Geiringer Oration II
Note: This entry is one in a series that tells a part of the story of General 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).
In his Geiringer Oration in Wellington, New Zealand in 1997 for the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, George Lee Butler had spoken of “flaws” in the thinking about “deterrence.” What flaws did Butler see?
First,
How is it that we subscribe to a strategy that requires near-perfect understanding of enemies from whom we are often deeply alienated and largely isolated? . . . In the final analysis, it was largely a bargain we in the West made with ourselves.
Second,
Nuclear deterrence is flawed equally in that the consequences of its failure are intolerable. . . . They leave us wholly without defense.
Third,
Deterrence failed completely as a guide in setting rational limits on the size and composition of U.S. and Soviet nuclear forces. To the contrary, its appetite was voracious: its capacity to justify new nuclear weapons, new delivery systems and larger stocks of each was unrestrained. . . . Perversely, the redundant and survivable nuclear forces required to meet this exacting test are readily perceived by a darkly suspicious adversary as capable, even designed to execute. . . a disarming first strike. . . . [T]he bar of deterrence ratchets higher, igniting yet another cycle of trepidation, worst-case assumptions and ever mounting levels of destructive capability.
Thus it was that the treacherous axioms of nuclear deterrence made U.S. and Soviet nuclear weapon stockpiles numbering in the tens of thousands seem reasonable. Despite having witnessed the devastation wrought by two primitive devices, . . . the superpowers gorged themselves at the thermonuclear trough. A succession of leaders on both sides . . . directed a reckless proliferation of nuclear devices, tailored for carriage by a vast array of delivery vehicles to a stupefying array of targets . . . . 266-7
And then,
I was a part of all that. I was present at the creation of many of these systems, directly responsible for prescribing and justifying the requirements and technology that made them possible. 267-8
I was a veteran participant in an arena where the most destructive power ever unleashed became the prize in a no-holds-barred competition among organizations whose principal interest was to enhance rather than constrain its possible application. And through every corridor, in every impassioned plea, in every fevered debate rang the rallying cry, “deterrence, deterrence, deterrence.”
Nuclear deterrence . . . is neither stable, nor is it static; its wiles cannot be contained . . . . At best, it is a gamble no mortal should pretend to make. At worst it invokes death on a scale rivaling the power of the Creator. 268
I see with painful clarity that from the very beginning of the nuclear era, the objective scrutiny and searching debate essential to adequate comprehension and responsible oversight of its vast enterprises were foreshortened or foregone. 269
The penalties proved to be severe. Vitally important decisions were routinely taken without adequate understanding, assertions too often prevailed over analysis, requirements took on organizational biases, technological opportunity and corporate profit drove nuclear force levels and capability, and narrow Congressional interests impinged on calculations of military necessity. Authority and accountability were severed, policy was dissociated from planning, and theory wilted in the heat of crisis. The narrow concerns of a multitude of powerful interests intruded on the rightful roles of key policymakers, constraining their latitude for decision. Many officials with oversight responsibilities in this area were simply denied access to critical information essential to the proper exercise of their office. 269
And what now, in 1997, six years after the end of the Cold War?
Only now are the dimensions, costs, and risks of the nuclear netherworlds coming to light. What must now be better understood are the root causes, the mindsets and the belief systems that brought them into existence. They must be challenged, they must be refuted, but most importantly they must be let go. 269
Must be “let go.” Not “refuted” or “defeated,” most importantly, but “let go.” Is that a hint about the “new mode of thinking” Einstein said would be required to keep us from “catastrophe”?
But it is not yet over. Sad to say, the Cold War lives on in the minds of those who cannot let go of the fears, the beliefs, and the enmities born of the early years of the nuclear age. These people cling to nuclear deterrence, clutch its tattered promise to their breast, shake it wistfully at bygone adversaries and balefully at new or imagined ones. 269-70
Thus, I am unshakably persuaded that as a nation we have no greater responsibility than to rethink our reliance on nuclear deterrence, however unpalatable that may be intellectually or politically. I fully appreciate the magnitude of that challenge. I spent much of my military career serving the ends of such deterrence, as did millions of others. I fervently believed that in the end it was the nuclear forces that I and others commanded and operated that prevented World War III and created the conditions leading to the collapse of the Soviet empire. But, in truth, I do not and I cannot know that. 270
Nor would it much matter that such informed assessments are still well beyond our intellectual reach. . . except for a crucial and alarming fact. . . . [A]s we continue to espouse nuclear deterrence as an irreplaceable element of our security strategy, others are listening, have converted to our theology, are seeking to build or enlarge their nuclear arsenals, are poised to rekindle the nuclear arms race and to reawaken the specter of nuclear war. 270-71
And if we don’t let go of this mode of thinking that characterized the Cold War and, sadly, much in its aftermath?
In the insightful words of my friend, Jonathan Schell, we face the dismal prospect that ‘the Cold War was not the apogee of the age of nuclear weapons, to be succeeded by an age of nuclear disarmament. Instead it may well prove to have simply been a period of initiation, in which not only Americans and Russians, but Indians and Pakistanis, Israelis and Iraqis were adapting to the horror of threatening the deaths of millions of people, were learning to think about the unthinkable. . . . Surely not, surely we still comprehend that to threaten the deaths of tens or hundreds of millions of people presages an atrocity beyond anything in the record of mankind? Or have we, in a silent. . . moral revolution, come to regard such threats as ordinary—as a normal and proper policy for any self-respecting nation.’ 271
So spoke retired General George Lee Butler, the last Commander in Chief of the United States Air Force’s Strategic Air Command, to how things stood in 1997.
And where are we now?
Next: Second Chance?