By Independent News Roundup
While speaking to George Galloway on his Aug. 3 MOATS show, former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter gave a sober assessment of Trump’s recent threat to deploy two Ohio-class submarines closer to Russia. Excerpts of his comments are included below:
“Mr. Trump deployed or claims to have ordered the deployment or redeployment of two Ohio-class submarines, and this is a very important term that I’m about to use: ‘closer to Russian shores.’ I’ll tell you why this is scary and should scare the daylights out of everybody. ‘Closer to Russian shores’ because of a tweet that Dmitry Medvedev put out in response to mean-tweeting by Lindsey Graham and Donald Trump which sort of hinted at not only the sanctioning of Russia, but also the possibility of a preemptive strike against Russian leadership. And so Medvedev said, ‘Look, you know, this crazy talk. You guys might want to watch The Walking Dead to see what America is going to look like after a nuclear strike. And remember, we have the Dead Hand….’
“What is the Dead Hand? The Dead Hand was a system created in the 1980s by the then-Soviet Union in response to increased nuclear strike capability by the United States. One of them was Pershing II missiles that were getting ready to be deployed to West Germany … this created the potential of decapitation. But there was also the Ohio-class submarine armed with these new Trident missiles. And the Russians feared a scenario—get ready for what I’m about to say—where the Ohio-class submarines would come close to Russian shores, launch their Trident missiles on a reduced trajectory where they could strike Russian missile silos, command and control, and other facilities within 20 minutes of launch. The combined capacity of the Pershing II and the Trident submarine led the Soviets to say the United States has the ability to launch a very effective preemptive strike that could take out our command and control, take out our missiles, and we’re in a lot of trouble. So, they came up with what they call the Dead Hand, the perimeter system.”
Ritter then goes on: “And what does the President of the United States do? Deploy two Ohio-class submarines using the exact same threat-model that caused the Soviets to create the perimeter and the Russians to sustain the perimeter system. This is insanity. This is as dangerous as it gets, because now the Russians have to take this deployment seriously. They have to act as if the United States is preparing for a preemptive nuclear strike…. Now you have the Russians monitoring this who are saying: ‘What are you doing? Getting ready for a preemptive strike against Russia?’ Which means now the new Russian doctrine is they’re going to be increasing their alert threshold, and if they detect additional movement, the Russians may be called upon to preempt our preemption. We’re in a situation now where this has stopped being funny. This is not about mean tweets and overreaction to the President being stupid and feeding every meme generation device out there. This is about the survival of the world,” Ritter warned.
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