George Lee Butler: Second Chance IV--Tactics
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
After establishing the Second Chance Foundation, Butler knew he now had to build a relationship with what was often called the Peace Movement. Tom Graham, his right-hand man in the Second Chance Foundation, had prepared an overview of this large and very diverse constituency of non-governmental organizations.
In late February 1999, Tom Graham,
hosted a Middle Powers Initiative meeting at the Rockefeller Foundation building on 5th Avenue. It ran for two days, over the course of which I [Butler] was introduced to the principal players in the international peace movement. A few were familiar to me from my New Zealand trip in 1997 and my recent swing through Europe, but most were not. I soon learned, however, that whatever their nationality and affiliation, they all shared a visceral abhorrence of nuclear weapons, a strongly moralistic compulsion to see the world rid of them, a disdain for anyone on the other side of the issue, and a hopeless naivete about how nuclear weapons policy is made, controlled and implemented. 294
“I was very candid with them,” Butler writes, “about the stark difference between our styles of engaging the nuclear weapon states.”
Oh. That didn’t sound good. They and Butler were, finally, on the same side, weren’t they? Could a way not be found to work jointly? Especially if it was simply a matter of different “styles.” Or was there a larger problem? Maybe the question of “style”—not the “what” but the “how”—was a more important question than we tend to think in matters of this kind.
Two months later, in late April, Butler was invited to Santa Barbara, California to accept the major annual award of a group called the the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation. NAPF had been created in 1984 by David Kreiger, an activist deeply dedicated to the abolition of nuclear weapons. In the year NAPF was founded, Butler was commanding the 96th bomb wing of the Strategic Air Command.
NAPF had given its awards in the past to the Nobel Peace Prize recipient Joseph Rotblat (a British-Polish physicist and founder of the Pugwash Conferences, with whom Butler had served on the Canberra Commission in 1996), Carl Sagan, the Dalai Lama, and Linus Pauling. Good company. None of them, of course, a part of the nuclear policy-making community or of what was commonly referred to as the “nuclear priesthood.”
Butler met with the attendees on the first day of the conclave “ostensibly to begin crafting a joint strategy.” In a seven-hour meeting, Butler found the NAPF group to be “much more intent on personal agendas and tactics” than on developing a joint strategy. Butler decided that in his acceptance remarks the next day he would
make a gentle but firm critique of the methods of the peace movement. However odd that might seem, given the occasion I wanted to put my audience on notice that I thought they were poorly organized, unfocused and employed self-defeating tactics. 297
Butler wasn’t at all sure how the group would take this. But maybe they wouldn’t be that surprised. Compared to the military services Butler had spent his life serving, who wouldn’t seem seem “poorly organized and unfocused?” They might see their diversity as a strength.
The next day, David Krieger reiterated to the NAPF audience the obstacles Butler had told them the day before that he saw ahead: “secrecy, inertia, Cold War fatigue, lack of political will, declining foundation support, lack of interest by the media and the public, and antipathy generated by radical activists.”
That last one was the most likely obstacle to cooperation. It was a common criticism of the Peace Movement by those not a part of it that their tactics created a self-defeating antipathy. Attendees at the NAPF meeting were no doubt used to hearing this. But consider: as entities outside of government and unsupported by it, and in the face of the automatic, ongoing, wave-of-the hand dismissal of their views by policy makers and the nuclear priesthood, did they have an option to be other than “activists” who were, in some important sense, “radical”? Would Butler himself not be called a “radical activist” by some of his former colleagues?
On the other hand, if the tactics being employed were ineffectual and self-defeating, and maybe even seen as self-serving (in the way that holier-than-thou attitudes can be self-serving), and if the Peace Movement wanted to get beyond preaching to the converted, did they not have to look for another way to engage? A way that maybe did not play the zero-sum good versus evil game that the Cold War had played?
In his acceptance speech, Butler declared to the group that as “a lifelong military professional and a combat veteran” he held “firmly to the conviction that the United States plays an irreplaceable role in building global peace and security. We do not always play that role wisely, but by and large it has served the world supremely well.” 400
He went on to point out what he had come to see as the deeply malign influence of relying on “deterrence” and the intolerable political status quo.
It seems regrettably clear . . . that none of the declared nuclear weapons states have any intention of taking meaningful near-term steps toward meeting their obligations under Article VI of the Nuclear Non-proliferation treaty. . . . Clearly we are at an impasse with profound implications for the non-proliferation bargain and its enshrined principle that nuclear weapons are intolerable.
A “defining challenge to the proponents of abolition,” he said, was
[r]eviving the process, or simply preserving it through the current impasse . . .: establishing a productive, mutually respectful dialogue with the nuclear weapon states and bringing responsible public pressure to bear on their policies. Both of these tasks are crucial, and in my judgment the abolition campaign has in both been largely unsuccessful. 401
“Mutually respectful dialogue” and “responsible” public pressure? Some in the audience might have become restive at that language. It’s not our lack of mutual respect and responsible action that accounts for the problem here, is it?
“As concerns tactics,” Butler said,
I leave it to your judgment whether the traditional marches, demonstrations, “ban the bomb” symbols and calculated confrontations contribute to or detract from the task of dialogue. In my own view, they are more hurtful than helpful, but I readily admit that view comes from having too often experienced them from the other side of the chain-link fences and the Pentagon walls. That being said, I worry that such tactics and slogans may not be psychologically attuned to a far lower level of public trepidation about nuclear dangers than prevailed during the Cold War. As regards policy-makers, I can tell you with some certainty these approaches are far from endearing.
“My real concern,” he went on,
is that they depreciate the greatest strength you bring to this arena and that is the force of your moral conviction. My sense is that in today’s environment, this powerful energy is best focused through the lens of carefully honed argument; otherwise it risks being diffused by the optics of erroneous or resentful perception.
“Carefully honed argument” will, however, have a chance of prevailing only in a relationship of mutual respect. If the respect isn’t there, might as well not bother.
If the respect isn’t there, what creates it? Carefully honed argument?
“I appreciate more than anyone in this room,” Butler continued,
that I trade on very thin credibility in calling for a reappraisal of the abolition movement. Many of you have suffered great indignities, hardship, and even incarceration in the name of a cause that touches the core of your being. I understand that and respect it. I can only ask you to accept that I am gravely concerned for the continuing effectiveness of the campaign. 404
As he came to the end of his remarks at the meeting of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, Butler announced to the group that he and his family had just created “our own foundation dedicated to the reduction and elimination of nuclear dangers.” The Second Chance Foundation.
“You have heard me say before,” he went on, “that five years ago I knew virtually nothing of nongovernmental organizations but now I think I am one.”
Butler was here recognizing that, whatever their differences, he and his team were joining them as another NGO devoted to . . . what, exactly? What was the best way to specify their common goal?
We need to follow-up on this.