The Second Chance Foundation Stands Down
Since February 2021, I have been posting on Substack weekly entries on nuclear weapon matters—history, technology, and “secrets,” not current events—in You Might Want to Know. To see a list of other entries that you can look into if interested, including the entries that tell George Lee Butler’s story, see the You Might Want to Know Archive.
The year 2000, the year after George Lee Butler got the Second Chance Foundation going, was a presidential election year. After two terms, Bill Clinton couldn’t run for another one.
The Democratic and Republican parties both had their nominating conventions in August. At its convention in Philadelphia at the beginning of August, the Republican Party nominated George W. Bush. Bush was the governor of Texas and son of George H. W. Bush. That’s who had been president when the Cold War ended in 1989 and Butler was about to be made Commander in Chief of the Strategic Air Command. In mid-August, the candidate nominated by the Democratic Party in Los Angeles was Al Gore, the former Senator from Tennessee who had served as President Clinton’s vice president.
The American people voted—those who did vote (the voter turnout rate was 60%)—on November 7. The results left us hanging. The outcome would turn on the vote count in Florida. In that state, “irregularities” had supposedly been discovered. Then more irregularities. The rest of the month of November was a maelstrom of re-counts being called for and resisted by whoever seemed to be ahead.
In summer 1999, a year earlier, George Lee Butler had met with George W. Bush at a meeting of the Texas Philosophical Society, a “venerable” group, Butler said, that had been “created by Sam Houston to provide a forum for the state’s leading minds to debate the issues of the day.” Really a kind of a booster club for conservative Texans, it seems to me, but that’s okay. Just more ideological than philosophical. Butler had given the opening address at the meeting and was serving as moderator. During the break, he was handed a note saying Governor Bush was in the audience, had been intrigued by Butler’s remarks on nuclear weapons policy, and would like to speak to him.
Butler’s host took him to see the governor whom he found “holding forth to a thoroughly charmed circle of admirers.”
When he spotted us, he stopped, shook my hand and hugged Dorene, who said, “I sure do like your momma.” Bush, eyes sparkling replied, “Well then, I think I’d rather talk to you. Do you know what my momma said to me yesterday? I called to tell her that in a presidential straw poll, the Republican Party faithful voted me their top candidate. She said, “Son, I like your strategy with those folks . . . , you still haven’t let them know who you really are.” Dorene winked and said, “You’ve got one smart momma, and everyone says you take after her.” With that, the grin on his face got bigger, and he finally turned to me. “General, I don’t understand much of what you were saying, but I know enough to understand how important the subject is, and that my daddy agrees with you. If you don’t mind, I’d like to call on you occasionally as I start reading into it more.
“I had a difficult time imagining him on the national stage,” Butler continued, “much less in the Oval Office. But stranger things had happened in American politics—or so I thought before the 2000 election ran its bizarre course. Incidentally, he never called.” (307-8)
In late November 2000, Butler attended a meeting of CISAC, the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University. He’d been working with the group in his efforts to eliminate nuclear weapons since soon after his retirement from the Air Force. At this meeting, they were joined by some Russian colleagues, including General Dvorkin, the head of Russia’s nuclear forces, whom Butler knew personally because of the military-to-military negotiations they had been involved in.
…Dvorkin…was deeply depressed [Butler wrote] over the state of things in Moscow. This outlook was mirrored by many of my CISAC mates, who feared the worst from a Bush Administration and had little good to say about the [prospective] new President or his national security team.
On December 12, in a 5-4 decision, the justices of the United States Supreme Court stopped any recounts, which decided the election in favor of George W. Bush. The result had already been certified in Bush’s favor by the Secretary of State of Florida, Katherine Harris, who had been co-chair of the Bush campaign in Florida.
This was not, in my opinion, our Supreme Court’s finest hour. Isn’t the most important thing to get right the number of votes? Five of the nine Justices apparently didn’t think so. They had all been appointed by Republicans presidents, if that matters.
We know who got to be president afterwards but we still don’t know who won the election.
As the year 2000 wound down, Butler spent long hours, he wrote,
reflecting on the extraordinary turn of events over the preceding twelve months . . . Ted Turner bursting on the scene, astounding changes at the top of governments in the United States and Russia, my friend General Sergeyev’s loss of influence as a consequence of the Chechnya debacle, and the disarray among NGO’s working the nuclear agenda. . . . I concluded that my vision for SCF had been overtaken by forces beyond my control. I had done everything in my power to change ingrained patterns of thinking and acting with respect to nuclear weapons policy and practice, with not much to show for it and at considerable cost to myself and my family, financially and emotionally. At this political juncture, with Republicans back in power after eight long years and with a poisonous atmosphere in Congress, my conviction was affirmed that there was little likelihood of near-term movement on nuclear issues. . . . (329)
On the 8th of January 2001, two weeks before George W. Bush’s inauguration, Turner and Nunn presented together at the National Press Club about their new entity. It had a name now—the Nuclear Threat Initiative. Turner and Nunn would be co-directors.
Also in January, Butler stood down the Second Chance Foundation. He returned the money Warren Buffett had donated and wondered if that had ever happened before to him.
What would retired General George Lee Butler do now? He had no political ambitions. As a died-in-the-wool introvert, he knew he would not be suited for that life. He’d told Ted Turner he would be available as a private consultant only, not as an “expert” or figurehead.
He was not an expert of the usual sort, was he? He didn’t just know a lot about nuclear weapons and policy. He was someone who had lived inside his “subject” and then changed his mind in a fundamental way about it. More like a sinner who had been saved. But not exactly like that either.
He also had a special kind of experiential knowledge. The hibakusha, the survivors of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a few of whom are still with us in 2023, also have this special kind of knowledge. It’s real knowledge, but like other experiential knowledge, not easy to share.
We do want experts to help us think about problems like eliminating nuclear weapons. But might they also be part of the problem here? They are, are they not?, people whose jobs may depend on the continued existence of nuclear weapons. And whose status depends on their relation to the nuclear enterprise. Even if it is true, as I believe it is, that those who say they want to eliminate nuclear weapons do.
When Butler retired from the Air Force in 1994, before becoming what he called in his memoir a “reluctant activist” and then a full-time activist as founder and CEO of the Second Chance Foundation, he had wanted very much to return to private and family life. He would do that now.
Among other things, but first of all, he would see what he could do to convey to his wife Dorene the gratitude, respect, and love he bore for her, his companion and partner on this taxing journey. In this as in his other undertakings, he would do all he could.
He had some remaining public obligations. One was attending a CISAC meeting in March. At the meeting, he was asked to give his assessment of the Bush national security team (Dick Cheney, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, Paul Wolfowitz). He had worked with all of them along the way and respected them. He noted that they were, with the possible exception of retired Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell, “the staunchest possible believers in the efficacy of nuclear deterrence.” It probably was not surprising then that they would consider both the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) “of marginal interest or utility.”
They would therefore, he predicted, make no effort to revive the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty that the Republican-dominated Senate had refused to ratify in October 1999 during President Clinton’s administration. Also, they considered “the elimination of nuclear weapons as called for in Article VI of the [NPT] . . . a distant and even utopian goal.” Butler told the CISAC group, he was, furthermore, “absolutely convinced that the group believes the ABM [Anti-Ballistic Missile] Treaty prevents the United States from responding to new, vital threats” and that they would likely “walk away from the treaty.”
In these and other predictions, he turned out to be right. (418-19) But “I was dismayingly wide of the mark,” he wrote, in predicting
their openness and honesty. . . that they understand the need for close consultation, both domestically and internationally. . . and that they grasp regional complexities and the limits of American power.
“Each time I read these words,” he went on in his memoir,
I am acutely reminded of the tragedies the Bush Administration suffered and caused, the lost opportunities and self-inflicted wounds, the fleeting victories and enduring miscalculations that cost our nation so dearly in physical and human treasure. (328)
Butler had also gotten some unexpected good news. He had been given one of the substantial awards of The Heinz Foundation, established by Teresa Heinz in honor of her late husband, Senator John Heinz. The Heinz awards of $250,000 were made each year for innovative and continuing contributions in the arts, the economy, or the environment.
In his acceptance remarks for the Heinz award on March 12, 2002, Butler said,
For me, a compelling truth [has] emerged, the product of too many crises born of human frailty and the failure of men and their machines. Today, as the delicate balance of Cold War terror is better understood and we witness the willing brinksmanship of new nuclear antagonists, this truth is starkly evident: we human beings are not to be trusted with the capacity for such boundless, wanton destructiveness. Our appetites, our egos, our fears and our enmities stand too ready to brush aside the cautions of deterrence and eagerly brandish the nuclear saber. [But] I see growing recognition that these weapons are an affront to civilized norms, that a single such device poses an intolerable threat, and that mankind has both a moral and a security imperative to loosen their grip on our safety and our humanity. (424-5)
As Butler was delivering these remarks, he was, he said,
enveloped by a sense of finality. . . . It was time to end my journey spanning six and a half decades, from a birthing room in Columbus, Georgia to national corridors of power. . . . I knew, deep down, that this was a door that needed to be closed. (330)
And George Lee Butler left the arena.
The arena that Ted Turner and Sam Nunn’s Nuclear Threat Initiative had just come into.
Should we expect that the Nuclear Threat Initiative would come up against the same insurmountable obstacle Butler had encountered—the Cold War mentality? Perhaps we should look more closely at that mentality. The Cold War ended in 1991. What is it about the Cold War mentality that had allowed it to persist to 2001? What might “loosen its grip”?
Before we consider these questions, though, let’s take a look at what the Nuclear Threat Initiative managed to accomplish after its founding in 2001.
[T]he unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking and thus we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe. Albert Einstein, 1948