Scott Ritter
Scott Ritter is a former Marine intelligence officer who served in the former Soviet Union, implementing arms control agreements, and on the staff of General Norman Schwartzkopf during the Gulf War, where he played a critical role in the hunt for Iraqi SCUD missiles. From 1991 until 1998, Mr. Ritter served as a Chief Inspector for the United Nations in Iraq, leading the search for Iraq’s proscribed weapons of mass destruction. Mr. Ritter was a vocal critic of the American decision to go to war with Iraq.
All Books By Scott Ritter
Disarmament in the Time of Perestroika
- By: Scott Ritter
- Narrator: Stefan Rudnicki
- Length: 18 hours 43 minutes
- Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
- Publish date: January 01, 2022
- Language: English
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4.83(5 ratings)
Disarmament in the Time of Perestroika is the definitive history of the implementation of the INF Treaty signed by Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan in all its complexities, and the lengths both sides went to “trust, but verify” this successful and unique historic disarmament process. It demonstrates how two nations fundamentally at odds with one another could come together and rid the world of weapons which threatened international peace and security and, indeed, all of humanity. Those engaged were pioneers in what was to be the new frontier of superpower arms control–on-site inspection–that would define compliance verification for future treaties and agreements to come. Their work represents not just a guide to but the standard upon which all future on-site inspections will be based and judged.
Ritter traces in great detail the formation of the On-Site Inspection Agency, who was involved, and how a technologically advanced compliance verification system was installed outside the gates of one of the most sensitive military industrial facilities in the remote Soviet city of Votkinsk, nestled in the foothills of the Ural Mountains in the Soviet Union. He draws upon his own personal history– occasionally hilarious, occasionally fraught with peril– as well as the recollections of the other inspectors and personnel involved, and an extensive archive of reports and memoranda relating to the work of OSIA to tell the story of how OSIA was created, and the first three years of inspection operations at the Votkinsk portal monitoring facility. The Votkinsk Portal, circa December 1988, was the wild, wild East of arms control, a place where the inspectors and inspected alike were writing the rules of the game as it played out before them.
This treaty implementation did not occur in a geopolitical vacuum. Ritter captures, on a human level, the historic changes taking place inside the Soviet Union under the leadership of Mikhail Gorbachev due to the new policies of perestroika and glasnost that gripped the Soviet Union during this time, and their real and meaningful impact on the lives of the Soviet people, and the economic functioning of the Soviet nation. Much of it was for the worse.
The INF treaty was not only born of these new policies, but also helped trigger meaningful changes inside the Soviet Union due to the economic and political implications brought on by the cessation of missile production in a factory town whose lifeblood was missile production.
... Read moreEndgame
- By: Scott Ritter
- Narrator: Scott Ritter
- Length: 3 hours 6 minutes
- Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio
- Publish date: January 01, 1999
- Language: English
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3.39(22 ratings)
WHAT SHOULD WE DO ABOUT IRAQ?
Scott Ritter spent seven years in Iraq as an arms inspector for the United Nations. His 1998 resignation as the U.N.’s chief weapons inspector there made front-page headlines around the world. In Endgame, Ritter draws on his experiences to take us inside Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and to explain where U.S. policy in Iraq went wrong.
Ritter describes in detail the ways that Saddam tried to foil inspectors by concealing his weapons programs. He brings readers with him inside some of Iraq’s most carefully guarded sites and shows us dramatic face-offs between U.N. inspectors and hostile Iraqi guards and officials. But Ritter criticizes the U.S. for squandering an international consensus on Iraq and trying to use the inspections process for uniquely American goals. He argues strongly against the proposed American military strike against Iraq, suggesting instead a bold and innovative solution to the long-standing crisis.