George Lee Butler XIV--The First of Two Important Experiences
Note: This entry is one in a series that tells a part of the story of General George Lee Butler. In the early 1990’s, 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).
Before we continue with this remarkable story of how matters unfolded in Lee Butler’s life after he retired from the Air Force in 1994, I want to tell you about two experiences he had while still in the Air Force. Both happened before he became CINCSAC and both seem to have resonated through the rest of his life, perhaps especially after he retired from the Air Force.
The first was his experience in the Looking Glass.
Looking Glass was the name given to the operation of five “airborne command posts” the Strategic Air Command built, equipped and started flying in 1961.
The Air Force had decided to put up these airborne command posts after we got our first Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles into operation to insure our ability to retaliate on the Soviet Union. The Soviets, it seemed, had gotten an ICBM into operation in 1957, before we had one. ICBMs carrying the lighter thermonuclear warheads that had been developed would be able reach the United States thirty minutes after they were launched. Against ICBMs there was, and is, no sufficient defense.
A Looking Glass command post, however, would allow us to retaliate with our own ICBMs, even if we had suffered a badly damaging surprise first strike. One of the Looking Glass airborne command centers was to be up twenty-four hours a day, every day, all year long, every year. It would be able to launch our ground-based Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles even if no one in the command centers on the ground were alive to do it. From any launch control centers and missile silos that were still operational anyway.
From 1984 to 1986, five years before before he became Commander in Chief of the Strategic Air Command, General Butler had done a stint as SAC’s Inspector General. One of his assignments while IG was to serve monthly 24-hour alerts as the Airborne Emergency Actions Officer in the Looking Glass. The Airborne Emergency Actions Officer in the Looking Glass is the officer would have been able to order the launch of everything SAC had to launch—bombers and missiles—if a nuclear attack had rendered the command posts on the ground “inoperable.”
Before becoming SAC’s Inspector General, General Butler had commanded two different bomb wings in SAC. When it came to our “strategic” bombs and bombers, he knew a good deal, including about nuclear war plans and operations. The pieces of it that had been assigned to his bomb wings, anyway.
But only pieces. In the regime of secrecy that had governed the nuclear enterprise since the beginning of the Manhattan Project, information was “compartmentalized.” You were allowed to know only what was pertinent to your compartment. You might have “security clearance” at some very high level, but you still would be allowed to know only your piece of things. Unless you could show a “need to know” something else.
That’s a little tricky, isn’t it? How do you know what you need to know if you don’t know what you don’t know?
Of course we always don’t know some things. But here’s a question for you: what did we in the American public need to know about nuclear weapons and their delivery systems that was known by others? We had been taught all these years that we didn’t need to know anything, right? That we should leave the business to others who supposedly did know what needed to be known about these matters. And not trouble ourselves.
As the commander of a bomb wing, General Butler would not have been taken to have a need to know about our ICBMs. As the AEAO in the Looking Glass, however, he did have a need to know about the ICBMs and about the whole nuclear war plan. At least the part of it that involved the Air Force. And up in the Looking Glass, he saw for the first time something much closer to the full scope of our operational plan for nuclear war, known as the Single Integrated Operational Plan. The SIOP.
And to come to see, he said, how complex and fragile the whole thing was.
At the time, the SIOP would have governed the actions of our more than one hundred “strategic” (i.e. nuclear) B-52 bombers on runway alert but also the use of the one thousand Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles we had on alert in underground silos at our missile fields out West. “On alert” means “in immediate launch readiness.”
He would have known already that the thermonuclear warheads and bombs these delivery systems would be carrying would be many tens of times, even a hundred times, more powerful than the bombs we had dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He would also know, better than most of us, just what such weapons would do.
Up there, in the night sky sometimes, he had the power, he knew, to launch our strategic nuclear weapons, all of them, if ordered to. And “now,” he writes in his memoir,
I began to grasp the enormity of a wholesale execution and the associated risks and consequences. This was the beginning of an education that would ultimately lead me to question the entire nuclear enterprise. I, p. 314
Some people think “enormity” means “great size.” Originally it meant “great evil.” George Lee Butler was using the word here in the original sense. I’ve checked this with him.
Compartmentalizing is assumed to be an essential feature of the regime of secrecy. You can see why. But there is a price to be paid, isn’t there? A heavy one. Compartmentalization makes official and institutionalizes an incapacity to see the whole.
A failure to see the whole, or better, to realize what might be missing in the normalized way of understanding the matter, was and is the essence of the nuclear arms race, isn’t it? Maybe even the essence of the modern world, the world that prizes “control of nature” above all else?
“Not ignorance, but ignorance of ignorance, is the danger.”
So says Iain McGilchrist, philosopher, neurologist, psychiatrist, literary scholar in Volume II of The Matter with Things (Perspectiva Press, 2021). That’s worth thinking about, I’d say.