Second Chance Foundation--Who's This?
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 that you can look into if interested, including the entries that tell George Lee Butler’s story, 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, 1948
In Lee Butler’s speech to the National Press Club in January 1996, the former Commander in Chief of the Strategic Air Command came out in favor of eliminating nuclear weapons. The response had been wildly, though not unanimously, of course, enthusiastic. After it, former President Carter had invited Butler to come to the Carter Center in Georgia. They met for an hour on March 18, 1996.
Immediately after their talk, Carter had faxed a message to current President Clinton’s Deputy National Security Advisor, Sandy Berger. Carter referred to “the highly publicized efforts by retired General Lee Butler to address the subject of nuclear disarmament” (referring no doubt to Butler’s speech to the National Press Club and the big reaction to it). Carter suggested that a good way to defuse Russian fears about the Clinton administration’s plans to expand NATO would be to remove “all land- and sea-based ballistic missiles from nuclear alert status.” Butler had recommended just that in the speech to the National Press Club. But this was former President Carter talking now. (248)
NATO, the military alliance of mostly western European countries, had been formed in 1949 at the beginning of the Cold War to counter aggression in Europe by the Soviet Union. That had been its explicit purpose.
The Soviet Union had ceased to exist in December 1991, five years before Butler met with former President Carter. But it was clear by now that President Clinton intended to expand NATO to include some former Warsaw Pact countries that wanted to join the alliance. Russia wasn’t happy about that. Some people in the United States weren’t happy about it. Like former State Department official George Kennan and former Commander in Chief of the Strategic Air Command and Strategic Command, George Lee Butler. Kennan had said expanding NATO would be “the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold War era.”
President Carter got no response from the Clinton White House to his message.
Our intercontinental ballistic missiles remained on Cold War alert—that is, ready for immediate launch on warning. As they have to the present moment. “Immediate” means they could be launched within three minutes of the launch control center getting and authenticating an order from the President. Thirty minutes later—less if the missiles had been launched from one of our missile submarines out closer to Russia—the warheads would arrive. At their targets would be the plan. If not exactly on target, they would arrive somewhere for sure. Missiles can’t be called back. Wherever they landed, there would be, in a common expression, hell to pay.
After the Cold War ended, the Russians had retained their intercontinental ballistic missiles, and presumably kept them nuclear alert because ours were. Targeting might have changed. They did seem to be more eager to reduce the numbers of weapons than we did. Even though since the end of the Cold War Russia had been going through a very difficult period politically and economically and had to be feeling vulnerable. Or maybe because of that.
In 1999, NATO was indeed expanded. The first countries formally admitted after the end of the Cold War were Hungary, Poland, and the Czech Republic, all former members of the Warsaw Pact, which had been the Soviet Union’s answer to NATO.
Butler had founded the Second Chance Foundation at the end of 1999, the year NATO was first expanded. (It would be expanded later to include other other countries closer to Russia.) In the first year of SLC’s existence, Butler had traveled to some of NATO’s capitals in Western Europe to develop relationships with them that might help achieve the goals of the SCF—the “reduction and elimination of nuclear dangers.” He had come away from those encounters discouraged. The United States government would always have its way with the NATO countries, it was clear. Its way now was not the way of the Second Chance Foundation.
Then Butler had started to work to develop relationships with the Peace Movement, which wasn’t one group but many. He came away from these efforts discouraged also as to the prospects of developing a joint strategy.
In 2000, Douglas Roche, the Canadian founder of the Middle Powers Initiative, which was separate from the Second Chance Foundation but had the same goals, had organized at the Carter Center a strategy conference that was attended and supported by the former President.
After the conference, former President Carter had called his friend Ted Turner at the Atlanta headquarters of Turner’s successful new television network, CNN, which stood for Cable News Network. Turner called Butler in March of 2000 and asked him to come to Atlanta to brief Turner about SCF’s mission and work. Butler wasn’t sure how productive a meeting would be with someone in no way a part of either the nuclear priesthood or the Peace Movement, but he decided to accept the invitation.
The meeting took place on the afternoon of March 13, 2000, in Turner’s 14th floor executive board room with his senior executives and the director of the Turner Foundation present. Butler briefed the group on SCF’s aims and work. Turner’s questions afterward seemed to Butler to be “some of the best questions I had ever heard from a lay person.”
At the end of the meeting, Turner “told his staff it was time to get serious about [nuclear issues] and that they could expect some detailed guidance from him regarding future CNN coverage.” Then,
he dropped a bombshell—he was going to enter the nuclear arena with the time, energy and resources to make a difference. His goal would be to abolish nuclear weapons within the next ten years. (322)
When Turner ended the meeting, he invited Butler to his office for a private conversation.
[Turner] began by saying he intended to put at least one hundred million dollars on the table, hire a world-class staff and not quit until the job was done. . . . [H]e wanted my help, advice, name, stature and probably services, although I let it be known up front that, whatever his intent, my role would be limited to that of a private counselor. When he asked me to give him my candid reaction, I was very forthright: his off-the-wall entry into the arena could do more harm than good. There was no way to spend that much money productively, but one could easily fritter away ten times that much to no avail. To be taken seriously by the nuclear priesthood, he needed to get off abolition and adopt the SCF mantra of reducing nuclear dangers. Ten years was much too short a time to accomplish anything of consequence. Finally, his was the wrong face to have on the initiative’s activities; he would need a Washington graybeard, someone with extensive knowledge in the field, great stature and unfettered access to the arms control policy process on a global scale. (325)
“Turner hauled all that on board without taking offense,” Butler observed. “I then watched with keen interest,” he continued, as, over the next several months,
he took soundings with all the right people; had serious papers written on the prospective goals of his brain child; held several conferences in D.C. (which I and many of the major players in the nuclear arena attended); and persuaded former Senator Sam Nunn to take on the leadership of the new entity yet unnamed.
Sam Nunn was the Democratic Senator from Georgia who had retired in 1997 after being chair of the Armed Services Committee. Earlier, before the end of the Cold War, he had, with Richard Lugar, the Republican Senator from Illinois, initiated the Cooperative Threat Reduction program “to secure and dismantle weapons of mass destruction and their associated infrastructure in former Soviet Union states.” They had recognized, as few others had, that the deterioration of governance and institutions in the Soviet Union increased the danger of nuclear weapons and materials falling into the wrong hands. In 1991, the senators’ program was incorporated into The Soviet Nuclear Threat Reduction Act passed by Congress. Under the Act, funding and expertise would be provided to Russia help secure its weapons and supplies of fissile fuel and dismantle its nuclear weapons. Some of them.
Nunn was an excellent addition. He had been inside the policy-making arm of the government as Butler, a member of the military, had not. The military’s official Constitutional role is to execute the policies established by our civilian leaders. Nuclear weapons, nuclear dangers, were not going to be eliminated unless the policy-makers ordered it.
On the 13th of July, 2000, Turner held a press conference with Nunn and announced his intention to form the new entity. It didn’t have a name yet.
Next: The Second Chance Foundation Stands Down