Oct. 22, 2018 - Steve Pieczenik
04:50
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| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| Hi, Dr. | |
| Buchanek, Steve Speaks. | |
| Today I want to talk about the fact that President Trump has correctly announced that we, the United States, will no longer be part of the INF Treaty with Russia. | |
| What is the INF Treaty? | |
| It relates to the intermediate nuclear force structures that we had in the United States as well as in Europe. | |
| Basically what it says is that Putin has not lived up to his part of the bargain. | |
| In 2007 he announced that he wanted to leave the INF Treaty. | |
| In 2014 he struck a missile and basically that missile was a strategic missile which went about 300 miles. | |
| The Nuclear Force Treaty relates to missiles which can travel from 300 to 3000 miles. | |
| And what it does in particular, it protects through the concept of mutual assured destruction, Europe. | |
| And what this does is that the missiles that are located in Russia or the Soviet Union, the missiles that are located in Europe, act as a deterrent to each other in terms of numbers and in terms of structure. | |
| Usually we have about 3,000 missiles. | |
| In 1991, we destroyed 1,000 of our cruise missiles in Europe, and the Russians destroyed about 2,000 out of 3,000 or 4,000 missiles that they had. | |
| Now, how did this all come about? | |
| The INF Treaty was started by Ronald Reagan. | |
| I was part of a group that initiated that treaty. | |
| My particular job was to develop the strategy and tactics for Ronald Reagan vis-à-vis Gorbachev, who was then Secretary General of the Soviet Party. | |
| Both men were quite bright. | |
| Both men were highly intelligent and were knowledgeable concerning the nature and quality of the missile systems that they had. | |
| The most important part was the fact that both men understood the concept of mutual assured destruction, which meant that if we have 3,000 missiles, the Russians have 3,000 missiles, we're not going to go off and shoot off a missile because the numbers of missiles act as a deterrent, so we didn't want to get into first strike capability. | |
| I worked at that time with a very talented group of operatives at the CIA. One was the head of The political profiles, Jerry Post, who is well identified, and the other one was an extremely talented national intelligence officer by the name of Fritz Ehrmeth. | |
| Fritz was in charge of really developing the entire strategy and tactics for the INF Treaty discussions in Reykjavik, Iceland. | |
| And he and I worked closely together, and he asked me, what would be the opening moves, the middle moves, and the end moves? | |
| Without getting into specifics, what we did was to outline the personality of Reagan who was witty, sharp, At the time, also could hold his own in terms of dealing with somebody who was an engineer like Gorbachev, who was also extremely bright, very personable, but extremely verbose. | |
| So we had a laconic individual in the persona of Reagan, and we had a very verbose individual in the persona of Gorbachev. | |
| Needless to say, they both came to an agreement which was called the INF Treaty. | |
| That treaty was solidified in 1986 and eventually the missiles were destroyed in 1991. | |
| What happened in 2004 is that Putin announced he would no longer abide by the INF Treaty and in 2014 he shot off a cruise missile. | |
| What that does is to put the United States in a very awkward position of asymmetrical power. | |
| We no longer have what we call mutual assured destruction, which means that we have to have some type of nuclear parity with Russia in order to deter the Russians from increasing their number of cruise missiles or deciding to use the cruise missiles as Gorbachev had done in 2014 in a situation that related to the Ukraine. | |
| Now, I'm not warmongering. | |
| This is not about warmongering. | |
| This is about explaining to you, the public, how we came to this treaty and who was involved. | |
| Let me quote Yahub Khan of Pakistan. | |
| He said the following, We have nuclear missiles. | |
| We will test them. | |
| And if need be, we will use them. | |
| God help us that that occasion will never occur. |
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