The Mentality Rears its Undead Head
Since February 2021, I have been posting weekly entries on nuclear weapon matters—history and technology, “secrets”—in You Might Want to Know on Substack. To see a list of other entries, see the You Might Want to Know Archive.
[T]he unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking and thus we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe. Albert Einstein, 1946
In 1989, while General George Lee Butler was working in the Pentagon in the Directorate of Strategic Plans and Policy, he was invited to give a speech to the National War College. The student body at the National War College was young military officers who have been identified as “promising,” that is, likely to be promoted.
He entitled the speech he gave “Tides, Trends, and Tasks: the Security Environment of the Twenty-first Century.” While working on the speech, he had come to a most important conclusion: the “mortal” threat posed by the Soviet Union was about to disappear. He had believed that mortal threat existed since 1957 when he had been taught that it did while a cadet at the Air Force Academy. It was a tense time. The Academy had opened its doors in 1955, the same year that the Soviet Union launched the first-ever earth satellite and then claimed to have a rocket that could deliver a nuclear weapon to the United States on something called an “Intercontinental Ballistic Missile.” In just 30 minutes.
The hugely expensive Distant Early Warning system we’d built in the 50’s across the top part of Canada to detect incoming bombers would soon be pretty much worthless.
By 1989, however, General Butler had come to see the Soviet threat as disappearing. Not all threats. He saw coming, he said in the speech, the “intensification of intractable conflicts between mortal enemies, a renewal of competing claims, ethnic rivalries, and religious hatreds going back centuries if not millennia.” And the malignant consequences of “virulent nationalism, murderous tribalism, religious fundamentalism, and genocidal ethnocentrism.”
He got that right too, didn’t he?
The consequences of these developments, he said, would not always “engage the vital interests of the United States but the local upheavals will surely engage our sensibilities and our resources.” We might expect, I think that meant, to end up supporting one side or the other in these conflicts with our armaments and soldiers. As we had done earlier in Korea and Vietnam. With less than ideal results, you’d have to say.
Right now, he said in the speech to the young officers at the National War College, “Job One” would be to “usher Russia through a chaotic, traumatic transition from failing dictatorship to respected member of the family of democratic nations.” As part of this, it would be necessary to “rethink the role, indeed, the very necessity for NATO.” (George Lee Butler, Uncommon Cause, Vol. I, p. 378)
Two years later, in 1991, still ten months before the Soviet Union dissolved, General Butler was made Commander-in-Chief of the Strategic Air Command. SAC was the command in the Air Force in charge of delivering our nuclear weapons in our bombers and later our own intercontinental ballistic missiles upon targets in Communist countries.
At the time, our top secret official plan for conducting a nuclear war—the Strategic Integrated Operational Plan, the SIOP—called for nuclear weapons to be delivered not just on the Soviet Union but on all countries in the eastern hemisphere unfortunate enough to have Communists in charge. After 1950, that meant not just the Soviet Union, but also the countries in the Warsaw Pact, like Poland, Hungary, Romania, and Czechoslovakia, and also China. Even Albania. If the SIOP were executed, they were all supposed to be destroyed, no matter who had started the actual war or (not) joined it. In the SIOP, having a government controlled by Communist dictators was all that was needed to qualify you as a target.
By the time General Butler became CINCSAC, he had concluded that because of the new “security environment” created by the imminent disappearance of the Soviet Union as a mortal threat to the United States, SAC had to be changed. Radically.
As he set out to orchestrate the changes in SAC, he harbored, he said,
no doubt that inculcating this new outlook [that the Soviet Union was no longer the “massive, implacably hostile and permanent” threat he and so many others had taken it to be since 1945] would be, by far, the most challenging of my priorities. …I was far from certain that the command could survive the emotional impact of such a fundamental transformation. (Uncommon Cause, Vol. II, 85)
Some months later, Butler decided that SAC itself should not survive the end of the Cold War. SAC had to be not just transformed but stood down. The “nuclear mission” would not go away, but it would now be supplemented by the missiles from the Navy’s ballistic missile submarines, and become a new “Strategic Command.” Some of SAC’s missions and considerable assets would be reallocated to other commands in the Air Force.
He convinced his superiors and the leaders of the other commands and armed services that this change needed to be made. No small thing for a change of this magnitude.
In 1992, he had accomplished the standing down of SAC, and, the next day, the standing up of STRATCOM. Getting things to this point was a huge undertaking, though many of us not then in the military might not have noticed. The people in the Air Force and the Navy’s submarine forces certainly noticed.
Butler was the first Commander in Chief of the new Strategic Command.
From this position, there were only two posts General Butler might have been promoted to, both in the Pentagon: Chief of Staff of the Air Force or Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Appointments to those particular positions may depend more on a candidate’s political alignments than do appointments to positions below them in the military hierarchy. General Butler was known not to support some of then President Clinton’s policies, in particular his apparent intention to expand NATO after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Butler knew he was unlikely to be promoted to either of the only two positions he could at this stage be promoted to in the military.
In 1994, two years after he had completed standing up the Strategic Command, General Butler retired from the Air Force, planning to enter private life.
Two years after his retirement, though, in December 1996, the former Commander-in-Chief of the Strategic Command declared to an astonished audience at the National Press Club in Washington D. C. that he believed that the “nuclear mission” itself should disappear—that is, that nuclear weapons should be completely eliminated.
The response was dramatic. Quickly, other invitations to speak began to arrive. One was from the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW). They asked if Butler would come to New Zealand and give their Geiringer Oration. The Oration had been established to honor a member of the IPPNW who had tried to get an advisory opinion from the International Court of Justice declaring nuclear weapons illegal. The ICJ gave IPPNW a hearing on the matter in 1995. Geiringer died that year.
Butler delivered the Oration in Wellington in October 1997. In it, he repeated his assertion that nuclear weapons should be completely eliminated, but recognized that a major obstacle to eliminating them would be the Cold War “psychology” that had persisted even though the Cold War had ended six years earlier.
The harsh truth is that years after the end of the Cold War we are still prisoner to its psychology of distrust, still enmeshed in the apocalyptic vocabulary of nuclear deterrence based on mutual assured destruction, still in the thrall of the nuclear era. Worse, strategists persist in conjuring worlds which spiral toward chaos and fixating on threats they assert can only be discouraged or expunged by the existence of nuclear weapons.
The “psychology” he was referring to here has also been called “the Cold War Mentality.”
It could reasonably be thought that the Cold War Mentality arose when the Cold War did, at the end World War II, caused by the hostile relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union. We in the U.S. saw it as caused by the hostility of the Communist Soviet Union toward us and other “capitalist” countries. Communists in the Soviet Union saw it as caused by the threat we posed to them (and others) because of capitalism’s built-in tendencies toward imperial conquest. Each of us had concluded that the other was bent on “world domination.” In claims about each other’s motivations, we both used exactly those words.
When we asserted this, it was to be taken as true. When they said the words, it was to be taken as what psychologists call “projection,” accusing another of what you know you yourself are guilty of. Politicians often engage in projection. It’s a way of going on offense when you know you yourself are an offender.
In 1991, if not before, the Cold War had ended when the Soviet Union dissolved. Yet, as Butler observed in the Geiringer Oration, the Cold War Mentality had persisted. That meant the Cold War Mentality was something that didn’t need an actual Cold War to support it. It might be “real” in the view of those who were in the grip of it but it did not rely on some objective reality outside itself. It could and did persist whether or not there was something in the outside world to justify it.
The Cold War Mentality delivered to the perception and understanding of continuing Cold Warriors the enmities and threats necessary to justify it, whether or not those enmities and threats could be shown independently to exist.
There was still, of course, the general threat posed to all of us by the continuing existence of nuclear weapons and their delivery systems.
You may have seen in other situations how something like this—an enmity persisting even though an actual threat is no longer present—can happen. Not just on a national level. In a people. In a family. In a couple. Not only that: if we see something or someone as a threat and act accordingly, we ourselves may come to be seen as a threat when we hadn’t been before. Now each party has become an actual threat to the other whether or not an actual threat had been present to begin with.
Since the Cold War Mentality appears to be independent of any objective reality, I’m going to drop the “Cold War.” Henceforth I’ll be calling it simply The Mentality.
The Mentality is not to be seen, as earlier entries in You Might Want to Know have argued, as a set of beliefs. It’s not an ideology, not a theory. It might be better to see it as a “mode of thinking,” a habitat, that creates and constrains beliefs, ideologies, and theories in particular ways.
The Mentality’s mode of thinking, I will be going on in later entries to argue, is one that human brains seem to be, not just capable of, but deeply susceptible to. Susceptible to, but also sometimes needful of.
It is not however, the only mode of thinking of which our brains are capable and needful of.
What characterizes The Mentality? Why has it persisted as it has? What other “mode of thinking” are we capable and perhaps now deeply needful of?
The hemisphere hypothesis demonstrates very clearly, I believe, that the prevailing account of the ‘All’ is the product of an unbalanced, untempered and characteristically domineering, go-it-alone left hemisphere view of the world, one that is false, impoverished, and dangerous; and that a form of attention to the world that allows into the picture what the right hemisphere discerns produces a truer, richer account of the ‘All’, without which we shall perish. Iain McGilchrist, The Matter with Things, 2021, p. 1329.