George Lee Butler: Second Chance II-Reconnaissance
Note: This entry is one in a series that tells some of the story of George Lee Butler. In the early 1990’s, General Butler served as the Commander in Chief of the Strategic Air Command, the Air Force command in charge of delivering our nuclear weapons. After retiring from the Air Force in 1994, Butler came eventually to lead efforts for their elimination. Quotations in this piece will be cited to the page numbers where the material appears in Volume II of George Lee Butler’s memoir, Uncommon Cause: A Life at Odds with Convention, Outskirts Press (2016).
There is a tide in the affairs of men, Which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune. Omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries. On such a full sea are we now afloat. And we must take the current when it serves, or lose our ventures. Brutus to Cassius in Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare, Act IV, Scene III
At the beginning of 1999, as he began his work as the CEO of the Second Chance Foundation, George Lee Butler inventoried some of the “significant steps” U.S. presidents since Eisenhower and their Soviet counterparts had “taken along the path toward reducing the testing, numbers, posture, and capabilities of nuclear weapons” (The names of the presidents who signed the treaties are interpolated in the quotation below):
the Limited Test Ban Treaty [Kennedy 1963], followed by SALT [Strategic Arms Limitation Treaties] I [Nixon 1972] and II [George H.W. Bush 1993, not ratified by the U.S. Senate], the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty [Nixon 1972], Conventional Forces in Europe Treaty [George H.W. Bush 1990], START [Strategic Arms Reduction Treaties] I [1991] and II [1993 George H.W. Bush], and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty [signed Sept 1996 by President Clinton and the leaders of many other countries, but shortly to be rejected by U.S. Senate].
Butler might also have mentioned the Non-proliferation Treaty signed by President Nixon and approved by the Senate in 1970. In that treaty, the five countries that then possessed nuclear weapons were allowed to retain their own nuclear weapons, as long as they committed themselves to start working right away to “pursue negotiations in good faith” aimed at “complete nuclear disarmament.”
“With the end of the Cold War,” Butler writes,
there was every reason to believe, as I did fervently, that this beneficial dynamic would not only continue but accelerate and broaden to include all of the nuclear weapon states, declared or de facto. It seemed reasonable to imagine, in time, a new hopeful interim scenario of small, equitable, immobilized arsenals, internationally-monitored, located solely on the territories of individual owner states. This outcome would drastically reduce the dangers of contemporary nuclear arsenals: surprise attack, accidental launch, launch on warning, and diversion of warheads or fissile material. It would also pave the way for serious thinking and discussion about the prospects and modalities of total elimination and the safeguards essential to the final steps toward that goal. 288-9
Here we see set out some of the concrete steps Butler knew could be taken—the creation of “small, equitable, immobilized arsenals, internationally-monitored, located solely on the territories of individual owner states”—that would “pave the way for serious thinking and discussion” about how to move toward the only goal that, as he had said in Geiringer Oration, made sense: the total elimination of nuclear weapons.
“Instead,” he went on, soon after end of the Cold War,
the arms control dynamic slowed, then ground to a halt and, in many respects, actually reversed. The seeds were sown when NATO began expanding without regard for Russia’s palpable apprehension, fed as it was by humiliation over the collapse of the Soviet Union and the chaos that followed.
Further, public interest began to wane, political parties in the U.S. and Russia became deadlocked over nuclear issues, most leading universities left the field, and the global media networks stopped covering what they considered a moribund subject. 288
The challenge that was taken up by the Second Chance Foundation as it came into the field at the beginning of 1999, Butler wrote, “was to revitalize the arena and, ultimately to become its key participant.” 289
Butler’s first hire, after hiring his secretary from Kiewet, Peggy Kruse, was Tom Graham and Graham’s secretary. Tom had been working in the Rockefeller Foundation until recently, focused on the foundation’s activities to support reducing the nuclear threat. The support by foundations working in this area, Butler had noticed, had begun to wane because of the lack of progress. Foundations like to be able to claim their donations are accomplishing something. We all like to see that.
Tom Graham was very knowledgeable both about the big-dollar foundation world that Butler would now have to deal with a lot and also the world of nuclear activism, often referred to as the Peace Movement. Butler asked Graham to draft an “overview of the recent abolition debate, focusing on where each of the major sectors and constituencies stood.”
Graham’s completed overview illustrated “the wide range of constituents, in terms of the nations and, within them, individual actors, comprising the nuclear arena, as well as the scope of networking required to be an effective agent for change.” The very wide range of constituents. Of many different kinds.
From the overview, Graham and Butler developed a briefing that would serve as “the core of our pitch to prospective donors and the basis for allocating time and resources.” 290
Will we get a second chance?
Time to get going and find out.