George Lee Butler V--One Hard Thing He Did as CINCSAC: Get His Arms Around the SIOP
General Butler became the Commander in Chief of the Strategic Air Command in January 1991.
Does the year 1991 mean anything to you? To those of us of a certain age, it can mean a great deal.
About four years before 1991, President Reagan and the leader of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, had met in Reykjavik, Iceland and agreed for the first time to reduce the stockpiles of nuclear weapons and delivery systems the two countries held.
About three years before 1991, the two countries had agreed—in the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty—to eliminate a whole class of nuclear weapon delivery systems, the first time something like that had been done.
Just over a year before 1991, the Soviets had taken down the wall that they had built between the East German and the Western zones in Berlin thirty years earlier.
Just after the wall came down, Mikhail Gorbachev and our current President, George H. W. Bush had met in Malta and declared that the Cold War was over.
For some of us of a certain age, 1991 was the first year of feeling we might have made it through, the first year of not hearing whispers that no matter how fine and beautiful the moment, we were altogether likely to die before our time in a hideous maelstrom of blast, fire, and ionizing radiation. Or lingeringly, in soot, radioactive fallout, and unrelenting cold.
By 1991, the incessant whispers had stopped. It might not happen. Likely wouldn’t happen, even.
At the end of General Butler’s first year as CINCSAC, on December 25, 1991, Mikhail Gorbachev would hand over the Soviet Union’s “football”—the briefcase with the nuclear launch codes in it—to Boris Yeltsin, the President of the newly formed Russian Federation. And the Soviet Union would cease to exist.
When General Butler became the CINCSAC in January 1991, one hard thing it now seemed he would not be called upon to do was to recommend to President George H. W. Bush how he should respond to a warning General Butler had received from NORAD that a nuclear attack on us was under way.
Other hard things were waiting, though. They would be hard in different ways.
The first hard thing General Butler set himself to do as CINCSAC was, as he put it in his memoir, to get his “arms around” the Strategic Integrated Operational Plan.
The SIOP was our super secret operational plan for nuclear warfare. Since its creation in 1960, it had always been put together by a group called the Joint Strategic Target Planning Staff. The JSTPS shared headquarters with SAC. Officially it was a separate entity, but as CINCSAC, General Butler would also be the director of the JSTPS.
The first JSTPS had drawn up the first SIOP at the end of the Eisenhower administration. Succeeding SIOPs would be developed, it was assumed, following guidance given to the JSTPS by the presidents who followed Eisenhower. By 1991, those had been John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, and George H. W. Bush.
Kennedy had wanted to make significant changes in the plan he’d gotten from Eisenhower. He wanted more flexibility in it. Not a requirement that both Soviet Union and China be retaliated against in a massive all-out attack, no matter which country had attacked us.
No official form or process had been specified for this “presidential guidance.” In whatever form it came—in a memo or notes on a napkin or in a conversation—it would be used by the President’s Secretary of Defense to create an official document called a Nuclear Weapons Employment Plan. The NUWEP would be forwarded to the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the Pentagon. The JCS would forward it to the JSTPS. The JSTPS would then build an operational plan that followed this guidance.
That was how it was supposed to go.
Over the years, the JSTPS had shared the specific details of its operational plans with no one, not even with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, let alone with the civilians in the Secretary of Defense’s office, not even with the President. It had offered all of them only general briefings and reassurances. The Presidents could have ordered that they and others in the chain of command be allowed to see the details, but none had.
Butler tells us there was something called the Black Book. It was prepared by Directorate of Operations in the Pentagon and it summarized the options offered to the President by the SIOP. The Black Book was placed in “the football,” along with the nuclear launch codes. What exactly was in the Black Book, no one else was allowed to know.
In the mid-to-late 1980’s, some officials in the office of the Secretary of Defense and some members of the Directorate of Strategic Plans and Policy in the Pentagon—called J-5 by insiders—had became concerned about this state of affairs. What, exactly, would the SIOP have had the Strategic Air Command do? Who knew? Was the President getting accurate information about what was in it?
Was the SIOP even following the presidential guidance?
In 1987, General Butler had served in the Pentagon in the Directorate of Strategic Plans and Policy. By 1989, two years before Butler became CINCSAC, he had been made the Director of J-5.
In 1985, Frank Miller, the Director of Strategic Forces Policy in the office of the Secretary of Defense, had started a review of the SIOP to see whether it reflected the requirements of the Nuclear Weapons Employment Policy that had been drafted by the Secretary of Defense. Miller and his staff had found they had a very hard time getting the JSTPS or the Joint Staff to provide them the information they needed to check on this. The JSTPS wasn’t accustomed to sharing such information with anybody, especially with any civilians. Frank Miller, like others in the office of the Secretary of Defense, was of course a civilian. The President was a civilian.
Because of the insistence of the Secretary of Defense, who could in this instance have been taken to be speaking for the President, Miller’s group finally managed to get enough access to the SIOP to determine something that shocked them even though they might have suspected it: As Miller wrote in a narrative General Butler includes in his memoir, “the implementation of the plans was absolutely inconsistent with the intent of the national nuclear policy” in the NUWEP.
Miller’s group still hadn’t gotten access to targeting information, including weapons-to-target assignments. In 1989, they were given the explicit authority to access that information by the new Secretary of Defense, Dick Cheney, and the new Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Bill Crowe. By late Fall 1989, Miller’s group had developed the further hypothesis, he reports, that “both the target base and the weapons allocation process were incoherent and riddled with errors.”
Imagine that. For all this time, no one had known this about our SIOP, our military’s plan for general nuclear war. Maybe even the JSTPS hadn’t known it. Surely they hadn’t intended to ignore the presidential guidance or produce a plan that was incoherent and riddled with errors. Had they? How does something like this happen? You could almost see it as a kind of insubordination.
Secrecy has to be part of what allows something like this to happen, doesn’t it? Maybe also there is something fundamentally incoherent about the enterprise?
Miller’s group concluded, after what he called a “nodal” analysis of the war plan, that 5888 nuclear weapons, not the 10,000 specified in the current SIOP, would be adequate for our “deterrence and military” purposes.
General Butler had worked with Frank Miller while in the Pentagon as Director of the Directorate of Strategic Plans and Policy (1989 to 1991). When Butler became CINCSAC in January 1991, he also became director of the JSTPS, considered a separate entity but located at SAC headquarters. JSTPS was a big group. On it were not only Air Force people but representatives from all the armed services. Even some civilians—technical and intelligence people. People to help with the banks of computers they used now. Over 250 people in all.
Butler’s example in his memoir of how things had gotten out of hand in the SIOP is something he found out in his first meeting with the JSTPS on his second day as CINCSAC. He had asked how many “strategic” nuclear weapons had been designated to attack the Anti-Ballistic Missile System that the Soviets had built around Moscow in the 60’s.
Our intelligence services weren’t sure the Soviets’ ABM system would work all that well. Nothing we had developed would have worked all that well against incoming ballistic missile warheads, we knew that, in spite of the huge amount of money that had been spent on the Strategic Defense Initiative President Reagan had initiated in 1983 on Edward Teller’s advice. But the Soviets had in fact built some kind of ABM system around Moscow and the SIOP planned to destroy it first—“with certainty”—in what was called a “counter-force” attack. “Counter-force” attacks were supposed to be limited to military targets, sparing cities. If the ABM system was destroyed, Moscow itself could be attacked later with impunity, was the idea.
In that first meeting with his JSTPS, Butler asked for the specific number of “strategic” nuclear weapons that had been allocated to the ABM system around Moscow. He was astonished at what he was told. It was obvious to him that an attack of that magnitude on the ABM system would also destroy Moscow, which supposedly was being spared. Not just Moscow. If you looked, as you should but the JSTPS must not have, at the nuclear weapons effects beyond mere blast, it was altogether likely that that attack would cause major damage far beyond the Soviet Union. How much damage? How far beyond? Where exactly? No one could tell you that with certainty.
Another of those things that, when it came to nuclear weapons, we’d know only when we knew.
Of how many other “counterforce” attacks in the SIOP, supposedly limited to military targets, would this be true, it had to be asked? Maybe all of them?
When General Butler had come through the door to his first meeting with the JSTPS and taken the chair at the head of the table, the reaction by the others in the room told him that his predecessor, General Chain, hadn’t done that much, or at all. The JSTPS had been left to its own devices. Or rather been run by the Vice-Director, Navy Admiral Ron Eytchison.
At the end of the meeting, General Butler told the assembled group that he intended to review every one of the ten thousand targets in the SIOP.
“Sir, you mean by category, such as airfields, submarine pens, and so forth?” asked Admiral Eytchison? “No, Ron,” said Butler, “every single target, beginning with the leadership category, then nuclear forces, then conventional forces, and finally the industrial base. We will devote an hour at a crack, for as long as it takes, starting next Monday.”
It did take a while. Six months. In his memoir, General Butler does not tell us the specific outcomes. Probably not the kind of thing he would be allowed to share with us even now. But by that time, the total number allocated must have been limited by the number of weapons being agreed to in a treaty that would be signed by President Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev at the end of July called START—short for Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty. That treaty would limit the United States and the Soviet Union to five- or six-thousand strategic missile warheads each. Maybe fewer. Maybe half the total warheads that had been scheduled to be used in the SIOP that had been in place under General Chain.
Progress, you’d have to say. And maybe only a start. There was already talk about a START II.
It was 1991, after all.
In the background, there was this to think about. In the early 1980’s, a number of respected scientists—Carl Sagan, among them—had begun to argue that only a few hundred “strategic” nuclear weapons—not five thousand—detonated on a few hundred cities—any cities, in any country, even all in the same country—would generate firestorms that would propel enough soot and smoke into the earth’s stratosphere to produce something called nuclear winter worldwide. Nuclear winter would lower the temperature on earth by enough and for long enough, a decade or so, to destroy food supplies. Millions of us, maybe billions of us, maybe all of us, would starve.
You couldn’t know with certainty that something like this would happen, of course. But no one seemed to be able to show that it couldn’t happen. It wasn’t something you could exactly test.
This was something else we could know only when we lived it.
Next: George Lee Butler V: Another Hard Thing He Did as CINCSAC—Let His People Know What Was Coming