Judging Freedom - Ritter - More Tanks & Ukrainians training in US

Episode Date: January 17, 2023

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Hi everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Tuesday, January 17th, 2023. It's about two o'clock in the afternoon on the east coast of the United States. Scott Ritter is with us again. Scott, it's always a pleasure. In reading one of your more recent statements, I'm not sure if it was an essay that you wrote or if you were being quoted on another platform, you warned of the dangers of thermonuclear war starting in Ukraine. Can you explain? Certainly. I mean, I think it's no longer a debate whether or not this conflict is a proxy conflict between NATO and Russia. I think, I mean, when even the Ukrainian defense minister is coming out and saying, hey, it's a proxy war between NATO and Russia, we're the ones dying, you need

to give us more weapons. It should be clear that that's what's going on. This is, for Russia, it's an existential conflict. They cannot afford to lose this. NATO claims it's an existential conflict, but the fact of the matter is NATO can survive if Russia wins in Ukraine because NATO survived without Ukraine for its entire history. Having Ukraine is not essential, but NATO's making it appear as if a Russian victory in Ukraine is a defeat for NATO. Therefore, what? Is NATO going to accept this defeat? Is NATO going to escalate to avoid the defeat? And it appears right now NATO is seeking to escalate.

We see them talking about providing not just Patriot batteries, but now there's discussion the British are going to cough up 14 Challenger 2 tanks in an effort to pressure Germany to give the green light for the release of the Leopard 2 tank. And, you know, for what purpose? Is it to simply drag on this conflict to fulfill Lloyd Austin's ambition of bringing harm to Russia? Or is it to actually enable Ukraine to win? But the Ukrainian victory means Ukraine would, according to Ukraine's own definition of victory, recapture the Donbass, reconquer Zaporizhzhia and Kherson and reconquer Kherson, which means they're going to war against Russia, mother Russia, because Russia has absorbed these nations under Article 64, they're Russia. This means they're confident. According to Zelensky, it would also require the recapture of Crimea. Yeah, that's what I meant. Yeah. Which is, I mean, there's no doubt about that being Russia. Inconceivable.

To quote the Sicilian from The Princess Bride, yes. And so, I mean, this kind of ridiculousness, I mean, when NATO is setting itself up to provide weaponry to Ukraine, when Ukraine says it needs this weaponry to do the inconceivable, it creates, at least on paper, the potential for thermonuclear war. Okay, so how does thermonuclear war, first of all, is there a difference between nuclear war and thermonuclear war? I'm just basically, you know, we're modernizing, you know, the Nagasaki and Hiroshima events. Today, you know, when you say nuclear war, the implication is atomic bombs. Thermonuclear war would be hydrogen bombs just okay weapons are are these um before we get into who's going to start it and what's going to happen just a little bit about the mechanics are these big boys as they called uh nagasaki that are dropped from a huge bomber or are they something that can be fired from uh from a tank well first they can't be fired from a tank but they can be fired from a tank? Well, first, they can't be fired from a tank,

but they can be fired from artillery pieces. And the artillery rounds today are as powerful as the bombs that were dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima. And do they have the same nuclear fallout that destroys life and property well beyond the area that they strike? Some of the smaller weapons are designed, we called them back in the 70s and 80s, neutron bombs.

They basically generate a lot of neutrons, which would kill people through radioactivity, but minimize the fallout so that, in know, hours or days after the device, you could drive through there without fear of dying of radioactivity. But the big boys, the ones that are the 150 to 300 megaton bombs that are sitting on most of our missiles, these are city killers. And when I say city killer, I mean the entire city, not just the heart of the city, like Nagasaki, Hiroshima, the entire city.

And the fallout from these will make the areas struck uninhabitable for thousands of years. And if you drop enough of them, then the earth becomes uninhabitable for thousands, which means mankind's gone. whoever uses these offensively, having designs on the real estate, whether it be Putin who wants to make it return to Russia, or whether it be NATO that wants it to be a country beholden to NATO, would use the lowest yield that they have so as to cause the least amount of permanent damage. Is that fair and sensible reasoning on my part? If this was going to be a limited nuclear conflict using tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine, for instance, it's reasonable to say, but Russia has said straight up, we're not dropping nuclear weapons on Ukraine. If we use nuclear weapons, we're

dropping them on London, Berlin, Paris, Washington, D.C. The world will end. See, Russia doesn't play limited nuclear war. Russia doesn't play these games. This is purely a construct in the Western mind that somehow you can limit nuclear conflict. Russia's made it clear. We won't be the first to use nuclear weapons, Vladimir Putin says. He also said we won't be the second and what that means is once you fire them at us we're not waiting for them to hit we're launching everything we got at you and we'll all die but at least we'll go to heaven as martyrs you'll go to heaven as the idiots who started a nuclear conflict does he have tactical nuclear weapons and does he have big boys? Let's just use that terminology, tactical nuclear weapons to mean you can go there a week later, people are dead, but you'd be alive surveying the property. Big boys meaning forget about it, everything's gone like Nagasaki was for

a couple of generations. You know, Russia got rid of its artillery delivered nuclear weapons a while ago, and those are the ones that would most tend to be so-called clean weapons. They do have tactical nuclear weapons that can be loaded on their short range ballistic missile force. But I don't know, to be honest, how clean they are, dirty they are. But the fact of the matter is, if a conflict goes nuclear, the big boys are going to be brought out and it's just going to get dirty. And Russia won't care because Russia has said at that point in time, the world ends. We know it. We're not we don't care if it's dirty, whatever. If you bring nuclear weapons against us, no matter what, we're going to kill everything. OK, do you believe Putin or let me say it differently.

Is Putin credible when he says he won't use nuclear weapons first? Absolutely. 100% credible. Well, then who would? We would. Our doctrine. Germany's not going to do it without Joe Biden saying, okay. Biden would be insane. He may have memory problems and he may look and act older than he is, but I don't think he's crazy, is he? Well, I don't know. Biden ran on a platform of bringing U.S. nuclear doctrine back to what he called sole purpose, which means the only purpose for us having these weapons is nuclear deterrence, sort of like what the Russians are saying. Okay, so who would fire the first round?

NATO with the approval of the United States and a consensus among NATO ministers? No, the United States would do it unilaterally per our doctrine. Remember, Joe Biden just published last October the National Security non-nuclear environment, which basically says we can make up any reason in the world we want to use nuclear weapons first. We are the nation that speaks about first strike, not Russia, the United States. So the nation is going to start this thing. If it goes nuclear, it's going to be us because that's our doctrine. That's how we're programmed to think. All right. So tell me how this would work.

A plane would leave from where, with what kind of a weapon on it, and it would drop this thing on what? Well, first of all, it'll start out probably, this is the way it's going to start out. The United States is building technologies and supporting doctrine that lead us to believe we can launch a preemptive non-nuclear strike against Russian leadership, that we can decapitate Moscow. So we believe that, for instance, if we deploy the Dark Eagle II into Germany, we can fire this hypersonic missile within five minutes of launch, we'll strike the Kremlin, killing Putin, throwing Russia into disarray. What will happen if we do that is, let's say we get lucky and we kill Putin. The Russians have something called the dead hand.

And the dead hand is just that. You killed Putin, doesn't matter. The dead hand hits the button and everything goes. There's nothing we can do to stop that. Now, there's some belief that we can combine this preemptive strike with a first strike nuclear attack against Russia's strategic arsenal so we can limit it so that whatever survives, even if the dead hand goes off, we will have ballistic missile

intercept capabilities on naval ships and elsewhere that can shoot these down to minimize the damage. So Russia gets destroyed and we either get nothing or just a very little and we declare victory. That's not how it's going to work though, because Russia has said, we know what you're doing. That's why we have invented, instance the poseidon which goes on the submarine that out there the poseidon is a nuclear powered giant torpedo when we fire it it just goes and it will show up on the coast of united states blow up and launch a massive tidal wave that'll destroy all the coastal cities they have this weapon it's ready it's there they have the sarmat which is a giant missile that doesn't fly into our missile defense. It flies over the South Pole, coming in from

behind and dropping, well, 13 nuclear weapons, avant-garde, hypersonic that cannot be intercepted, destroying American cities. The American nuclear thinkers are literally insane. And this is why it's so important that we get arms control back on the agenda. You know, we have the Russians put an ambassador in Washington, D.C., Anatoly Antonov, who negotiated the last New START treaty. Here's a chance for America to work with a Russian ambassador to get arms control on the table. And he just sits there doing nothing because we're ignoring him. Why are there no back channels of communication or even front channels of communication? Why isn't Tony Blinken talking to the Russian ambassador

or to his opposite number, Lavrov? I mean, do you want my honest answer? Cause Tony Blinken's an idiot. Um, because he's a moron. Sullivan's not an idiot. Why isn't it? Jake Sullivan's a propagandist, a communication specialist. Who's operating way out of his depth. He knows nothing about nuclear weapons, nothing about nuclear disarmament. There must be somebody that works for Joe Biden.

We got rid of them all judge have we got rid of them all judge we got rid of them all we used to have an entire you know padre uh we had a deep bench of arms control experts arm control specialists but like any muscle if you don't use it it atrophies we got rid of them all we don't have any more arms control specialists we have tony blinkensins, Jake Sullivans, and other propagandists. Talk to the, invite, not challenge you, I request you, invite the U.S. Secretary in the State Department responsible for arms control onto your show and ask this person who runs disarmament policy in America. And the honest answer she'll give you is the Defense Department. And when you have the people who have the weapons and are planning to use the weapons, and you're relying upon them to come up with the policy to get rid of the weapons,

you'll be turning blue in the face before this happens. We don't have an arms control community anymore worthy of the name. This is the danger of this. Tony Blinken needs to be fired on the spot and replaced with somebody who is thinking about the future of grandchildren and next generations. Because right now we have people playing stupid political games and they're putting the entire safety of the world on the line. At least the Russians have people ready to talk. We don't. We know that Joe Biden's not going to fire Tony Blinken.

We know from the discovery of the classified or national defense information documents at the Penn Biden Center that the Penn Biden Center was basically the Biden administration foreign policy team in waiting that the Penn Biden Center was actually run by Tony Blinken. To the extent that old joe has a brain tony is one is one half of it uh but i get uh i get your argument let's take a step back uh from armageddon and talk about uh putin what uh confronts put Putin if he wins this war? Is he confronted by 20 years of guerrilla warfare? No. Putin will be confronted by a chastised and defeated Europe that will come to grips with the reality that the disaster that has befallen them was because of the United States and their willingness to follow blindly the United States into the abyss. And hopefully a Europe that's ready to sit down and talk with Russia responsibly about what Russia wanted to talk about in December of 2021 before this war started, which is a new European security framework.

Already we hear Europeans saying we have to, Macron, even Schultz, others are saying, we have to look out for ourselves. We need to have a European security concept that is free of the pressures from the United States because this isn't working out. This isn't working out to our advantage. Now there's still some political elites out there who continue to articulate the American talking points. Put your fertile and experienced brain into the mind of the more super patriotic Ukrainians who don't care a whit about Zelensky, they just want to win. They're not going to lay over and let a Russian-oriented politician run their government, are they? Aren't they going to engage in some sort of perpetual war against whoever replaces Zelensky, whether it's a Ukrainian

who accepts reality or whether it's an import from Moscow? Well, the Russians know this as well. So this is why Russian victory will be predicated upon killing every one of those super patriotic Ukrainians possible. And if you've engaged Europe responsibly, meaning that you're not dictating terms of surrender to Europe, you're telling Europe, we want to live peacefully, we want to coexist with a new treaty-related European security framework, Europe won't give sanctuary to these Ukrainians. They'll be homeless. They'll have to go to the United States, Ukraine, Australia, and then they'll fester there, putting up their monuments to new Nazi-like heroes, but they'll have no power. But no,

Russia can't stop this war in a way that allows this kind of hateful anti-Russian ideology to continue to exist in Ukraine. Russia's only path to victory is to kill them all or drive them all out. If Joe Biden were to ask you to participate in a back channel, who would you talk to and what would you tell him? I guess you'd call Zelensky first and say, dial it back. I'm about to negotiate an end to this. No, I'd keep Zelensky. He's not a player. Zelensky's not a player. And I'd make him know that from the start. You're not a player. Well, that's why I dial it back. Stay out of

the picture. We're taking it. Nope. Stay in the picture all you want, Zelensky. You're going to die. What I'm telling Zelensky is we're not going to save you anymore. Okay. It's all on your shoulders. You can either choose to die now or later or you can surrender and live. But I don't care. I'm writing Ukraine off the picture and I'm dealing with the future of the world right now because Ukraine cannot be allowed to dictate the terms of survival to the world. That's what Ukraine thinks they can do. Survival be from the Russian perspective? Putin has said many times he doesn't want Kiev. He just wants the remainder of the country to be neutral and non-Western. Look, right now, if I were talking with the Russians, my number one priority would be to

stabilize relations. And that means we have to bring it into this conflict. And we need to do so in a manner that preserves Ukraine as a viable nation state. So I would be asking Putin to terminate the war short of taking Odessa to at least give Ukrainians access to the sea so that their economy can survive and that we will work with him and I'll work with myan allies to make sure there's no sanctuary for the banderists to work with them on making a truly neutral ukraine in exchange in exchange i need the russians to actually now sit down we have to do arms control we have to do arms control in a meaningful fashion um we have to get past this impasse but the problem here is the sort of hypocritical of me because it's not Russia that's causing the problems in arms control.

It's ourselves. So I have to convince the Russians that we're not serious about arms control. I have given you a nearly impossible task in this hypothetical. But there's no hope, according to you and your observations and your sources of information, there's no hope for a rational back channel or even overt series of negotiations to end this in a rational, meaningful, and quick way. Am I right? No, the United States right now is married to a fantasy, a fantasy that somehow a peace can be attained with Russia willingly giving up Ukraine, giving up the territories that they've absorbed already, including Crimea. That just isn't going to happen. Then they throw in another fantasy, which is Russia will subject itself to, you know,

international tribunals and Putin will go on trial. Do people understand that Putin literally just signed directives? He's withdrawn from the European community. He says none of the interaction that took place since the 90s, the treaties, the cooperation and all this stuff, it's all done. Russia is a sovereign state and it doesn't care one hoot about Europe. And tomorrow he's given a big speech. And a lot of people are saying that that speech is boom the flare in the air and the war begins and at that point in time russia will never negotiate with anybody i mean we we missed our window of opportunity once putin pulls the trigger and i think that trigger is going to be pulled tomorrow this ain't over until russia says it's over and that could be short it could be long who knows? I mean, the British are sending 14 Challenger tanks.

Wow. 14, Judge. That's a company. You know how long a company in isolation survives on the battlefield? Not very long. Not very long. Yeah. When Zeluzhny, I think I have the name right, the commander-in-chief of the russian military gave that interview to um the

economist magazine where zielinski sat there while shaluzny did the talking talking yeah and he said he wanted 500 tanks you said to me he wants an army oh it's an army yeah so greg britain's giving him a company wow right right scott r, always a pleasure, man. Very, very fascinating, fascinating, terrifying, but fascinating insight. Come back and visit us again soon. Okay, Judge, thank you very much. Before you go, how's the book going? Disarmament in the Name of Perestroika. Let me say to those of you watching, and I can see the numbers are huge, you like Ritter, get his book. How's it going?

Book's doing well. I just had a very good speaking engagement in New York City and, you know, a lot of support for the book and it continues to grow. So thank you very much for your support. Of course. All the best. Judge Napolitano for judging freedom.