Interlude II-1 What Words? Why?
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).
The limits of my language means the limits of my world.
― Ludwig Wittgenstein
Let’s say that in spite of those who just know it’s impossible, we are going to try to achieve a world free of nuclear weapons. What words do we use to describe this goal?
This could be important. Words are never just words. They establish certain fields for thought and action, and rule out others.
In the Geiringer Oration in New Zealand in 1997 that had made such a powerful impression on so many in that audience and elsewhere later, retired Commander in Chief of the Strategic Air Command George Lee Butler had specified the goal as the “complete elimination of nuclear weapons.”
The goal we set, he said in the talk, “matters enormously,” and, further, that “elimination” was “the only defensible long-term goal.”
This goal matters, he said, for several reasons. It makes other measures, like “reductions” in the numbers of weapons, mere “way-points” on the way to zero. It shifts attention from mere reductions in numbers to “the security climate essential to permit successive rounds of reductions.” It sets the stage for “rigorous enforcement of nonproliferation regimes.” It “conditions government at all levels to create and respond to every opportunity for shrinking arsenals, cutting infrastructure and curtailing delivery systems and nuclear weapons modernization.” 259
I don’t personally know anyone who declares their goal to be “more nuclear weapons in the world” or “more countries and people with nuclear weapons.” I’ve heard there are some such. Like those who believe everyone should pack a gun, they seem to think that every country having nuclear weapons would make us safer.
I don’t personally know anyone who isn’t in favor of fewer nuclear weapons, at least. Those who still believe nuclear weapons are a “deterrent” will speak in favor of us having some nuclear weapons. But many I know, including George Lee Butler, want all of them gone. How should we specify that goal in our language?
The word Butler used in his Geiringer Oration, “elimination” comes from Latin words meaning “throw out of the house.” “Toss over the threshold.” Something like that.
“Elimination” had also been chosen by the Canberra Commission on the Elimination of Nuclear Weapons that the just-retired General Butler had served on in 1996. The members of the Commission had modified this goal, however. Because “elimination” by itself might allow the inference that instantaneous unilateral action was being called for—definitely not what the members of the commission wanted to recommend—the goal was revised to “stable phased elimination.”
The word preferred by members of the Peace Movement Lee Butler addressed at the convocation of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation in Santa Barbara, California in 1999 was likely to be “abolition.” They were happy to be called “nuclear abolitionists.”
“Abolition” comes from a Latin word meaning “destroy.” It is part of a family of terms that imply an all-or-nothing once-and-for-all action. The Canberra Commission had explicitly rejected “abolition” as their goal because of these connotations. They believed “elimination” could be achieved only in a process that was “phased.” And “stable.”
“Nuclear abolitionist” does have about it a kind of definitive, maybe even heroic quality, for those who embrace it. For others, not surprisingly, it may connote a lack of realism.
The verb “outlaw” shares the all-or-nothing quality. If something is outlawed, it is from that moment, unlawful. Done deal. Legally speaking anyway. It must of course be recognized that even if “slavery” could be and was both “abolished” and “outlawed” in the United States, as it was after our Civil War, some Americans who thought slavery was okay—for others, not for themselves—found ways to continue the practice under other names.
“Ban” is another word in this all-at-once all-or-nothing family. Something is banned, or it isn’t. If it is “banned,” it probably hasn’t been abolished or it wouldn’t have to be banned. But it has been outlawed by the pertinent authorities, with the kick that a curse may also have been laid on it. These days many Republican-controlled state legislatures are “banning” abortion.
“Prohibition" is a member of this all-at-once all-or-nothing family. A gentler member, perhaps. “Prohibition” comes from a Latin word meaning to “hold back” or “prevent.”
Still it has the definitive all-or-nothing trait. Pass a law, sign a treaty—The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, let’s say—and you’re done with the prohibiting. Legally speaking anyway. That particular treaty was opened for signature at the United Nations in September 2017 and “came into force” under international law in 2020. No Nuclear Weapon State signed on to the treaty. None has intimated it ever will.
When it comes to other Weapons of Mass Destruction (weapons that in their nature preclude focusing only on military targets), we are party to an international treaty that “prohibits” chemical weapons (Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production, Stockpiling and Use of Chemical Weapons and on their Destruction, 1997) that seems to have worked pretty well. We destroyed our last chemical weapons a few weeks ago, it was reported. We are also party to a treaty that prohibits biological weapons (Biological Weapons Convention, 1975). Kind of prohibits them. It bans the production and use but not the possession of biological weapons and unfortunately provides no means of verification.
For people who have some acquaintance with American history, the term “prohibition” may carry another concern. We know it is possible to “prohibit” something, like drinking alcohol—even by means of an amendment to our Constitution (the eighteenth, ratified in 1919)—and be completely unable to prohibit it in practice, even when that thing is recognized to be grievously harmful to people and the polity. According to The National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, a component of the National Institutes of Health (NIH June 2023), more than 140,000 people died in the United States in the reporting year from alcohol-related causes, approximately 97,000 men and 43,000 women. As a cause of death, that put it just behind the total of deaths caused by all of the other drugs we have outlawed. Until recently, alcohol was number one.
Before the Eighteenth Amendment was repealed in 1933 by the Twenty-first Amendment to the Constitution, our authorities devoted vast resources to enforcing it. Attempts to enforce or coerce compliance with that particular prohibition seemed not to have ameliorated the problem but to have exacerbated it.
We would seem to have learned nothing from this experience. In 1971, during President Nixon’s administration, a “war on drugs” was declared. Wars are about coercion. Fifty years later, we have spent, NBC has reported, a trillion dollars in this “war.”
How are we doing would you say? Might that money have been better spent on something else?