The Nuclear Threat Initiative I: Out of the Blocks
Since February 2021, I have been posting on Substack weekly entries on nuclear weapon matters—history, technology, and “secrets,” not current events—in You Might Want to Know. To see a list of other entries, including the entries that tell George Lee Butler’s story, see the 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, 1948
Retired general George Lee Butler, the last Commander in Chief of the Strategic Air Command and first CINC of the Strategic Command that replaced it, had founded the Second Chance Foundation in 1999. Its goal, he told the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation group that year, would be “reducing and eliminating nuclear dangers.” Not just “reducing.” “Eliminating” them, which would have to include eliminating nuclear weapons, wouldn’t it? Nuclear dangers will last as long as the nuclear weapons do.
In January 2001, Butler stood down the Second Chance Foundation and yielded the field to the new “Nuclear Threat Initiative” that had been founded that same month by Ted Turner, with former Senator Sam Nunn having joined him as co-director. Its goal would also be the elimination of nuclear weapons.
Also still in the field, of course, were the many NGO’s like the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation and other members of the Peace Movement, some of whom had been urging the elimination of nuclear weapons for decades. Since even before the end of the Cold War, some of them, like the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation. And still very far from reaching that goal.
NTI had a strong position here at its start. Ted Turner had committed $100,000,000 to it. Mercy. That’s the amount Lee Butler had thought he’d have to raise to get SCF going, and NTI had it out of the gate. It would have Turner’s Cable News Network to support it. It would have the financial support of some of the people and groups Butler had found to support the Second Chance Foundation, like Warren Buffett, maybe others.
Former Senator Sam Nunn, whom Turner had recruited to be NTI’s co-director, had been inside the nuclear policy-making apparatus as chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee. That meant he would have access to other insiders. Nunn was no longer in the Senate but he was still involved with the Cooperative Nuclear Threat Reduction initiative he had started with fellow Senator Richard Lugar while in the Senate. Its aim was to secure the weapons and fissile fuel still in the world. The thousands of weapons and tons of fissile fuel still in the world.
Butler’s first task had been to find office space for SCF. NTI wouldn’t have to look for office space, though for appearance’s sake I don’t suppose they’d want to be based in the CNN offices. Wherever NTI started out, maybe at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution where Sam Nunn had an appointment, they’d likely end up, like all the think tanks and policy institutes and everyone else who hoped to affect national policy, with offices in Washington, D.C.
Turner had told Butler when they met in March 2000 at Turner’s headquarters in Atlanta that his goal would be to eliminate nuclear weapons in ten years. By 2011, then. Butler had told him that wasn’t realistic.
Butler had also told Turner that his face would not be the best one on his new project. Turner had apparently agreed. He would remain—throughout, actually—a “co-director” of NTI but would not be listed as a member of the “Executive Leadership.”
In its first few years, NTI had focused, not surprisingly, on supporting former Senator Nunn’s project of locating and securing nuclear weapons and fissile fuel in the many states that had been in the Soviet orbit and elsewhere where the weapons had proliferated. Nunn and Senator Richard Lugar had started that ball rolling in 1989 in their Cooperative Threat Reduction initiative.
The focus of CTR had turned out to be not just on nuclear weapons but also on biological and chemical weapons of mass destruction. Was this a good idea if your goal was the elimination of nuclear weapons? Would this broader focus increase or decrease the chances of achieving elimination of nuclear weapons? I’d argue that it would decrease them. Those are all different kinds of WMDs, requiring different ways of addressing the danger they pose.
If you had to consider the special detection and enforcement requirements for the different kinds of weapons of mass destruction, you might never get to the basic matter. The basic matter was there in the “cooperative” part of the Cooperative Threat Reduction program.
If you did manage to achieve the world of peace and security that would allow the elimination of nuclear weapons, you could probably fairly easily also eliminate chemical and biological WMDs, no? It might be better to focus not on defending against particular weapons but on achieving a world in which their use is seen as no longer needed or wanted.
That seems now to be a greater challenge, I admit. It is also, I would argue, a sine qua non for accomplishing what you say you want to accomplish if you say you want to eliminate nuclear weapons.
And maybe it’s not so great a challenge if you recognize that what’s needed is not technical expertise so much as another mode of thinking. If we can figure out what that is.
If you expanded your concern to natural biological hazards, like pandemics, as NTI went on to do, you’d be looking at something that might be ameliorated or partially prevented, but not eliminated. Unless you eliminated biology. Nuclear weapons could do that, all right.
With the expanded portfolio, you would give yourself more you might do, of course. It would also allow you to show yourself making progress in one area when you weren’t making progress in another, in, say, eliminating nuclear weapons.
The subtitle on NTI’s webpage today is “Making a Safer World.” If that’s the goal, you can claim progress if you get a law passed requiring seat belts. Or funding drug treatment. Or early child care.