It’s a book well worth reading and absorbing. It unfortunately fails to recognize the existence of evil people. It also, wrongly, blames America for the proliferation of nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles when other nations and cultures are culpable in the development of their nuclear arsenals.
Stalin, for example knew as more than President Truman did about the Atomic bombs because Stalin had spies inside the Manhattan project. Stalin saved many years of development by stealing the plans to build atomic bombs. If America had stopped building atomic bombs Stalin and the Soviet Union Russia could have and probably would have used them in Europe and America.
America doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Neither does evil. Nor do evil people who want to, for example, annihilate Israel and America as Iran has repeatedly told anyone who would listen.
But Ritter holds America accountable for increasing the nuclear arsenal of the entire world. Even worse, Ritter want’s America to destroy all of our nuclear weapons. He proposes we do it first and he thinks that will cause all other nations to destroy theirs. If America were to do that then any pipsqueak with one thermonuclear bomb would be able to rule the world. Ritter hasn’t come to that conclusion. Neither has for example al-Qaida, Hamas or Iran. Unilateral disarmament is suicide.
There are alternatives to nuclear war but there is no alternative to the question should evil nations be able to rule people? From clubs to gunpowder to plutonium bombs, the history of the human race has been periodically interrupted by war. To give up the ability of defense would guarantee offense by another power. And in some circumstances offense by America is justified which means nuclear weapons are needed because the one who has the biggest weapons wins. History shows that. Ritter needs to add that into his idea that America should just disarm.
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