Interlude II-3 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, You Might Want to Know, August 3, 2023.
At the end of retired General George Lee Butler’s address when he was receiving the award of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation in 1998 in Santa Barbara, California, he announced to the group that he would be establishing a foundation that would have as its goal “the reduction and elimination of nuclear dangers.”
That’s not how he’d stated the goal in the Geiringer Oration in Wellington, New Zealand in 1997. There he’d said the goal was “the complete elimination of nuclear weapons.”
Was the new formulation a retreat from the commitment made said in the Geiringer Oration? It was not. Here’s why not.
The new formulation does allow for the possibility of “the reduction . . . of nuclear dangers. “Dangers” can be reduced without eliminating nuclear weapons, without eliminating any of them, in fact, by, for example, taking our ICBMs off nuclear alert.
Reducing nuclear dangers may not entail eliminating nuclear weapons but it need not distract us from the ultimate goal of eliminating them. Eliminating nuclear dangers does entail eliminating nuclear weapons.
It may be important to recognize here that reducing the number of nuclear weapons does not necessarily reduce nuclear “dangers.”
Today, in 2023, the numbers of nuclear warheads in the stockpiles of the United States and Russia, who together hold almost 95% of the nuclear weapons that now exist, have been reduced from what they were at the height of the Cold War. Vastly. By twenty times.
The reductions have in no appreciable way, however, eliminated the “dangers.” Both countries today retain about 1500 strategic nuclear weapons, many more than would be required to exterminate humanity. There has been no talk recently of further reductions, let alone of eliminating the weapons the two countries still have.
The current numbers could be reduced by half again without significantly reducing the ultimate nuclear dangers. You could argue—I would—that agreeing to such reductions in numbers would reduce the dangers, at the time of the agreements, at least, because of the fact that some agreement had been reached.
The reduction in numbers would also have reduced the risks of accident. The risks of accident will not have been entirely eliminated, of course, until the weapons are. No matter how “professional” and well-trained and equipped are those who maintain these very complex machines designed for massive destruction, the risk is not zero until the number of weapons is.
Finally to eliminate the “dangers,” then, it will be necessary to eliminate the weapons, just what Butler had called for in the Geiringer Oration.
Here is another wrinkle that Butler’s formulation of the goal for the Second Chance Foundation invites us to recognize—that it might be possible to eliminate nuclear “weapons” without eliminating nuclear “dangers.”
Eliminating the weapons will not eliminate the knowledge of how to make them. As Niels Bohr and J. Robert Oppenheimer knew from the beginning of the Nuclear Era, knowledge is not something that can be “eliminated” without eliminating the knowers. The knowledge of how to make them is not a “secret” now, if it ever was. It can be ignored or forgotten, but that’s different.
Plus, eliminating nuclear weapons would not necessarily eliminate the large stores of manufactured fissile fuel now stockpiled in the nuclear weapon states. At the beginning of the nuclear era, manufacturing the fissile fuel was the hardest part about making a nuclear weapon. Not any more. Today tons and tons of the highly enriched uranium and plutonium necessary to making nuclear weapons are now stockpiled by Russia and the United States, with smaller amounts in the seven other countries that have become nuclear weapon states. Unless agreements and measures are in place that keep secure those stores and make unlikely or undesirable any acquisition of these fuels by non-state terrorists or a remanufacture of nuclear weapons that might have been dismantled, eliminating nuclear weapons could not be said to have eliminated nuclear dangers.
During his two terms, President Obama sponsored four international Nuclear Security Summits. All were very well-attended, though Russia refused to attend the last one. The goal of these convocations was to identify, locate and secure the supplies of fissile fuel—in civilian hands, at least—world-wide. Significant progress was made in these summits toward meeting this goal though it wasn’t in the news much. The last summit, the one Russia refused to attend, wrapped up on April 1, 2016.
The President who came after Obama, Donald J. Trump, who took office in January 2017, had no interest in continuing this effort and didn’t. I’m not sure why he didn’t think it was worthwhile. He might not have given the matter much thought.
If the fissile fuel can be got hold of, the knowledge of how to make a nuclear weapon would not be hard to come by, if you don’t have it already. The hard part is getting the fissile fuel.
To eliminate nuclear dangers, then, we will have to get rid not just of nuclear weapons but the supplies of fissile fuel that must be accounted for and secured. It can’t just be dumped in the landfill. It has a shelf life of thousands and thousands of years.
Are you among those who believe in nuclear deterrence? If you are clinging to that faith, you will not want to eliminate all the weapons, but what numbers do you think are necessary to make deterrence actual? As far as I know, that question has never been seriously considered by our nuclear policy-makers. Or Russia’s. The answer has almost always been “more than we have now.” And better delivery systems.
In the mid-1970’s, someone on our side, though not the Soviet Union’s, seems to have decided that increasing our stockpile beyond the 25,000 or so nuclear warheads we had at the time and increasing the numbers of our delivery systems (bombers, intercontinental ballistic missiles, and ballistic missile submarines) beyond what we already had would be pointless. Overkill.
In any case, in the mid-70’s, we stopped increasing our totals of weapons and delivery systems. That made some in our military nervous. They seemed to think that the Soviets were “getting ahead” of us. Which they were, for the first time, in numbers, if not in anything that made a meaningful difference.
What would you say is needed, in numbers of warheads, for effective deterrence?
Herbert York, the first director of the Livermore nuclear weapons laboratory, our second weapons laboratory after Los Alamos, was once asked what he thought the number of warheads was. To deter someone rational enough to be deterred, he replied, “Somewhere between 1 and 100, closer to 1 than to 100.”
McGeorge Bundy, the statesman and national security advisor to the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, once wrote in the journal Foreign Affairs,
In the real world of real political leaders—whether here or in the Soviet Union—a decision that would bring even one hydrogen bomb on one city of one’s own country would be recognized as a catastrophic blunder; ten bombs on ten cities would be a disaster beyond human history; and a hundred bombs on a hundred cities are unthinkable.1
In 2023, we and Russia each have, as I say, about 1500. Fifteen times unthinkable.
Both of these stories appear in Daniel Ellsberg’s The Doomsday Machine: confessions of a nuclear war planner, Bloomsbury (2017). I have not had the time to run down the original sources. I have on other questions always found Ellsberg to be accurate and trustworthy.