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. Ritter’s account parallels McGeorge Bundy’s study, Danger and Survival: The Political History of the Nuclear Weapon, but Mr. Ritter’s 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 administration’s attempt to find some basis for dealing with the Soviet Union and President Obama’s 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 Nitze’s 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?
On no subject, I believe, do we need the lesson of history so desperately as on Mr. Ritter’s topic. This is an extraordinarily important book. It is technical where it needs to be, but it also addresses the broad political, military, and cultural aspects of arms control, Understanding the full dimensions of the danger and what we need to do to overcome it is an absolute necessity. We cannot afford to fail. To paraphrase the great English poet John Donne: if the bell ever tolls, it will toll for all of us. To help us perceive the danger of the sound, we must heed the first tremors of the “bell” before it is too late, Mr. Ritter’s book gives us mental “hearing aids.”
This book must be read and absorbed and become part of our political thought and action.