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Feb. 3, 2026 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
26:40
Scott Ritter : Trump Ignites a New Nuclear Arms Race
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Government's Illegitimate Force 00:01:18
Undeclared wars are commonplace.
Tragically, our government engages in preemptive war, otherwise known as aggression, with no complaints from the American people.
Sadly, we have become accustomed to living with the illegitimate use of force by government.
To develop a truly free society, the issue of initiating force must be understood and rejected.
What if sometimes to love your country, you had to alter or abolish the government?
What if Jefferson was right?
What if that government is best which governs least?
What if it is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong?
What if it is better to perish fighting for freedom than to live as a slave?
What if freedom's greatest hour of danger is now hi everyone?
Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Ajudging Freedom.
Today is Tuesday, February 3rd, 2026.
Scott Ritter will be with us in just a moment on this intriguing topic.
Is President Trump about to launch a new arms race?
But first this.
New Arms Race Risks 00:16:00
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Scott Ritter, welcome here, my dear friend.
Before we get into the potential of President Trump igniting an arms race by not addressing President Putin's offer to extend the new start to the breaking news.
Did an Iranian drone attempt to attack the USS Abraham Lincoln and was it shot down by an American jet fighter?
Well, I don't know if an Iranian drone attempted to attack the USA Abraham Lincoln.
An Iranian drone may have been searching for the Abraham Lincoln and was deemed to be a threat and was shot down by an American fighter.
You know, I think the United States is very protective of this legacy strategic asset known as the Carrier Battle Group.
We've known for some time that there are vulnerabilities attached to this weapon.
We're worried about area denial weapons, ballistic missiles.
If you remember a while back, under the Biden administration, actually, when the commander of the Marine Corps basically said, I'm directing the Marine Corps to change every way it does amphibious warfare because we relied on legacy systems, big amphibious warfare ships where you put 900 Marines on it.
And if we close with nations that have ballistic missiles, we're going to lose that ship and we're going to lose all the Marines.
So we need to change the way we're doing business.
It's the same holds true with an aircraft carrier.
If an aircraft carrier gets in range of a nation that has ballistic missiles that have hypersonic capability of maneuvering warheads with advanced targeting systems, we're going to lose an aircraft carrier.
And Iran is one of those nations that has missiles capabilities of this nature.
So what we're doing is keeping the carrier, you know, removed from Iran a distance, and we don't want the Iranians to know where this carrier is.
So the Iranians are out there crisscrossing the ocean with drones looking for it.
And I think a drone got a little too close and was shot down.
But the use of drones for surveillance purposes is obviously loyal.
Excuse me, it's obviously legal.
We all do it.
Yeah, just don't get too close to an aircraft carrier.
All right.
Was there also, as far as you know, an effort by Iranian gunboats to detain or deter or interfere with the travel of an American oil tanker?
There was an American flag tanker that came into contact with Iranian vessels that I think attempted to call it over.
Look, the United States advertently or inadvertently violates Iranian territorial waters on a regular basis.
If you're not careful as you go through the Strait of Hormuz and you allow your ship to drip off, you can drift into Iranian territorial waters.
It happens frequently.
And a ship may have drifted in and the Iranians called it out and the ship kept going.
Who knows?
I don't know all the details of it, but it wouldn't shock me if something like that occurred.
What is the background on the new START treaty that expires at the end of the day on Thursday this week?
And do we know why the Trump administration has not responded to President Putin's offer to extend its terms?
Well, we call it New START because it replaced the old START treaty, the original START treaty that was signed in 1991 between President Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev.
There were different iterations of it.
Start two actually got signed and was going to be ratified, but the Russians pulled ratification because the United States cheats and does a whole bunch of other stuff.
Start three never got out of the starting box because, again, because what the United States was doing with anti-ballistic missiles.
START expired.
And when START expired, we needed a new START treaty.
So in 2010, Barack Obama sent a negotiating team led by Rose Gutamüller.
And she met with a Russian negotiating team led by Anatoly Antonov.
He was the former ambassador, Russian ambassador of the United States.
He was directed by Medvedev to negotiate a new treaty.
There's some important things here that people need to keep in mind.
First of all, Congress, when talking to the Obama administration, said we'll be willing to ratify a new START treaty so long as there's no break in verification between the old start and the new start.
Why?
Because Congress had grown comfortable with knowing what the Russians were up to.
And that's what arms control does.
It not only puts caps on it, but through compliance verification inspections, the exchange of data, you become comfortable with what the other side has, what they're doing with it, and you're not afraid of it.
So Congress said, we'll support this treaty as long as there's not a gap.
But if there's a gap and we lose touch with what the Russians are doing, we won't support this treaty because we won't have confidence in the numbers.
That's what I'm trying to tell you.
When it expires and it's not extended, that cap 1,550, we're suddenly going to say, well, we don't know.
Do the Russians have 1,550?
Did they get rid of some?
Did they build more?
We don't know because we don't have inspectors.
We're not exchanging data.
Suddenly becomes a big unknown.
And from that fear, we tend to react.
The other factor in, too, is China.
China, because of, again, the genius of Donald Trump in his first term, where he changed the nuclear employment plan so we could carry out a nuclear first strike against China, because the Chinese said, hey, wait a minute, you're threatening to come to the aid of Taiwan and attack us.
We have hotheads, you know, the equivalent of Pete Hegseth.
We'll kill them.
We'll knock them, nuke them.
We got them taken care of.
The Chinese went, okay, well, you won't because we're going to build up our nuclear capability so that we can ride out your attack and launch an attack against you.
And the United States went, well, we can't do that, so we need more nuclear weapons.
But we're limited because we have 1,550 capped by the New START Treaty.
So there's a lot of people saying we have to let this treaty die so we can build more nuclear weapons or put more warheads on existing nuclear weapons so we have enough to handle the Russian target set and the Chinese target set.
So there's a lot of factors going in, but the real point I want to make is that New START didn't happen in a vacuum.
As I said, it was linked to START Treaty, but the START Treaty was linked to the INF Treaty, which created on-site inspections, by the way.
Again, you're talking to the first inspector on the ground in the Soviet Union to implement the INF Treaty.
That's my legacy.
I'm putting that flag wherever I can.
But I'm very proud of that fact.
But the point is, you know, the INF Treaty invented on-site inspection-based compliance monitoring and verification efforts.
Prior to that, we had the SALT strategic arms limitation treaties.
Why did we talk about limiting?
Because we had the anti-ballistic missile treaty, which said we have to stop this arms race.
This isn't the first time we've had an arms race.
We had an arms race back in the 1960s.
We were building missiles and missiles and missiles.
And we went from a few hundred warheads to a couple thousand to 30,000 warheads on each side.
And we were going to build more until finally the sanity kicked in.
We said, stop mutually assured destruction, anti-ballistic missile defense.
Since we can't defend ourselves, we don't need all these numbers.
We can start limiting and start reducing them.
And the anti-ballistic missile treaty was founded on the principles of the non-proliferation treaty that basically said we don't want to proliferate nuclear weapons.
We want to have them in the hands of the nations that have them, and they need to promise to get rid of them.
So the ABM Treaty began a cycle that saw us go from 30,000 to 5,000 to 4,000 to 1,550 where we are today, slowly living up to the promise of the NPT.
When New Start expires, wipe the board clean.
None of that counts anymore.
We go back to square one.
And when I say square one, I mean the end of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty.
You're going to see the proliferation of nuclear weapons in nation states that for decades have not gone that route because of the arms control legacy that Donald Trump is getting ready to flush down the toilet.
Why would Trump and Hag Seth and Rubio want another arms race after the lessons of the time period that you've just described?
Because they're ignorant as the day is long, because they're ideologues, they're not specialists.
You know, here's the other problem.
All that treaty stuff I was talking about, you know, it started, there was a guy named Paul Nietzsche.
He was a guy that was at Hiroshima.
He did one of the studies after Hiroshima.
He knows what nuclear weapons are.
He's also the guy that wrote NSC 68, which was the Cold War containment that militarized, created the Cold War back in 1950.
And he's been around.
He was the guy that was the negotiator for the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty.
He went from, you know, seeing nuclear weapons, the birth of nuclear weapons.
He understood what they were, and he helped create a treaty that got rid of them.
The people that he helped mentor, the arms control specialists, you know, all developed during this, the guys who negotiated MPT, who negotiated ABM.
You know, Ray McGovern.
He was involved in the ABM treaty in the early ages of the psaltery.
You know me, a guy who was involved in INF and START.
We had a whole bunch of people who specialized in this.
And then we just stopped caring.
I just wrote a three-part series in my substack about the end of the ABM treaty, but it talks about how the linkage with all the other treaties as well.
You know, the thing is, when we have these specialists that do this job, it was based upon the notion of equality, parity.
We feared the Soviets because we knew what they had.
When the Soviet Union collapsed and George W. Bush decided he was going to get out of the anti-ballistic missile treaty so that he could build a missile defense shield, Vladimir Putin said, if you do this, first of all, we're going to, you know, we'll never ratify START 3.
We're going to get rid of that.
And we may have to put warheads back on our missiles and we have to build new missiles.
And Colin Powell, of all the people who knows better, Colin Powell, because Colin Powell was around in INF and START.
He knows better.
Colin Powell said, we're not worried about that because they lost the Cold War and they don't have the capabilities.
They can do anything they want.
We're not concerned about that.
Well, guess what they did?
They modernized everything.
They have the most advanced system today.
But that's the mindset that set in.
If you don't exercise a muscle, that muscle atrophies.
Arms control is a muscle.
It needs to be exercised intellectually.
It needs to be exercised physically through on-site inspection and the other work.
When we stop doing it, the muscles atrophy and it gets replaced by ideologues who buy into the nonsense that we are an unmatched hegemon who gets to dictate outcomes anytime we want.
And we have an arms control community that has never caught up with reality.
Vladimir Putin tried to warn us about this in 2016.
He told American journalists, hey, this ABM treaty, you're going to make us build weapons we don't really want to build, but we're going to have no choice.
2018, he came out and said, you weren't listening to me.
Let me introduce Sarmat.
Let me introduce Avant-Garde.
Let me introduce Poseidon.
Are you listening to me now?
And the answer was no, because then they had to go in and build it and build these missiles.
And now he's put them on active combat duty.
Russia has the most advanced nuclear weapons program in the world because of what we did, not because they wanted it, but because we withdrew from the anti-ballistic missile treaty and we didn't treat them seriously.
And so we are reaping what we sow.
They say, sow the wind, reap the whirlwind.
Well, the whirlwind's head into town, people.
And guess what?
Russia's already made the capital investment.
Their weapons exist.
We haven't made the capital investment.
All the things that Donald Trump wants to do, we're going to have to start from scratch.
And we don't have the money for that.
All the things that Donald Trump wants to do are based on almost a childlike attitude of we got to be bigger, better, and stronger than they are, even though we already all have enough nuclear weapons to do what to the earth, turn it into a sender.
400 times.
Look, but again, the beautiful thing about being a historian is that the, you know, that old saying that those who fail to learn the lessons of history are doomed to.
Well, guys, this ain't the first rodeo.
All right.
People like me have been around a long time.
People like Ray McGovern have been around a lot longer.
All the arguments you hear that you think are innovative coming from the Trump administration, they've been said before.
The same arguments were made in the 60s.
The same arguments are made in the 70s.
The same arguments are made in the 80s.
The same concept of we have to be the unmatched nuclear superpower.
We have to have all the strength.
We're America.
We can do this.
And every time we did it, we ran up against the brick wall of reality called Russia or the Soviet Union.
And then people like me and like Ray and every stepped in and we went, we got this, boys.
Stop that nonsense about being unmatched nuclear hegemon.
Let reality kick in.
The arms controllers came in and we solved the problems.
We got back to parity.
We calmed things down.
But every generation, these morons who are sitting in the basement eating raw meat, looking at old John Wayne videos are coming out going, hey, we've got to be bigger and stronger than everybody because we're America.
And they come out and they convince stupid politicians because politicians, you get votes by going USA, USA, USA.
You know how you don't get votes?
Hey, maybe we're not as strong as we think we are, guys.
What do you mean we're not strong, says the average American from their suburban home?
What do you mean we're not strong?
We're America.
We can do anything.
We can't, guys.
And there used to be smarter people.
Richard Nixon learned that lesson.
Ronald Reagan learned that lesson.
Nobody called Nixon or Reagan weak.
They learned this lesson.
Donald Trump's not learning the lesson.
He's listening to stupid people.
I mean, Marco Rubio is just a Cold War.
You hates Russia.
Pete Hegseth, as I've said before, he's just as ignorant as the day is long.
He should never have risen above, you know, battalion operations officer, let alone become Secretary of Defense.
Begram and Beyond 00:08:37
Go back, look at the names that are carved on the pantheon of history who were secretaries of defense.
These are people who were brilliant, people who knew what they were doing, people who had innovative ways of thinking.
Pete Hegseth just wants to do a goddamn push-up.
I don't want a Secretary of Defense that does a push-up.
I want a Secretary of Defense that knows about, you know, throwaway, knows about megatonage, and knows what it costs to produce a missile.
I don't want some idiot that goes, we can do it because we're America.
We're America and we can do anything.
No, Pete, you're fired.
We should fire them.
But we're not going to because Donald Trump loves this kind of stuff because Donald Trump likewise isn't.
Richard Nixon came from a briefing.
I mean, it started with John F. Kennedy.
It came from the first briefing that was given about the integrated operations plan, the nuclear war plan.
He walked down and he went, and we call ourselves the human race.
We're not going to do that.
I'm not going to give the orders to cause hundreds of millions of people to die.
And John F. Kenny began the pushback against the defense industry saying no to your stupid nuclear war plans.
We have to have a better way of doing business than just killing everybody.
Lyndon Johnson did the same thing.
Richard Nixon came out and said, this is insanity.
You have to give me options.
You can't just have me kill everybody.
Gerald Ford, all the presidents, Ronald Reagan woke up and said, my God, you want me to do what?
To destroy the world?
We have Donald Trump right now who just doesn't believe it.
It doesn't take this seriously.
Where are the Chinese in this, Scott?
Chinese just published a arms control paper last fall that said, look, we're doing what we're doing because the United States has threatened us with preemptive nuclear attack.
Remember, ladies and gentlemen, we live in a cause and effect world.
Nothing happens in a vacuum.
So for all the idiots, I go, oh, the Chinese.
The Chinese were satisfied with having 200 nuclear weapons not loaded on their missiles, their missiles not in a fully operational status.
And they're willing to let that happen because they basically were saying, if you attack us, we'll have enough survive that we can get to you.
And what we said is, no, we want to be able to kill all your missiles in the silo and therefore neuter you so you can't oppose us when we come to Taiwan.
Listen to what people are saying about Bagram.
I mean, it's hilarious that people aren't picking up on this.
You know, everybody thought we were in Afghanistan because of the global war on terror.
And we had this giant airfield in Begram.
And, you know, we had a lot of fighter airplanes stationed there.
And Listen to the people saying, well, we have to get back to Begram because look where it is on the map.
Look where our planes could go when they take off.
They could go over western China where the Chinese are, you know, digging holes in the ground, putting missiles on.
We need Begram so that we can interdict the Chinese missiles.
And now we're out of Begram and we lost that capability.
The Chinese aren't stupid.
They know what we're doing.
So the Chinese now are modernizing their nuclear force.
But we're projecting because we mirror image everything.
We're saying, well, they're going to try and match us at war at warhead.
The Chinese are saying, no, we just need 600 now because now you can't preemptively take us out.
And what we have surviving, we can destroy you.
But the Chinese have also said, because Trump is saying, we have to get the Chinese to the table.
And the Chinese are saying, hey, don't talk to us about coming to the table.
We had 200.
You had 1,550.
If you want us to come to the table, why don't you drop your numbers first?
Get your numbers down to where we are.
We don't want to bring our numbers up to you.
Get your numbers down.
And the Chinese in their white paper said it's important for Russia and the United States to get their collective act together to re-engage on arms control so that the nations that have the largest nuclear war weapons arsenals in the world stabilize their situation.
Get your act together, stabilize your situation, and then invite us to the table.
But don't sit here and try and bully us into coming to this table with some stupidity about you're afraid of our nuclear weapons, our 200, and then you threaten us with a preemptive nuclear strike so we go to 600 and now we're the problem.
No, America, you're the problem.
Why does Trump want to attack Iran?
He doesn't want to attack Iran.
This is just Donald Trump's folly.
If he thought he could get away with it, if he thought he could pull a Venezuela, you know, come in and do a quick strike and get the objectives.
But the objectives that need to be gotten are regime change.
And it has to happen quick.
The Israelis have put Donald Trump on notice that if there is an attack against Iran, that it has to kill the regime.
And it has to happen quickly, like three to five days, because Israel could absorb 700 Iranian ballistic missiles and no more.
Israel doesn't want to absorb 700 missiles unless the price that they're paying by absorbing these missiles results in an outcome that has the theocracy eliminated and Iran eliminated as a threat.
And so Donald Trump now is looking at it and his military people are saying, can't do it, boss.
Can't accomplish that.
That mission cannot be accomplished.
He's sending all the ballistic missile defense forces in the region.
It's not enough.
His experts are saying, you know, boss, during that 12-day war, we had all the FAD batteries and the Patriot III batteries integrated with the Aero 3s, the David Slings, and the Aegis, and we couldn't stop the missiles.
Now you're sending in resources to the Middle East that aren't nearly what we had to defend Israel.
And you think they're going to defend our bases?
Isn't going to happen, boss.
If we go to war, they're going to take out our bases and thousands of Americans are coming home in body bags.
And we can't win this war.
It's going to last forever.
And Donald Trump finally, his brain went, that means I lose the midterm.
And now we come to the real crux of the problem.
This is about American politics.
Donald Trump's already in trouble because of Milwaukee.
I mean, he's what nice.
Yeah, Minneapolis.
I'm sorry.
You know, ICE has destroyed his credibility.
And there's a good chance he's going to lose the house just on ICE alone.
Now, if he gets us involved in a war with Iran where thousands of Americans die and it's a long, dragged out, dragged out fight, costing us hundreds of billions of dollars, no end in sight, thousands of American dead, he's done.
And by done, I mean he doesn't just lose the house.
You lose the house, you're going to be impeached every day of the week for the rest of his term.
That's just the reality.
Democrats have done that's going to happen.
You lose the Senate, you could become convicted.
Then you go to jail.
So Donald Trump is looking at his political future and personal future being flushed down the toilet of life because of his stupidity.
He is not going to attack Iran because the military can't guarantee him the quick victory he must have.
So he's done a lot of blustering, but now he's at the negotiating table.
And I think we're going to be at the negotiating table for a long time, up until at least the midterms come in.
Does Benjamin Netanyahu understand that the United States cannot achieve any military objective in Iran?
Oh, yes.
Look, it was Benjamin Netanyahu that called up Donald Trump at the end of the 12-day war, begging Donald Trump to intervene and stop the Iranian missiles from hitting Israel because Iran was dialed in.
The final days of the war, Iran was sending a missile in.
It was hitting a target, and the Israelis knew exactly what that target was.
They wouldn't let anybody else see, but the Israelis knew that the Iranians hit a room or a facility that was very specialized, very sensitive, that you could only know about if you had really good intelligence.
And they obliterated it.
And the Israelis went, wait a minute, they're starting to take out all the really high-value stuff.
We need this war to end because we can't stop those missiles.
If this continues, it's really going to hurt.
So they begged Donald Trump to stop the war.
Israel's anti-ballistic missile capability has not improved.
Iranian ballistic missile strike capability has improved.
The Israelis are the ones telling Donald Trump, don't attack unless you can kill him.
And Donald Trump's being told by his people, we can't kill him.
So they know that.
But now Netanyahu has to play political games because he's in a political crisis as well.
So he has to be seen as not being afraid of an attack, but it's an American decision.
And so that's why you're seeing some noise out of there.
But the Israelis have been telling the United States, do not pull the trigger unless you can guarantee that you kill the king.
Don't strike the king unless you can kill him.
This is a series of two extraordinary analyses, Scott, about nuclear weapons and about the U.S., Israel, and Iran.
This is just truly remarkable and eye-opening.
Don't Strike the King 00:00:41
And I hope a lot of people pay attention to what you've said.
We know somebody in the West Wing watches us.
Maybe some of this will make its way into the Oval Office.
I don't know.
He's got a very thick skull, and he's got his own issues domestically to deal with.
But what you've said is so rational.
Thank you, my dear friend.
Thank you for joining us.
I know you've had a busy day, and maybe it's not yet over, but thank you for all your time with us, Scotty.
Well, thanks for having me.
Thanks.
Sure.
We'll see you again soon.
Coming up tomorrow on Wednesday at 8 in the morning, Gilbert Doctorow.
At 10 in the morning, Colonel Bill Astori.
At 1 in the afternoon, Professor Glenn Deason.
At 2 in the afternoon, Colonel Douglas McGregor.
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