George Lee Butler: The Turn II
Note: This entry is one in a series that tells some 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).
The National Academy of Sciences held regular meetings in Washington D.C. in the spring. For the meeting in spring 1996, they asked the Committee on International Security and Arms Control for an interim report on the study CISAC had earlier decided to do, at Lee Butler’s urging, about the prospects for eliminating nuclear weapons. Butler and “Pief” Panovsky were chosen to present CISAC’s interim report.
At this meeting, Butler would make the first public presentation of the views he had come to hold on the need to eliminate nuclear weapons and the means for doing so.
The presentation at NAS was received enthusiastically by the large group. Many in the audience stood to applaud. Not everybody. Some in the NAS still believed in something called “deterrence.”
By then the plot had thickened considerably for George Lee Butler.
In mid-October 1995, several months after his first meeting with CISAC, Butler had received a phone call that invited him to come to Australia to join a commission being established by the prime minister of Australia, John Keating, to consider the future of nuclear weapons.
Butler asked to see the list of invitees. It included the recent winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, Joseph Rotblat; the Secretary of Defense under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, Robert McNamara; former Prime Minister of France Michel Rocard; ambassadors and military and scientific leaders and diplomats from other countries and from the United Nations. Butler agreed to join.
The first meetings of what would come to be known as the Canberra Commission on the Elimination of Nuclear Weapons would take place in Canberra January 21-28, 1996. Three other convocations were scheduled, the second to take place in New York City in April, the third in Vienna in July. The last was to take place in Sydney, Australia in August. The commission committed to completing its report by August 31, 1996. This would allow the prime minister to present the report to the opening session of the United Nations General Assembly in September.
Two months after the Canberra Commission’s first meeting in January, however, Prime Minister Keating was voted out of office and replaced by a conservative, John Howard. At the Commission’s last meeting in Sydney in August, Howard would make it clear he had no interest in advancing the commission’s work toward the elimination of nuclear weapons.
In Spring 1996, about the time Butler and Panovsky were giving their interim report to the National Academy of Sciences and while the Canberra Commission was still developing its report for August, Butler had received another surprising invitation. He’d been invited to give the keynote address at the second State of the World Forum in October.
What was the State of the World Forum?
Mikhail Gorbachev was its principal sponsor. In December 1991, the year Gorbachev had stepped down as leader of the Soviet Union and the Soviet Union had ceased to exist, Gorbachev had established a private foundation. In May 1992, Gorbachev had done a two-week speaking tour in the United States to promote the Gorbachev Foundation.
Gorbachev was very, even wildly popular in the United States in 1992. In Russia, by this time, not so much. In October 1992, the president of the Russian Federation, Boris Yeltsin, decreed that the Gorbachev Foundation’s headquarters and buildings in Moscow would be taken over by the Russian government. That was a sign.
Even so, in 1995, the Gorbachev Foundation was able to host in San Francisco at the Fairmont Hotel the first State of the World Forum. Over several days, the Forum featured an array of prominent former officials from the Cold War period (George Shultz, Margaret Thatcher), wealthy businessmen (Ted Turner, David Packard), and celebrities of different kinds (John Denver, Wolfgang Puck, Rigoberta Menchu).
The Forum wasn’t focused on nuclear weapons only nor was it the kind of event that would be likely to produce a concrete plan of action. But a yearning for a very different world was evident enough.
In August 1996, the Canberra commission’s report was submitted, as planned. Butler was “gratified by the unanimity of view and the forceful logic of our report, which in my view captured in measured, balanced and reasoned terms the essence of my own conclusions about the risks and penalties associated with nuclear weapons. Most importantly, it set forth a practical, realistic blueprint for working toward their elimination. . . .” 257
The Clinton administration got wind of the Commission’s report but spokespersons dismissed it, calling it “pie in the sky.” Which Clinton’s domestic political opposition would almost certainly have called it if Clinton’s own people hadn’t.
On the third of October, 1996 Butler addressed Gorbachev’s second State of the World Forum in San Francisco. He offered there a revised version of the speech he had given to the National Academy of Sciences that Spring—where he had argued for the first time publicly for eliminating nuclear weapons.
The audience at the State of the World Forum was a large one, as you can imagine. Butler was given a standing ovation. Butler hadn’t been sure how Mikhail Gorbachev would react. Gorbachev crossed the stage and gave him a bear hug.
An attendee at the Forum was Alan Cranston, a long-time Senator from California who had retired in 1993. Cranston was known to be a strong and long-time opponent of nuclear weapons. At the 1996 Forum, he would sponsor a Nuclear Weapons Elimination Initiative.
Perhaps through Cranston’s offices, Butler was then invited to address the National Press Club in Washington, D. C. in December, a month and a half hence.