George Lee Butler XV--The Turn I
Note: This entry is one in a series that tells a part of the story of George Lee Butler. In the early 1990’s, 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).
Correction and Addition to Previous Posting: The Agreement to Prevent Dangerous Military Activities was signed not in Washington, D.C but in Moscow. It almost wasn’t signed at all. General Butler’s Soviet counterpart, General Bolyatko, had insisted on confidentiality and Butler had agreed. But before the agreement was signed, the journalist Bob Woodward sniffed out the upcoming event and published a new report about it. Bolyatko was incensed. But such was the trust that had built up between Butler and Bolyatko that Bolyatko decided Butler had not been the source of the information. Bolyatko let it go. Mr. Woodward may have cared more about the scoop than about achieving the agreement or simply not known how important preserving confidentially for another couple of days might be. Let us hope it was the latter. And now,
The Turn I
When General Butler retired from the Air Force in 1994, he had no intention of continuing in public life. Or, if you think of a military life as in a way private, of entering public life.
In his military life, he had achieved spectacularly but in his memoir Uncommon Cause Butler shows his acute awareness of how hard that life had been on his wife Dorene and on their two children. He looked forward to a “private,” more normal life for all of them.
He couldn’t retire completely. Not yet. He had, he said, to “make a living.” The prosperous construction firm in Omaha, Kiewet, recruited him to lead an effort to expand their construction operation into domains having to do with energy delivery. He took the job.
The work with Kiewet Energy would be in unfamiliar territory, not, as so often with retired generals, including his predecessor as CINCSAC, more work in the military-industrial complex. The work would be new and it would be demanding. Butler knew this and was fine with it. It wouldn’t be as demanding as his military life had been, he was pretty sure of that.
He was not to have the private life he had hoped for.
The first sign came in March 1995, less than a year after General Butler’s retirement, when he got a call from the president of the Council on Foreign Relations.
In 1995, as today, the Council on Foreign Relations was one of the distinguished “think-tanks” (also known as “policy institutes”) in Washington, D.C. The Council had been founded in 1921, just after World War I. Over the years it had become one of the most prestigious and highly respected policy institutes in Washington. Its membership comprised mostly civilian leaders—people who had distinguished themselves in government and public service, the academy, and the media. Members of the military were occasionally invited to join. Butler had been invited onto the Council in 1974, twenty years before he retired from the Air Force.
The president of the Council in 1995 was Les Gelb. Gelb was a respected media figure who also had a record of distinguished government service. He had just established in CFR a commission to examine the role of NATO after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact that had taken place four years earlier. Gelb asked Butler to serve on the commission. The work with Kiewet Energy was well enough under way. Butler thought serving on the commission would be do-able.
Also, what the role of NATO should be now was an issue Butler felt strongly about.
The Commission convened in March 1995. The meeting was co-chaired by Henry Kissinger, who had been President Nixon’s and Gerald Ford’s Secretary of State and National Security Advisor, and Harold Brown, who had been President Carter’s Secretary of Defense. Kissinger opened the meeting asserting at length the essential role of NATO for European unity. No one took issue until it was Butler’s turn to speak.
Following the lines of the argument he had made in 1988 in his Tides, Trends, and Tasks speech at the National War College (I, 375), he argued that it was time for NATO to step back, perhaps to disappear. NATO had been founded in 1949 explicitly and specifically to counter the threat then seen to be posed by the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union had ceased to exist at the end of 1991. The new and old country of Russia was clearly going through severe economic and political struggles now. Butler argued that standing NATO down at this time would, among other things, assuage the fears of a country which at this moment could only be feeling deeply vulnerable. It would furthermore give the European countries an incentive to begin to take responsibility for their own defense, and would get out of the way of them becoming themselves a union.
Butler argued that maintaining and, worse, enlarging NATO would likely create the hostile and unstable conditions it was still being imagined by some to counter.
A discussion followed. To the consternation of Henry Kissinger, most members of the Commission seemed to be persuaded by Butler’s argument. Kissinger packed up his briefcase, left the room, and resigned from the Commission.
Word of Butler’s arguments at the meeting would of course have spread beyond the Council of Foreign Relations. In April 1995, a month after the Council’s meeting, Butler received an invitation to join a sixteen-member group called the Committee on International Security and Arms Control. He’d been invited by a friend, John Holdren, then the chair of CISAC, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley who was an expert in among other things, energy management and had also a distinguished record in government service.
CISAC was an arm of the National Research Council. The NRC operated under the aegis of the independent and prestigious National Academy of Sciences. NAS had been established all the way back in 1863 as a chartered non-governmental agency to provide advice to the government on matters of science and technology. NAS had established the Committee on International Security and Arms Control in 1980.
Another of CISAC’S members was “Pief” Panovsky, a distinguished physicist who had been for many years the director of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, and was a member of the Arms Control Association, a group established in 1971 to increase public understanding of and support for effective arms control policies.
Butler had become concerned that the opportunities offered by the end of the Cold War were being squandered. Reluctantly, he accepted the invitation to join CISAC.
In May 1995, the CISAC group met at the NSA offices in Washington D.C. to decide what the focus of its next study should be. Butler, because of his obligations at Kiewet, felt he had no time to waste. He suggested “with no verbal foreplay,” as he said in his memoir, that “the central objective should be to show the way toward the ultimate elimination of nuclear weapons around the globe by delineating rigorous guidelines and conditions that would meet the obligations of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty without compromising America’s security.” p. 233
The Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty had been signed in 1968 by a bunch of states, including the five states that had nuclear weapons at the time—the United States, Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, France, and China. The treaty allowed these five “Nuclear Weapons States” to keep their nuclear weapons on the condition that they begin to work toward nuclear disarmament. The actual words of the commitment were “to pursue nuclear disarmament aimed at the ultimate elimination of their nuclear arsenals.”
Under international law, the treaty would come into force when forty states signed on to it. This happened quickly, by 1970. By 1995, almost all states had signed onto it. Not all. India and Pakistan hadn’t. Israel hadn’t. Sudan hadn’t, for some reason.
Since the treaty had come into force in 1970, the Nuclear Weapons States hadn’t done much to pursue “the ultimate elimination of their nuclear arsenals.” Some progress had been made after President Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev met in Reykjavik in 1986, but only in the direction of reductions in stockpiles and delivery vehicles, not really in the direction of disarmament. Reductions in stockpiles don’t amount to disarmament, of course, not unless they are done as part of a program to disarm. Or, as might be said these days, to “de-nuclearize.”
The treaty said that after twenty-five years, it would have to be renewed. In May 1995, the year after Butler retired from the Air Force, it had been renewed and also extended indefinitely. But still, no work by the NWS toward “the ultimate elimination of their nuclear arsenals” was being pursued.
Butler argued to CISAC that it was not necessary to set a timeline for elimination of the weapons. In fact, that could prove a distraction. What was essential, though, was to get the process underway, and for the United States to set the example.
Some CISAC members, notably one who was a former director of the Lawrence Livermore weapons laboratory, could not accept elimination as the goal, believing, as they said they did, in the efficacy of “deterrence.” But even the emeritus director of a weapons laboratory could not pull rank on someone who had Butler’s experience with nuclear weapons and their delivery systems, or silence opposition by claiming access to a higher level of classified information.
There was a spirited discussion in the CISAC group, reports Butler, after which the majority came to agree with Butler. The emeritus director of Livermore left CISAC.
CISAC then began work on a study of how to eliminate nuclear weapons, with conclusions to be presented in summer 1997, two years hence, to the National Academy of Sciences.
Next: The Turn II