I'm old enough to remember the excitement that most of the world felt when Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev signed the
Treaty Between the United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics on the Elimination of Their Intermediate-Range and Shorter-Range Missiles - better known as the
Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty. It was one of those epoch defining moments, with two seemingly implacable enemies, having stared each other down across the so-called Iron Curtain, and having engaged in a costly and potentially disastrous arms race, actually concluded that it was all rather pointless and certainly too dangerous to continue, and that a much better idea - and indeed a perfectly feasible one - was to sit down and come to an arrangement that benefited both sides, and made nuclear confrontation far less likely.
The result was a treaty, signed by the leaders of both countries in 1987, which eliminated missiles with a range of 500-5,500km, fired from land-based launchers. The purpose of this treaty was to guarantee (as much as such guarantees are possible) the security of Europe, which until that point had become a focal point of possible nuclear confrontation between the two sides, with American BGM-109G ground-launched cruise missiles
based in Great Britain, West Germany, Belgium, Italy, and the Netherland, and Soviet SS-20s missiles
based in East Germany and Czechoslovakia, as well as on the territory of Russia.
Comment: Witt likely saw some of the nasty things the US was planning against Iran and couldn't in good conscience go along with it. That this all happened six years ago and is only now being put in the news shows this is more about propaganda against Iran than anything else.