Interlude II-2 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).
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. from Interlude II-1, August 3, 2023.
In his award acceptance speech to the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation on April 29, 1999, Lee Butler had declined to embrace the term “abolition” or any of its other all-at-once family members as his goal. The term “abolition” had become identified, he believed, with the radical activism of the Peace Movement that he and others he had worked with as Commander-in-Chief of the Strategic Air Command and the Strategic Command had come to see as ineffective, even counter-productive.
How about “disarmament”? That’s not all-at-once. It allows for a process. Also one that is achieved by agreement, not by “enforcement” or “war,” that is, by coercion, which rarely works the way we might have hoped.
In 1952, the year of our successful test of the first hydrogen bomb (Ivy Mike, yield the equivalent of more than ten million tons of TNT, plus radioactive fission products) a “Disarmament Commission” was established in the United Nations. As time went by, it was followed by several other entities in the UN focused on “disarmament.” In 1979 the last of these entities was replaced by a “Conference on Disarmament” that is formally independent of the United Nations. Over the years, the Conference has helped draft important treaties, starting with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Nothing recently. It is still in operation though. Representatives from 65 countries meet three times a year in Geneva.
The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty had gotten ratified in 1970. It allowed the Nuclear Weapon States of that time, all five of whom had signed the treaty, to keep their nuclear weapons if they committed to begin immediately to enter into “good faith negotiations” whose goal would be “complete nuclear disarmament.”
That has never happened, not even the “good faith negotiations” part, as members of the Peace Movement are frequently reminding us. The treaty didn’t prevent “proliferation” either. Since 1970, four more countries have acquired nuclear weapons. North Korea most recently, in 2006, during the administration of George W. Bush.
From the point of view of someone committed to elimination, there are several unwelcome implications in the term “disarmament,” I think. One is that mere reduction could meet the standard. Partial disarmament might still qualify as disarmament. Partial elimination is not elimination unless it is done in the name of elimination.
Another problem is that the term courts the idea that not just nuclear weapons but all armed forces and armaments are on the table. In the actual mission statement of the Conference on Disarmament they, in fact, are. This goal could seem even more unrealistic than the goal of eliminating nuclear weapons only.
Yet another consideration is that while arms may have been put down in a “disarmament” process, if they have not been eliminated, they are available to be taken up again.
At the end of Butler’s speech to the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, he told the group that he had established a new foundation. Its goal, he said, would be “reducing and eliminating nuclear dangers.”
In this formulation, we see two significant changes from the way he had specified the goal in the Geiringer Oration. There he’d said the only goal that made sense was “the complete elimination of nuclear weapons.”
Here the goal is eliminating “nuclear dangers.” And reducing them is allowed.
In the Geiringer Oration, Butler told his audience that friends had advised him that setting the goal as "the complete elimination of nuclear weapons” risked setting the goal too high, “providing an easy target for the cynical and diverting attention from the more immediately achievable.” Like reducing the numbers of the weapons. Or taking our ICBMs off nuclear alert. 259
Is this shift to “reducing and eliminating nuclear dangers,” then, a retreat from the goal he had declared in the Geiringer Oration? It is not. There is no way to eliminate nuclear “dangers,” finally, without eliminating nuclear “weapons.” It is, however, possible to reduce nuclear “dangers” without eliminating the weapons.
Butler’s new goal committed the Second Chance Foundation to “elimination” of the dangers.
From the time of his service on the Canberra Commission, Butler had specified ways in which the “dangers” posed by nuclear weapons might be “reduced” on the way to “eliminating” them. The starting point Butler suggested in the Geiringer Oration was taking our intercontinental ballistic missiles off nuclear alert. Unlike some other measures—like separating the nuclear warheads from the missiles—this could be done in a day.
Butler had recommended taking our ICBMs off nuclear alert to former President Carter in the meeting Carter had invited him to at the Carter Center in 1996. That same day, Carter had recommended this to President Clinton’s National Security Advisor, Sandy Berger. Neither Carter nor Butler heard back from the White House.
Taking the missiles off nuclear alert was one of the measures Daniel Ellsberg, a nuclear war planner at the highest levels in the Kennedy administration, recommended in his book The Doomsday Machine: confessions of a nuclear war planner, (Bloomsbury, 2017) as a good way to begin to dismantle the Doomsday Machine that we are living with. That was how Ellsberg specified the goal—as dismantling the Doomsday Machine. That also is something that might be done without eliminating nuclear weapons entirely.
Today, six years after Ellsberg called for this action, which Butler had called for ten years before Ellsberg did, and more than thirty years after the end of the Cold War, this “de-alerting” hasn’t happened. Our Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles are still being kept in immediate launch readiness. At great expense. In 2023 they are about to be, not eliminated, but “modernized,” at even greater expense. The cost of “modernizing” is now estimated to be $180 billion over eight years, about a third of the total expense of maintaining our nuclear forces. Cost estimates of this sort go up, never down.
Whose interests does this huge expenditure serve? The interests of what President Eisenhower called the military-industrial complex, you’d have to say. And of the members of Congress whose districts benefit from the expenditures, like the ones with bases and missile fields in them. And of the local economies around the bases.
Anyone else? All Americans, you might say?
Really?
Here’s a little story about the importance of words in this matter. In 2011 in an interview published in Time magazine, William Perry, who had been President Clinton’s Secretary of Defense, said, about de-alerting the ICBMs, “I don’t think we ought to use the term de-alerting. De-alerting is a word that goes against the grain of every military person—they spend their career trying to be alert and then you come along and tell them they need to de-alert. It’s the wrong word. What we need is a framework for increasing warning and decision time for nuclear weapons.”
Okay by me. We don’t want to create morale problems in our military if we can help it. We do, I think, want to take these weapons permanently off Cold War alert, that is, off immediate launch readiness.