George Lee Butler XIII-2: SAC Stands Down
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).
The Air Force four star generals had seemed to buy into General Butler’s proposal that SAC be stood down. They might not have found it that hard since it didn’t involve any diminishment of their missions or resources. Everyone’s mission but SAC’s would be enhanced. Especially that of the Tactical Air Command, soon to be the Air Combat Command. They would get all of SAC’s 500 bombers.
Their budgets might increase too, although that post-Cold War “peace dividend” that was being mentioned might put a dent in that. We’d see about that.
Now the details of the standing down of SAC would have to be hammered out and a few others in the military “brought on board.”
One of the bigger details was whether SAC should continue to be a “Specified Command” or whether a new command called the Strategic Command should be created that would be “a single joint unified combatant command”—a lesser thing than a “specified command.” STRATCOM would have no bases of its own and no ability to conduct operations on its own. It would, however, have control over nuclear war planning and of any nuclear forces on alert, that is, placed on immediate launch readiness. And, should nuclear war come, STRATCOM would have operational command over all nuclear forces, including the “strategic” missile submarines of the Navy, which at the moment it didn’t have.
Butler thought the second option was preferable, even though it would reduce the sway of SAC even more. If that was what he preferred, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell told him, he would have to bring the Chief of Naval operations, Admiral Frank Kelso, on board. This could be a heavy lift. It was the Navy’s insistence on retaining operational control of its own nuclear weapons that had torpedoed the first proposal that a Strategic Command be established. That proposal had been made all the way back at the end of the Eisenhower administration when the very first Strategic Integrated Operational Plan for general nuclear war was being formulated..
General Butler would be the first Commander in Chief of a new STRATCOM, but, he told Admiral Kelso when they met, his Vice-CINC would be a Navy three-star Admiral chosen by Admiral Kelso. Also, the position of CINCSTRAT would be rotated between Air Force Generals and Navy Admirals, and Butler would agree to step down as CINCSTRAT early, three years before his mandatory retirement date, as soon as STRATCOM got its “sea legs.”
Another important development was that on July 31, 1991, the Commander in Chief of our Armed Forces, President George H. W. Bush, had signed START—the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty—with the Soviet Union. This treaty didn’t just limit the number of nuclear weapons in our stockpiles, it reduced them. President Bush was already eager, it seemed, to negotiate a START II. He would almost certainly want to support the decision to stand down SAC because of the momentum it might give to the negotiations.
President Bush said he’d be making a speech to the nation in September and would announce the stand-down of SAC then.
But President Bush and General Butler saw other ways of creating momentum. The first START said that our force of 450 Minuteman II ICBMs would be retired over many months. On General Butler’s recommendation, President Bush decided to retire the Minuteman IIs immediately and unilaterally in what was called a Presidential Nuclear Initiative. (This didn’t exactly leave us without a land-based nuclear deterrent: we would still have 550 multi-warhead Minuteman III ICBMs on alert). Also, all SAC bombers were unilaterally taken off nuclear alert, that is, removed from the “immediate launch readiness” they had maintained all day every day since 1957. Mikhail Gorbachev responded with unilateral initiatives of his own. It was working.
In November of 1990, the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe had been signed by the countries of NATO and the Warsaw Pact. Big reductions were made in conventional forces in Europe, on both sides, more on their side than on ours, partly, no doubt, because they had more conventional forces than we did in Europe. The U.S. Army had retained some smaller “tactical” nuclear weapons in Western Europe. In his speech, President Bush announced that we would be taking all the ground-based tactical nuclear weapons out of Europe. We would also be taking the tactical nuclear weapons off our Navy ships. The weapons would be brought home and destroyed was the plan.
Secretary of Defense Cheney and other Republicans wanted some of the “tactical” nuclear weapons left in Europe and others kept in storage. That’s what happened finally. I guess they thought that would somehow make us safer.
While it was clear in 1991 that the danger of war with the Soviet Union had receded, maybe even disappeared, the danger of the kinds of regional wars General Butler had foreseen in his 1988 speech to the National War College had not. The Gulf War that had ended only this year, at the end of February 1991, a month after General Butler became CINCSAC, had shown that.
Historical Note on the Gulf War: In August 1990, a few months before General Butler became CINCSAC, the Middle Eastern country of Iraq, whose president was the dictator Saddam Hussein, had invaded and completely taken over the small oil-rich country of Kuwait that was on their southeastern border. President Bush had quickly put together a large coalition of nations to oppose this action. Some former members of the Warsaw Pact joined the coalition. On the border between Saudi Arabia and Iraq, the coalition built up a large body of conventional forces, tanks and such. A bombing campaign, using SAC airplanes carrying conventional bombs, had begun on January 17, 1991, a few days before General Butler became CINCSAC. After a little more than a month of bombing, the coalition forces crossed the border into Iraq. They advanced rapidly. On February 28, 2001, a month after Butler became CINCSAC, President Bush called a halt to the advance when coalition forces were still well short of Baghdad, Iraq’s capital city. Iraq’s dictator, Saddam Hussein, remained in power. General Butler had considered using SAC’s nuclear weapons in the conflict—we had them, why couldn’t we use them?—but could see no way it made sense. During their retreat, Iraq’s forces had set a large number of Kuwait’s oil wells on fire. It took a while to put them out.
Next: George Lee Butler XIII-3: SAC Stands Down