George Lee Butler: The Turn III
Note: This entry is one in a series that tells some 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 1996, George Lee Butler was invited to give a speech to the National Press Club.
In 1996, a speech to the National Press Club was a big deal. It still is. The Club, founded in 1908, had over the years become the go-to forum for journalists and media people and those whom they reported on. The list of who had been invited to speak there included not everybody who had been interesting or important during NPC’s existence but a great many who had been. An address to the National Press Club would be one of the most potentially significant actions a public figure could perform. The immediate audience would be very large, and the secondary audience, given the platforms of who would be in the audience for the speech, might be much larger.
Butler gave the speech on December 4, 1996. In it, Butler argued, as he had to other groups by now, publicly, that nuclear weapons should and could be eliminated. The response was, like the response to his keynote address at the State of the World Forum, highly enthusiastic. Many stood to applaud. Not everyone. Many journalists had been ardent Cold Warriors, after all. How could it have been otherwise? They had to sell papers.
Lee Butler had been an ardent Cold Warrior. He made no apology for it. But now, he was arguing that it was time for a change. A big one.
After the talk and the response to it, the Clinton administration took more notice of the Canberra Commission’s report than it had in August, but “took notice” was as far as it went.
Another think-tank in Washington, one of the newer ones, was the Stimson Center. It had been founded in 1989 by Barry Blechman and Michael Krepon, two long-time public servants. The Stimson Center focused, with what the founders wanted to be a pragmatic, “real world” emphasis, on a range of issues related to international peace and security. Among those issue were some presented by nuclear weapons—like the safety and security of the weapons and preventing proliferation.
The Center’s first work had been a four-year project on “Eliminating Weapons of Mass Destruction.” The reception this report received had seemed to Butler even more tepid than the reception the Canberra Commission’s report had received.
Henry Stimson, after whom the Center had been named, had been a distinguished statesman in the 1930’s and 40’s and the Secretary of War during World War II. That meant he had approved the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan. In an article called “The Decision,” published in the Atlantic Monthly in February 1947, he had written a defense of this action to quiet some of the doubts and criticisms that had begun to emerge. It seemed to work.
Blechman invited Butler to speak at the Stimson Center. At first, Butler demurred but then he realized that speaking there would give him a chance to correct misrepresentations and answer criticisms of what he had said at the National Press Club. On January 8, 1997, he spoke at the Stimson Center at a meeting open to the public.
On the day of his speech at the Stimson Center, January 8, an article about Butler was published in the New York Times . It reported that his speech a month earlier to the National Press Club had generated a huge response from the public and from retired generals and admirals. The article reported that “Accompanied by a disarmament manifesto signed by 60 retired generals and admirals from nuclear states around the world, General Butler's speech has had an impact comparable to the diplomat George F. Kennan's classic article on containing Communism, published in Foreign Affairs magazine in July 1947.” That was quite a comparison. Kennan’s article was considered one of the most influential articles ever published in Foreign Affairs.
The report in the Times had added that the current deputy commander of the Strategic Command, Vice Adm. Dennis A. Jones, did not share the idea that further reductions in and a final elimination of nuclear weapons should be our goal. Nuclear weapons were, of course, the Strategic Command’s reason for being, and had been since General Butler stood up the Strategic Command in 1992. Before he made the turn.
Jones compared nuclear weapons to “an insurance policy.”
That was a very bad analogy, if you think about it. Insurance policies don’t actually “protect” us against anything, in spite of that language being used in their advertising. What they might do is help us recover financially to some extent from calamities we experience if those particular calamities are “covered” by the insurance policy.
Nuclear weapons would not help us recover from anything. The effects of the use of nuclear weapons is what we would have to recover from, if we could.
After the speech at the Stimson Center, Butler realized, he writes in his memoir, that he was “in the arena” to stay. He would have to leave his position at Kiewet Energy. He would need now a “pulpit and an expert to help me navigate the media shoals.”
A kind of pulpit was provided by an invitation he received shortly from the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War. The IPPNW had emerged out of a U.S. group called the Physicians for Social Responsibility that had been founded in 1961. IPPNW itself had been founded in 1980 by physicians from the United States and the Soviet Union. Physicians in many other countries had joined. In 1985, the IPPNW had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
Butler was invited by the IPPNW to give the “Geiringer Oration” in New Zealand on October 1. Erich Geiringer, Butler found out, had been a physician in Wellington who had spearheaded the World Court Project. The WCP was an effort to get the International Court of Justice to issue an advisory opinion that would constrain the use of nuclear weapons or even the threat use them. Dr. Geiringer had died in 1995. The ICJ had issued the advisory opinion in July 1996. It did some of what had been asked for.
Butler accepted IPPNW’s invitation.
The speech Butler gave in Wellington on October 1, 1997 seems to me the sort of thing preachers are praying for when they ask that the words of their mouths and the meditations of their hearts be acceptable in the sight of God. A version of the speech appears in Volume II of Butler’s memoir (255 ff). Butler’s memoir is a remarkable, gracefully written, and profoundly informative document. The speech is of course more quickly read, and should be read, I believe, by every citizen. We will look more closely at it in forthcoming entries.
When word of the speech and its reception reached the United States, Butler was invited to give a second speech to the National Press Club, in February 1998. In this one, Butler knew he would focus, as he had in Wellington, on the dubious notion that he had come to see as locking in place the nuclear enterprise. The keystone that supported the whole appalling structure.
Deterrence.
A month before Butler was to give his second speech to the National Press Club, he had been asked by the President of the Council on Foreign Relations, Les Gelb, to review a package of mock presidential speeches Gelb had drafted. The speeches dealt with foreign and security policy issues. Gelb hoped they might help frame the issues during the approach to the presidential elections of 2000.
Butler found the speeches Gelb had drafted discouraging. He began his review:
I have read the speeches you sent and in all candor I must say I was keenly disappointed. I found little to choose among or differentiate them. . . . Fundamentally, they all struck me as part and parcel of the Cold War thinking and rhetoric that continues to infuse and inform national security and what passes for debate. . . . To wit, they depart from a simplistic threat-based view of the world and America’s role therein. . . . We continue to think in terms of zero-sum outcomes rather than cooperative regimes or mutual security, of deterrence rather than assurance. . . . I am sufficiently concerned on this score to make a critique of deterrence—past, present, future—the principal focus of the National Press Club speech I will give in February. 275
On February 2, 1998, Butler spoke again at the National Press Club. Unfortunately, in mid-January, a scandal had broken about a sexual relationship President Clinton had had with a young White House intern named Monica Lewinsky. Suddenly, there was no room in the media universe or the executive branch for a serious and sustained consideration of the issues raised by the speech. Nor, Butler realized, as the two sides dug in on the issue of impeaching President Clinton, would there be any possibility of bipartisan cooperation in Congress.
Nevertheless, after Butler’s second speech to the National Press Club, invitations poured in. One was from Mikhail Gorbachev to attend a conference in Moscow the subject of which would be “Global Security on the Threshold of a New Century.”
At this conference, Butler noticed the
glumly negative tone of the Russian side, particularly regarding the state of relations with the United States under the Clinton Administration. The START II impasse, the expansion of NATO, growing criticism among U.S. hawks of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and the ABM Treaty, and a pervasive condescension toward all things Russian were taking a severe toll. . . .
He also learned from his Russian counterparts that “Russia was more reliant on nuclear weapons than ever, particularly nuclear weapons of the tactical variety, because of the sorry state of its conventional forces.” 279
Another invitation came from Michel Rocard, former prime minister of France and Butler’s colleague on the Canberra Commission, to address a meeting of the European Parliament, part of the legislative arm of the European Union. In early September, Butler spoke to the Parliament and found the reception much more encouraging, in fact “truly astounding, this very eclectic audience on its feet, evincing a deep connection across a wide array of nationalities and political parties.”
Before he left Paris, Butler met and had a conversation with a old acquaintance, Marc de Brichambaut, “a brilliant diplomat and jurist who headed the Foreign Ministry’s Legal Division.” “I drew comfort from our brief interlude,” Butler wrote, “finding yet another person of towering intellectual and moral strength whose humanity had not been compromised by the intoxicating allure of weapons of unbounded destructiveness.” 283
“Intoxicating allure.” Should nuclear weapons be included in the War on Drugs started in the Nixon years?
In October, Butler returned to the United States. Shortly, he heard again from Senator Alan Cranston who “asked to bring a small delegation to Omaha to put a proposition” to Butler about his “future participation in the cause of nuclear abolition.” 283