Interlude II-4: What Words? Why?
Since February 2021, I have been posting on Substack weekly entries on nuclear weapon matters—history, technology, “secrets,” not current events—in You Might Want to Know. To see a list of other entries that might interest you, including other entries that tell George Lee Butler’s story, see the You Might Want to Know Archive.
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 fields for thought and action, and rule out others. From Interlude II-1, You Might Want to Know, August 3, 2023.
In January 2007, seven years after Lee Butler established the Second Chance Foundation with its goal of “reducing and eliminating nuclear dangers,” an op-ed appeared in the Wall Street Journal that surprised quite a few of us. It argued we should set a goal of, in the words of the title, “a world free of nuclear weapons.”
The goal of something like “a world free of nuclear weapons” was nothing new. Even before the first nuclear bomb was tested in New Mexico on July 16, 1945, this goal, or something like it, had been advanced by the great Danish physicist Niels Bohr. Bohr argued to President Franklin Roosevelt and, at Roosevelt’s request, to Winston Churchill, that an approach should be made to the Soviets to try to get them to cooperate with us in keeping the terribly destructive new weapons out of the world. Roosevelt seemed to think an approach to the Soviets would be worth trying. Churchill rejected the idea without even hearing Bohr out. Vehemently. Later he suggested Bohr should be imprisoned for proposing it.
No effort of this kind was made. Instead, we got, as Bohr and others predicted we would, a deeply perilous nuclear arms race that lasted for forty-five years and has been estimated to have cost us five trillion dollars. More. We are still cleaning up after it and will be for a very long time. It’s still on, isn’t it?
So the goal of “a world free of nuclear weapons” wasn’t new. What was new in January 2007, even shocking, was who was now urging it.
The goal of a world free of nuclear weapons was being urged here by four men none of whom was currently in the U.S. government but all of whom had held high leadership positions in it and had always held that we should retain nuclear weapons. The four were George Shultz, President Reagan’s Secretary of State; William Perry, President Clinton’s Secretary of Defense; Sam Nunn, former chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee during the Reagan and H.W. Bush administrations; and perhaps most surprising, Henry Kissinger, President Nixon’s Secretary of State and National Security Advisor, now the head of a lucrative private consulting firm, Kissinger Associates.
All four men had been deep inside the world of nuclear weapons policy-making in the United States, deeper inside it in some ways than the presidents they had served. They were the kind of people George Lee Butler had hoped to reach in his work leading the Second Chance Foundation. During the time that Butler was running SCF, William Perry and Sam Nunn were in office. Shultz and Kissinger no longer were. People in government still listened to them.
In 1997, a year after Butler’s remarkable Geiringer Oration in New Zealand, Senator Alan Cranston had arranged a meeting between Butler and George Shultz. As President Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of State, Shultz had been present at the momentous meeting between Reagan and Gorbachev in Reykjavik, Iceland in 1986. The meeting was not as momentous as it might have been: Gorbachev had proposed at the meeting that they agree to eliminate all nuclear weapons. Reagan had liked the idea at first, it seemed, but his advisors convinced him that instead we should commit ourselves to a hugely expensive project called the Strategic Defense Initiative. SDI would develop technologically sophisticated systems that would render all nuclear weapons “impotent and obsolete.” Pretty quickly, that hope proved vain. By then the opportunity had been lost.
During a short meeting with Shultz in 1997 arranged by Senator Alan Cranston, Butler had briefed Shultz on his ideas for achieving “the complete elimination of nuclear weapons.” Nothing had come of this meeting, not at the time. The op-ed proposing a world free of nuclear weapons came out ten years later.
Until the publication of this op-ed in 2007, all four of its authors had been known for their unshakeable faith in “nuclear deterrence.” None, before now, had been an advocate for a world free of nuclear weapons.
Before Lee Butler began to argue for the complete elimination of nuclear weapons in 1996, he had been the Commander in Chief of the United States Strategic Command. He had shown, therefore, that it was possible for unlikely people to change their minds about these matters. Butler had changed his, he said, because of the promptings of his conscience, though he went on to offer closely reasoned arguments to support the change.
Why had these four made the change? Here’s how they explained it in their column.
Nuclear weapons were essential to maintaining international security during the Cold War because they were a means of deterrence. The end of the Cold War [in 1991, seventeen years earlier] made the doctrine of mutual Soviet-American deterrence obsolete. Deterrence continues to be a relevant consideration for many states with regard to threats from other states. But reliance on nuclear weapons for this purpose is becoming increasingly hazardous and decreasingly effective.
Notice that they assert as a fact, not as a matter of faith, that nuclear weapons had provided effective deterrence during the Cold War. This proposition is, of course, as Butler had recognized, not proved by the fact that the United States and the Soviet Union had not gone directly to war with with each other over that period. The claim is—though in many circles unquestioned—unprovable. A matter of faith.
In any case, their change of mind hadn’t happened because of moral objections to the weapons as unavoidably weapons of mass destruction and genocide. Nor had it happened because of practical arguments by people like General Colin Powell that nuclear weapons were useless as weapons of war. It had been brought about, they explained, because of the nuclear “proliferation” that had taken place since the days when only the United States and then the Soviet Union had possessed the weapons. And by the prospect, they said, of more proliferation. “Deterrence” had worked in a “bi-polar” world, they asserted, but with more countries now having the weapons, it no longer could be relied on.