Interlude II-5: What Words? Why? Commitments
Since February 2021, I have been posting on Substack weekly entries on nuclear weapon matters—history and technology, not current events—in You Might Want to Know. To see a list of other entries that might interest you, including the 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).
[T]he unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking and thus we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe. Albert Einstein, 1948
In 2007, as my previous posting unfolded, four elder statesmen, who during their time in government had been ardent supporters of nuclear deterrence, published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal in which they said we should now commit ourselves to work toward “a world free of nuclear weapons.”
Retired General George Lee Butler, the last Commander in Chief of the Strategic Air Command and first CINC of the new Strategic Command, had urged that commitment in 1996, ten years earlier, in a speech to the National Press Club. At the time, the four elder statesmen clearly hadn’t been persuaded.
They had no doubt been helped to change their minds about the efficacy of nuclear deterrence by a shocking event on September 11, 2001, six years before they published their op-ed. Members of an Islamist group called Al Qaeda had hijacked four passenger airliners, flown two them into the two towers of the World Trade Center in New York City, causing both towers to collapse, and a third into the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., murdering thousands of innocent people and killing themselves in the process. The hijackers had intended, it came to be thought, to fly the fourth airliner into the Capitol building or the White House. They were prevented by the passengers, who made a heroic effort to take back the airplane, then headed back toward Washington, D.C. When the airplane and its passengers were about twenty minutes from D.C., it crashed into an open field in western Pennsylvania and exploded. No one survived.
How could we imagine we were going to “deter” such as those hijackers by threatening to kill them or to retaliate on their countries with our nuclear weapons? They were both suicidal and stateless. They didn’t have countries. And what if such as they had stolen or bought a nuclear weapon, or stolen or bought enough fissile fuel to make a nuclear weapon themselves?
Here’s how the four writers of the op-ed put what they had now come to understand: “[N]on-state terrorist groups with nuclear weapons are conceptually outside of a deterrent strategy.”
Might this realization lead to others about “deterrence”?
The “deterrent strategy,” said Herbert York, the first director of our Livermore nuclear weapons laboratory, requires that the one to be deterred be “rational enough to be deterred.” Daniel Ellsberg, The Doomsday Machine: confessions of a nuclear war planner (2017), 144
“Rationality” may not be all that’s needed, of course. Psychopaths, who by definition lack a conscience, may not lack rationality. They may be, in fact, hyper-rational. What they lack is a conscience. The assumption of supporters of deterrence has been, it seems, that psychopaths will not become part of the command structure in nuclear weapon countries or get access to nuclear weapons. It would be nice to be able to be sure of that.
Even sane rational people with consciences aren’t always sane. Consider the frequent occurrence of what is called “road rage” in otherwise solid citizens. Are our national leaders, when they aren’t being chauffeured, any less subject to something like that than the rest of us, do you suppose?
What about those who have come to think they have nothing left to lose? As in the not-infrequent cases of suicide-by-cop? In such a case, might a more promising approach than threatening to shoot such people be for the cops to try, if they have a chance, to help them see what they still do have that they would lose? The child, the friend who would miss them when they no longer show up at the park to feed the pigeons? Maybe only that would be enough.
What about those who, like those Islamist terrorists on 9/11 and the Christian Crusaders in the old days, believe that if they attack a “Satanic” enemy and are killed in the act or in a retaliatory attack, they will go to a world better than this one? How are such as they to be “deterred”?
The op-ed by the four generated a huge and positive response, just as George Lee Butler’s speech to the National Press Club had ten years earlier.
A year after the op-ed was published, in January 2008, the four published a second op-ed in the Wall Street Journal entitled “Toward a Nuclear-Free World” in which they made more specific recommendations toward the same end.
A year after that, on April 9, 2009, in Prague, Czechoslovakia, our newly elected President Barack Obama gave his first foreign policy speech. In the middle of it, he declared “clearly and with conviction” his commitment to the “peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons.”
Had any American president made that commitment before? In his State of the Union address on January 31, 1985, President Reagan had said “All of us have no greater dream than to see the day when nuclear weapons are banned from this Earth forever.” Not exactly a commitment, is it? When Reagan met with the leader of the Soviet Union Mikhail Gorbachev in Reykjavik in 1986, Gorbachev had proposed that the two of them commit themselves to the total elimination of nuclear weapons. There, a chance to go for it. Reagan chose instead to put his faith in a very costly ballistic missile defense program he’d announced in 1985 that his preferred advisors had told him would make nuclear weapons “impotent and obsolete.” Instead of committing to a cooperative effort to achieve elimination, he’d chosen to follow a dream that turned out to be a delusion.
Obama’s way of stating the goal raised an interesting question that didn’t always get addressed. Was the “peace and security” he mentioned something that was supposed to follow from the elimination of nuclear weapons? Or was it a condition for their elimination?
If a condition for their elimination, how was this to be achieved?
Since the very beginning of the nuclear era, there have been people who seemed to think that “peace and security” is what nuclear weapons gave us. Peace and security at the price of the profoundest and most general insecurity, it turned out. An outcome that wiser people, like Niels Bohr, had foreseen.
At the moment, we don’t seem to have much of an idea of how to proceed here, how to achieve a peace and security that would enable us to eliminate nuclear weapons. Is it our “mode of thinking” that’s keeping us from getting anywhere with this, that keeps us instead drifting toward catastrophe? Einstein might think so.
Since America was the only country to have used nuclear weapons in war, Obama said, the United States had a moral obligation to lead the effort to reach this goal. Achieving it would take time, maybe longer than his lifetime, he said, and would require patience and persistence.
He went on in the speech to add something that might have seemed confusing. “As long as these weapons exist, the United States will maintain a safe, secure and effective arsenal to deter any adversary, and guarantee that defense to our allies.” That’s back to thinking that having nuclear weapons is what guarantees peace and security, isn’t it? Did he think he had to say that to reassure those who might be thinking he didn’t embrace the faith in nuclear deterrence that they still did? Did he see this confusing commitment as a political necessity? That is, were we the problem here? In the United States, we choose our political representatives, right?
In January 2010, the year after President made this public commitment, the four statesmen published a third column. Its title was “How to Protect Our Nuclear Deterrent.” If you infer from the title that the group was now backsliding on deterrence, you would be right. Not a surprise, I suppose, given their histories and reputations. This op-ed argued that our nuclear weapons labs needed more funding so we could keep up our superior scientific and technical expertise when it came to nuclear weapons. “Maintaining high confidence in our nuclear arsenal,” they said, “is critical as the number of these weapons goes down. It is also consistent with and necessary for U.S. leadership in nonproliferation, risk reduction, and arms reduction goals.” I couldn’t follow the argument here, but that’s what they argued. Or rather, simply asserted. And by “leadership” did they mean leadership or simply holding on to an advantage?
A fourth column by the four was published in March 2011, after Obama had accomplished some important things toward reducing nuclear dangers—like the New Start treaty with Russia and the first of the International Security Summits that aimed to secure nuclear materials. In this op-ed, they argued that “deterrence” obviously had to continue, but we should find ways to do it that didn’t rely on nuclear weapons. Something more like the world that Niels Bohr had envisaged, maybe. Back in 1945. Before there was a single nuclear weapon in the world.
President Obama’s speech in Prague was a great success, with the huge audience in the square in Prague and around the world. Seven months later, in October 2009, Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Among the reasons the Nobel Committee gave were Obama’s “extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples.” Emphasis was also given to his support - in word and deed - for the vision of a world free from nuclear weapons.
Some Americans, like the chairman of the Republican Party, Michael Steele, complained that Obama didn’t deserve the prize because, he said, he hadn’t done enough yet.
Next: Second Chance Foundation—Who’s This?