Scott Ritter took the warnings that he had issued during his appearance with Diane Sare on Cynthia Pooler’s “Issues that Matter” YouTube channel, about NATO’s Steadfast Noon nuclear sharing exercise, to a column in Consortium News, posted yesterday. “Given that NATO’s nuclear umbrella extends exclusively over Europe, the indisputable fact is that STEADFAST NOON is nothing more than NATO training to wage nuclear war against Russia,” he says at the outset.
Indeed, how could it be otherwise?
Ritter points out that, despite all of the insane rhetoric coming out of Washington, Brussels, and Kiev (of which he provides a timeline), there has been absolutely no talk coming out of the Kremlin about using tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine. In fact, Russian officials have made numerous statements to the contrary, that Russian nuclear doctrine is very specific on the conditions in which Russia would use nuclear weapons, and those conditions don’t, and won’t exist in Ukraine.
Biden, Ritter says, “got it all wrong” when talking about the potential for nuclear conflict. “The risk isn’t that Russia would start a pre-emptive nuclear war over Ukraine,” Ritter warns. “The risk is that America would.” This, Ritter argues, stems from the doctrine of preemption adopted by the G.W. Bush Administration in 2002, which has still not been repudiated. Biden came into office promising to enshrine in U.S. nuclear doctrine a “sole purpose policy,” under which, Ritter quotes Bush that “the sole purpose of our nuclear arsenal should be to deter—and, if necessary, retaliate against—a nuclear attack.” But that change still hasn’t been made; therefore, the U.S. military has to rely on previously issued doctrine, the 2018 Nuclear Posture Review being the most recent such document.
Under the Bush doctrine, current “nuclear weapons are but another tool in the military’s toolbox, to be used as and when needed, including occasions where the destruction of battlefield targets for the simple purpose of gaining an operational advantage is the objective,” Ritter writes.
