The Geiringer Oration I
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).
Here we will step back in time from September 1998 where we were at the end of the previous entry to 1997 to look more closely at the remarkable speech George Lee Butler delivered that year in Wellington, New Zealand at the invitation of the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War.
The International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War had been founded in 1980. Physicians from the United States who were part of a group called Physicians for Social Responsibility and physicians from the Soviet Union had managed to get together to found it. Physicians from many other countries had quickly joined. IPPNW’s mission was to advocate for the elimination of nuclear weapons. The founders had formed the group, they said, because they knew there could be no meaningful medical response to a nuclear war. Physicians have an obligation to try to prevent what they cannot treat.
No meaningful medical response to a nuclear war? That wasn’t what many of us seemed to think, if we thought at all about the aftermath. But if we did think about it and if we knew something of what it had been like in Hiroshima after that now-quite-small nuclear weapon had detonated over the city, the IPPNW had to be right about that. At least, for those of us not in the hardened and well-staffed and -provisioned shelters that had been built for our leaders.
Maybe even for them.
In 1985, the IPPNW had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
The group had invited Butler to give the “Geiringer Oration.” Erich Geiringer, Butler learned, had been a physician in Wellington who had spearheaded the “World Court Project.” The WCP was an effort to get the International Court of Justice in the United Nations to issue an advisory opinion that would constrain the use of nuclear weapons, including the threat to use them.
Dr. Geiringer died in August 1995. In July 1996 the International Court of Justice had issued an advisory opinion that didn’t offer everything Dr. Geiringer had wanted. It allowed that the use of nuclear weapons might be legitimate if national survival was at stake. Even if, Dr. Geiringer might have wanted to point out, a use of nuclear weapons in a world where they had proliferated would be altogether unlikely to assure meaningful “national survival.”
In 1997, Butler accepted the IPPNW’s invitation.
A version of the speech Butler gave in Wellington on October 1, 1997 appears in Volume II of Butler’s memoir (p. 255 ff). The version that appears in the memoir combines the remarks Butler had made nine months earlier at the Stimson Center with what he said in Wellington.
Here I’d like to point out what seem to me some striking features of the speech that appears in Butler’s memoir. Other excellent speeches by Butler, including his first speech to the National Press Club and speeches he made later when accepting awards from various groups in following years, can be found in the appendices to Volume II of his memoir, Uncommon Cause: A Life at Odds with Convention (Outskirts Press, 2016).
The version of the speech that appears in the memoir begins with an account, likely imported from his presentation at the Stimson Center, of the steps in what he called “reluctant activism” that had brought him to the present moment.
It told of how “encouraged” he had been by the outpouring and intensity of the support that had followed his speech at the National Press Club in December 1996.
And of how “disappointed” he had been at “the quality of the debate that ensued, by those pundits who simply sniffed imperiously at the goal of elimination, aired their stock Cold War rhetoric, hurled a personal epithet or two, and settled smugly back into their world of exaggerated threats and bygone enemies.” 258
Of how “distressed” he had been by critics who attacked his views by misrepresenting them, “suggesting that I was proposing unilateral disarmament or a pace of reductions that would jeopardize the security of the nuclear weapons states.” He had never, of course, proposed either of those things.
And of how “dismayed” he had been that “even among more serious commentators the lessons of fifty years at the nuclear brink could still be so grievously misread.”
He quoted the warning Albert Einstein issued shortly after World War II that “the unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking, and thus we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.” 258
A new mode of thinking? What might that be? How does one get to such a thing? Einstein hadn’t said.
Butler mentioned the counsel he had received from “well-meaning friends” that by committing himself to the complete elimination of nuclear weapons, he risked “setting the bar too high, providing an easy target for the cynical and diverting attention from the more immediately achievable.” 259
“My response was,” he went on, “that elimination is the only defensible long-term goal and that goal matters enormously.”
Commitment to that goal makes “all force postures above zero simply . . . way-points along a path” leading to “a precise end-state.” It shifts the focus from numbers of weapons to “the security climate essential to permit successive rounds of reductions.”
“I say again,” he said, “the goal matters enormously and the only defensible goal is the total elimination of nuclear weapons.” 259
But, he added, “I was in the public arena for too long to ever make the perfect the enemy of the good” and “no one is more conscious than I am. . .that realistic prospects for elimination will continue to evolve over many years.”
But, he said, we were showing ourselves “far too timid” in imagining possible outcomes and “too rigidly conditioned . . . by a mentality deeply rooted in the Cold War.” “We have lost sight too soon that in the blink of an eye the world we knew for a traumatic half-century was utterly transformed.”
There he was referring to the momentous meeting between President Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev in Reykjavik, Iceland in 1986 in which they were on the point of agreeing to the goal of total elimination had President Reagan not been beguiled by his Republican advisors who had convinced him that we would be able to develop an infallible, impregnable defense against strategic nuclear weapons—in spite of plentiful scientific arguments to the contrary that had been made by scientists not aligned with President Reagan’s political program.
“I find it distressing,” Butler went on, “that, in a world transformed, nuclear weapons retain an aura of utility, of primacy and of legitimacy that for many justifies their existence well into the future . . . . The persistence of this view lies at the core of the concern that stirs my very soul.” This “abiding faith,” he went on, “was inspired and is sustained by a catechism instilled over many decades by a relatively small cadre of theorists and strategists who speak with great assurance and authority.”
Here he was referring to the group he and others have called “the nuclear priesthood.”
Then he acknowledged something that distinguishes him from many proponents of elimination and at the same time adds greatly to the force of his argument. He acknowledges that he was “for many years among the most avid of the keepers of the faith in nuclear weapons, and,” he says, “for that I make no apology.”
“I was moved,” he goes on, “by fears and fired by beliefs that date back to the earliest days of the atomic era.” “These are,” he asserts, “powerful, deeply rooted beliefs” that “cannot and should not be lightly dismissed or discounted,” beliefs that throughout his career he “professed” and “put . . . into operational practice.”
“And now,” he goes on, “it is my burden to declare with all of the conviction I can muster that in my judgment they served us extremely ill.” 261
How so?
They accounted for “the most severe risks and most extravagant costs” of the confrontation between the U.S. and the S.U. Indeed, they “intensified and prolonged an already acute ideological animosity.” They “spawned an endless cycle of new and more destructive nuclear devices and delivery systems.” They gave rise to “mammoth bureaucracies with gargantuan appetites . . . .” They “spurred zealotry and demogoguery.”
“Most importantly, these enduring beliefs, and the fears that underlie them, perpetuate Cold War policies and practices that make no strategic sense.”
“At the same time, I cannot overstate the difficulty this poses for me. No one who ever entered the nuclear arena left it with a fuller understanding of its complexity or greater respect for those with whom I served its purposes. I struggle constantly with the task of articulating the evolution of my convictions without denigrating or diminishing the motives and sacrifice of countless colleagues with whom I lived the drama of the Cold War. I ask them and you to appreciate that my purpose is not to accuse but to assess, to understand and to propound the forces that birthed the grotesque excesses and hazards of the nuclear age. For me, that assessment meant first coming to grips with my experiences and then coming to terms with my conscience.” 262
It was the range of his experiences and the breadth of the knowledge he now had that made Lee Butler the formidable foe of the nuclear priesthood and the profoundly welcomed advocate for the cause of elimination. Then and now, those who propose the elimination of nuclear weapons can seem to have arrived too easily at their positions. They are also easily dismissed by asserting that as outsiders, amateurs, people without security clearance, they can’t possibly know what they need to know to conclude responsibly that elimination would be desirable or possible. Even civilian leaders with the highest security clearance—Secretaries of State and Defense—can be and have been dismissed by military leaders as ignorant and naive. As timid souls who can’t stand the truth.
Butler, as we’ve seen, locates the “timidity” elsewhere.
That mode of dismissing Butler’s arguments for elimination was not available to those who wished to dismiss his arguments:
That experience began in the classroom, as a young cadet and some years thereafter as a professor at the U.S. Air Force Academy. I knew the moment I opened my first textbook on nuclear issues I had been thrust into a world beset with tidal forces, insane risks, towering egos, maddening contradictions, and alien constructs. Its arcane vocabulary and apocalyptic calculus defied comprehension. Its stage was global and its antagonists locked in a deadly spiral of deepening rivalry. I later came to see it as a modern-day holy war, a cosmic struggle between the forces of light and darkness. The stakes were national survival, and the weapons of choice were eminently suited to this scale of malevolence. 262
The opposing forces created vast enterprises, each giving rise to a culture of messianic believers infused with a sense of empowering mission and schooled in unshakable articles of faith. As my career progressed, I was immersed in the work of all of these cultures, either directly in those of the Western world, or through penetrating study of Communist organization, teachings and practices. My responsibilities ranged from the highly subjective, such as assessing the values and motivation of Soviet leadership to the critically objective, such as preparing weapons for operational launch. I am steeped in the art of intelligence estimates, the psychology of negotiations, the interplay of bureaucracies and the impulses of industry. I was engaged in the labyrinthine conjecture of the strategist, the exacting routines of the target planner and the demanding skills of the aircrew and the missileer. I have been a party to their history, shared their triumphs and tragedies, witnessed heroic sacrifice and catastrophic failure of both men and machines. And in the end I came away from it all with profound misgivings. 262-3
. . . I came to a set of deeply unsettling judgments. That from the earliest days of the nuclear era the risks and consequences of nuclear war have never been properly understood. That the stakes of nuclear war engage not just the survival of the antagonists, but the fate of mankind. That the prospect of shearing away entire societies has no politically, militarily or morally acceptable justification. 263
By what authority do succeeding generations of leaders in the nuclear weapons states dictate the odds of nuclear proliferation, terrorism and war? Most urgently, why does such breathtaking audacity persist at a moment when we should stand trembling in the face of our folly and united in our commitment to abolish its most deadly manifestation? 263
Like millions of others, I was caught up in the holy war, inured to its costs and consequences, trusting in the assertions of the nuclear priesthood and the wisdom of my seniors. 265
Butler then turned to what he had identified as the
intellectual foundation of America’s military response, the strategic underpinning that today still stands as the central precept of the nuclear catechism. . . . For all of my years as a nuclear strategist, operational expert and public spokesman, I explained, justified and sustained America’s massive nuclear arsenal as a function, a necessity and consequence of deterrence. …We ignored, discounted or dismissed its flaws and cling still to the belief that it obtains in a world whose security architecture has been wholly transformed.” 265
What “flaws” did Butler see? Are they the kind that can be fixed? Can nuclear weapons be saved?
Next: The Geiringer Oration II, concluded