Scott Horton: Joe Cirincione Told Me ‘a Lot of What We Did Set the Stage for What Putin Is Doing’

EXCERPT:

HORTON: "And if you’ll indulge me for a moment, I would like to just read real carefully a little bit from my book here. This is a real weapons expert, I’m sure you’re familiar with this man, Joe Cirincione from Washington D.C., he's an anti-nuclear weapons activist from the Ploughshares Fund and the Quincy Institute up until recently, and I interviewed him two days after the war began and it’s the last chapter in my book 'Hotter Than the Sun' here. And he said very clearly here, sir, he said, 'There’s nothing that we did that justifies what Putin is doing. Let’s be clear about that. But a lot of what we did set the stage for what Putin is doing. The NATO expansion that George Kennan warned us at the time, in the 1990s when the Warsaw Pact collapsed and we were just starting to let those Warsaw Pact countries into NATO, he warned that this was going to stimulate the worst kind of militaristic and revisionist nationalist fears in Russia, which it did. Obama was warned when he put in what he said were defensive missiles, which is true. We were putting Interceptors in Poland and Romania to try to intercept an Iranian ICBM should they develop a nuclear weapon with an ICBM. They have developed neither, but we still put those missiles in Poland and Romania. The problem is that these are the same kinds of missile launchers that we have on our Aegis cruisers and destroyers. In fact, it’s called the land-based Aegis system. And while we have Interceptors in them now, those same missile tubes could house offensive nuclear-tipped missiles like the Tomahawk cruise missile and Russia wouldn’t know what was in the tubes because there’s no arrangement for inspections.' And so, Cirincione goes on at length to explain how he told — he was on an advisory position in the Obama government, and he warned them about this, and he says they laughed off Russian concerns as ridiculous and how that helped, as he explains, lead to this current crisis, that the Americans simply refused to take those concerns seriously. And I think Joe Cirincione probably does as good of a job as anyone in America in explaining the truth that."