George Lee Butler: Second Chance III--Sallies
Note: 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).
There is a tide in the affairs of men, Which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune. Omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries. On such a full sea are we now afloat. And we must take the current when it serves, or lose our ventures. Brutus to Cassius in Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare, Act IV, Scene III
In 1998, the Second Chance Foundation’s work was not going to be supported financially by this Congress or this White House, that was clear. Even though this Congress and this White House were at desperate odds with each other.
Lee Butler’s first task would be to fund the Second Chance Foundation.
SCF had already generated significant financial support from some important sources—from the Butler family’s own foundation, from the Fourth Freedom Forum (the fourth freedom was the “freedom from fear” that had been invoked by President Franklin Roosevelt in a speech to Congress in 1941), the Rockefeller Foundation, Warren Buffett, and the Young Presidents Organization, a group of young but already very successful business executives.
At a third appearance at the 1999 State of the World Forum in San Francisco, Butler participated in a roundtable with Ambassador Richard Butler, who had been his leader at the Canberra Commission. The roundtable was broadcast internationally. Butler got more financial support for SCF. They’d thought at the jump that they would need $100 million. They were getting close.
Earlier in 1999, the first year of the operation of SCF, Butler had been encouraged when Resolution 48 was voted on in the United Nations. The resolution had been put forward by Doug Roche, a Canadian with a long history of nuclear activism who with Butler had been a member of the Canberra Commission.
Until 1998 Roche had been Canada’s Ambassador for Disarmament and the Chairman of the United Nations Disarmament Committee. In October 1998, just a few weeks before SCF was founded, Roche had founded the “Middle Powers Initiative.” MPI took as its goal the elimination of nuclear weapons but made the interesting move of gathering its membership from non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in seven countries that were not nuclear weapons states but were nevertheless “powers,” that is, countries that took responsibility for their own security, like, for example, Brazil and Finland.
Resolution 48 called for the Nuclear Weapons States to get off the dime and start implementing Article VI of the Non Proliferation Treaty ratified in 1970. Article VI was the provision in which the Nuclear Weapons States of the time had committed themselves to begin to work immediately and “in good faith” toward “complete nuclear disarmament.” The Treaty had allowed the NWS to hold on to their nukes only because they made that commitment. All the NWS of the time had signed the NPT in 1970. For almost thirty years now, they had done next to nothing to meet their obligation.
You did have to think that if any country insisted on holding on to its nuclear weapons, it would hardly be in a position to argue that another country had no right to “proliferate” if it wanted to.
The Clinton administration had lobbied hard with the NATO countries against Resolution 48. But the vote at the UN, early in 1999, seemed to Butler to offer some hope: 87 representatives voted in favor of the resolution, 40 were opposed (including all Nuclear Weapons States). The big news was that 15 countries abstained and among them were Canada, Germany and ten other NATO countries. This result—which showed resistance to the Clinton administration’s position, even in NATO—seemed to Butler to create the promise of movement toward SCF’s (and MPI’s) goal of eliminating nuclear weapons.
In an early meeting with one of SCF’s “earliest and most important” allies, the Fourth Freedom Foundation, it had been agreed that Butler should “immediately undertake a visit to some NATO capitals. He would try to persuade those governments to support a wholesale review of the nuclear policy of the alliance at NATO’s upcoming 50th Anniversary Summit, to be held in Washington in April.
In February, Lee and Dorene Butler touched down in Oslo, Norway and began a twelve-day swing through Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium (the site of NATO headquarters), Germany and the U.K. Unfortunately, Butler found anything but unqualified support for the goals of the SCF. “[T]he trip was enlightening on several scores,” Butler wrote, “but mostly confirmed what I already knew: the United States could essentially have its way with NATO on almost any issue.”
After returning from the swing among the NATO countries, Butler planned to begin to forge alliances with other key constituencies identified in Tom Graham’s overview. He would need also to make an approach to China and newly “proliferated”—just this year—states of India and Pakistan. Finally he hoped “to make the reduction of nuclear dangers a ‘must address’ item in the 2000 presidential debates.” This rather tall order “set my agenda for the next two years.” 293-4.
A constituency he would also want to develop a relationship with was what was often referred to as the Peace Movement. That was the name given to the wide array of non-governmental organizations in the U.S. and in other countries, some of whom opposed all war and some, nuclear weapons, and it wasn’t always clear which. This was, as Tom Graham’s overview had shown, not one constituency but many. Some in the group had been opposing nuclear weapons for a long time, longer than Butler had.
When it came to nuclear weapons, the members of these groups were no doubt used to having their arguments dismissed because they were outsiders. Outside, that is, the circles of the policy- and decision-makers. They were, of course, not outside the body of those who would be affected, directly or indirectly, by nuclear war. None of us was.
One reason Butler’s voice was so powerful had to be that his arguments couldn’t be dismissed in that facile way. No one had been more inside the nuclear weapons enterprise than he. And not only inside it but responsible for its operation at all levels. It was likely that at this point no one, not the scientists in the weapons labs, not the insiders often called “the nuclear priesthood,” almost certainly not the President, knew more about all the dimensions of “the nuclear enterprise” than he.
Having retired from the Air Force in 1994, he was no longer an insider, though much more “inside” than the rest of us.
For now, maybe close enough.