed by the memory conjured by the graves, but at the end of our walk, Primakov turned to me and said simply, We must not ever allow this to happen again. Those deaths, of course, occurred before the dawn of the nuclear age: if the Germans had had nuclear weapons, no one would have been alive even to bury the dead.

It is, I believe, in this spirit that Mr. Ritter has approached his task: What should we have learned? How can we apply it to the fundamental task of keeping ourselves, our families, and indeed, our world alive?