George Lee Butler XIII-4: Where Next?
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 November 1992, five months after General Butler stood down SAC and stood up STRATCOM, President George H. W. Bush failed to win election to a second term. Our next president would be William Jefferson Clinton.
In his one term as President, George H. W. Bush had done quite a lot to reduce the nuclear threat, wouldn’t you agree? He’d had to get out there to do it. In those unilateral Presidential Nuclear Initiatives, for example. General Butler’s support for the initiatives must have helped. And then Mikhail Gorbachev had responded with unilateral measures of his own. “Unilateral” means they had done them on their own, without being required by a treaty or tit-for-tat agreement to do so.
On January 3, 1992, a couple of weeks before turning the office over to President-elect Clinton, President Bush signed a START II treaty with the new president of the Russian Federation, Boris Yeltsin. In START II both sides agreed to take off their ICBMs all the Multiple Independently Targetable Re-entry Vehicles. On land-based missiles anyway. Another big step. Everyone, almost everyone, now agreed that MIRVs had been a terrible, dangerous, destabilizing idea. The Navy would be allowed to keep some MIRVs on their Trident D-5 Submarine Launched Ballistic Missiles. Not as many as before. But still quite a few, like eight. The Minuteman III ICBM had only three.
In that same month, January 1992, while General Butler was still CINCSAC, he sent a letter to the Chief of the Air Force, General Tony McPeak. McPeak had asked all the four-star generals for their thoughts on “Air Force strengths and weaknesses and on what its objectives should be over the next four years.” p. 141
Butler’s assessment of strengths concluded,
In short, we are the world’s best air force. We got there by taking care of business. Staying focused on the threat. Acquiring superb instruments of war. Recruiting and training skilled, motivated professionals.
As to the weaknesses, Butler mentioned the way the force was “stovepiped” into different specialties that created obstacles to “unified” command. That could be a problem in a war, couldn’t it? Even in governments and universities.
“Finally,” Butler wrote,
for all our reorganizing, I am deeply concerned that we as an institution have not yet come to grips with the magnitude of change set in motion by the end of the Cold War and break-up of the Soviet Union. Our galvanizing threat has effectively dissolved. That astonishing reality, coupled with the associated demise of the Warsaw Pact and German reunification, signals the end of an era of large standing U.S. armed forces. NATO is surely in its last days, at least NATO as we have known it.
He added,
The nuclear age is effectively over, fears of proliferation notwithstanding. Nuclear alert will soon be a thing of the past. Modernization is a dead letter, except for modest improvements to existing systems. Long-standing targeting doctrine and war plans are simply outmoded and largely irrelevant. . . . STRATCOM is a novel and potentially useful organization, but absent additional future missions, it probably has a half-life of five years.
In some respects, we as a nation are right back in 1945, absent the looming threat of a hegemonic Soviet Union and the Cold War.
The great challenges are rebuilding a world weary of superpower confrontation and regional war, putting the nuclear genie back in the bottle, and establishing global means of cooperation founded on the rule of law. In this setting, political, social and economic dialogue can —indeed must—supplant military solutions to conflict.
That’s how General Butler thought matters stood in 1992 shortly after the end of the Cold War and at the beginning of the Clinton administration. How did matters in fact unfold?
In his memoir, General Butler follows the quotation of his letter to Chief of the Air Force McPeak with this:
As I once more read these words, twenty-four years removed from penning them, I weep for the opportunities lost and strategic blunders committed that closed the door on the possibilities for the world that I envisioned in 1992. Distractions during the Clinton years cost irretrievable momentum in arms control, disrupted the United Nations’ monitoring of Iraq’s aspirations for a renewed nuclear program and killed leverage with the Pentagon to compel reformation of the U.S. armed forces. These were inexcusable and carried severe consequences. Worse, taking the easy and popular path of expanding NATO—rather than pushing our European allies to take charge of their own security—tied down significant forces with irrelevant missions, perpetuated Cold War thinking, and needlessly alienated a Russia desperately poor and insecure. The arrogance and shortsightedness resident in these strategic missteps has persisted across administrations, bringing us finally to the debacle in Iraq, a renewal of tensions with Moscow not seen in twenty-five years, and an unprecedented decline in American credibility and prestige. pp. 142-144
What else has happened since 1992, when General Butler wrote those hopeful words to General McPeak?
Here is an abbreviated chronology.
In 1994, at the NATO summit in Brussels, an American initiative called the Partnership for Peace was launched, within NATO, “to enable participants to develop an individual relationship with NATO, choosing their own priorities for cooperation, and the level and pace of progress.” “Progress” towards becoming members of NATO, I guess. The idea was to support various forms of cooperation—educational, industrial, scientific, military cooperation directed at peacekeeping—between NATO and non-NATO countries, some of whom had been neutral (Sweden, Norway, and Finland) and some of whom had been in the Warsaw Pact or the Soviet Union.
In May 1995, the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty, which had entered into force in 1970 and been signed at the time by over 60 countries, was indefinitely extended by the parties (In 2023 the NPT has been signed by 190 countries). Article VI of the NPT allowed the five original Nuclear Weapons States—the United States, the Soviet Union, Great Britain, France, and China—to keep their nukes, provided they would begin now and continue to work actively toward the elimination of nuclear weapons. Israel, India, Pakistan, and South Sudan did not sign the NPT. North Korea withdrew in 2003, during the George W. Bush administration. The work required of the Nuclear Weapons States by Article VI hasn’t happened and isn’t happening. That fact has often been pointed out by the Non-Governmental Organizations still committed to elimination. It’s still not happening.
In May 1998, India conducted a series of three nuclear weapons tests (5 devices), their first tests of nuclear weapons. In 1974, they had tested what they claimed was a “peaceful” nuclear device. Also in May 1998, Pakistan conducted six nuclear weapons tests. Both were now nuclear weapons states. Neither had signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. President Clinton had tried to get the two countries to agree to shun nuclear weapons. India wouldn’t agree to since China wasn’t going to be a part of the agreement. If India didn’t, Pakistan wouldn’t.
In 1999, during the Clinton administration, Hungary, Poland, and the Czech Republic were folded into the NATO alliance in the first expansion of NATO since the reunification of Germany when Gorbachev was the leader of the Soviet Union.
In 2001, on September 11, stateless Islamist terrorists attacked the World Trade Center buildings in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. by crashing into them passenger airliners they had hijacked. A fourth passenger airliner crashed in a field, brought down, it is clear, by the passengers. Nuclear weapons were not involved in the attack or the response to it.
In June 2002, the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty was abrogated by President George W. Bush. The ABM treaty had been in effect since being signed by President Nixon in 1972. When the ABM Treaty was abrogated, Russia immediately began to re-arm its ICBMs with Multiple Independently Targetable Re-entry Vehicles. The START II treaty, signed 3 January 1992 by President George H. W. Bush and Boris Yeltsin, in which the U.S. and the Soviet Union agreed to get rid of their MIRVs on ICBMs, was now a dead letter.
In 2004, seven Central and Eastern European countries were added to NATO—Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia. President George W. Bush attended the accession ceremony.
In 2006, on October 9, still during President George W. Bush’s administration, North Korea tested its first nuclear weapons. President Bush had taken a very “tough” stance against North Korea acquiring nuclear weapons. It hadn’t done the job.
In 2014, Russian forces invaded and occupied the Crimean Peninsula and claimed it as part of Russia. Most other countries considered Crimea to be part of Ukraine, which had been an independent country since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991.
In 2015 January, the Russian Federation stopped accepting U.S. assistance in securing weapons-grade nuclear material and dismantling nuclear weapons. Since the late 1980’s, the U.S. had been providing technical and financial assistance under the Cooperative Threat Reduction program started by Senators Sam Nunn (D-GA) and Richard Lugar (R-IN). In 1991, the CTR program had been codified in the Soviet Nuclear Threat Reduction Act, also known as the Nunn-Lugar Act.
In 2018 on October 20, the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty was abrogated by President Donald Trump. On 1 February 2019, it was formally suspended by the U.S. It was suspended by Russia the following day. It had been signed by President Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev in 1987.
In 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine. At this writing, the war is ongoing. Russia has mentioned the possibility of using tactical nuclear weapons in the conflict. The United States is supplying Ukraine with advanced conventional weapons on the condition that they not be used inside Russian territory.
In 2023, Russia partially suspended New START, which had been signed by Presidents Obama and Medvedev on April 8, 2012 in Prague. Russia would now allow no more inspections but said they would maintain the number of warheads agreed to in the treaty, 1550. That number, regardless of the effects on the antagonists, is ten times what has been estimated by scientists to be necessary to cause a nuclear winter that would result in the starvation of billions of people on earth.
In 2023, despite the failure of the U.S. anti-ballistic missile program to develop anything that would protect against more than a few incoming intercontinental ballistic missiles, Russia has developed two new weapons systems that would defeat any such program: a hypersonic glide missile that would fly lower and arrive in much less time than an ICBM, and a drone torpedo that could carry a 100-megaton warhead (twice the yield of largest nuclear device to be detonated in any test so far). This weapon could be stored on the sea floor and when activated be guided by artificial intelligence to, let’s say, the west coast of Great Britain or the United States, where, leaving aside the effects of blast or heat, the radioactive results of its detonation would likely blanket even the whole of the United States, not to mention Canada and Mexico. Or Great Britain.
China, which had not been a party to any of the treaties mentioned above other than the NPT, had nevertheless for many years not gone beyond about four-hundred warheads in its nuclear arsenal. They could have but I guess they hadn’t seen any point. In recent years, China seems to have begun to build up its stockpile. It has also developed hypersonic glide missiles and built more ICBM silos. It has continued to declare, as the U.S. never has, that its policy is never to be the first to use nuclear weapons.
China has, however, recently expressed its determination to incorporate Taiwan into China. The United States has expressed its determination to defend Taiwan against any Chinese aggression. Both countries are conducting large military exercises designed to demonstrate their determination.
So today, in 2023, thirty-one years from General Butler penning that letter to General McPeak about the future he saw as possible at the end of the Cold War, where would you say we have gotten ourselves? And where are we headed? Why?
Next: George Lee Butler XIV: the First of Two Important Experiences