You Might Want to Know: Who Is George Lee Butler? What's He Doing in this Examination of Deterrence?
I don’t remember when I first began to learn the story of George Lee Butler. I’d been doing research and writing about nuclear weapons and the nuclear arms race for a while, years actually, before I ran across a reference to him.
This research and writing had resulted in a series of six books under the general title The Altered Air. They are a “lived history”—technological, strategic, political, and personal—of the five decades of the Cold War and the nuclear arms race, the sixth book being subtitled “Roads Not Taken.” (The books are as yet unpublished. More information about them can be found on my website, authorjohnwarnock.com.)
After I encountered a reference to General Butler, I soon learned that after the end of the Cold War, in 1991, the year the Soviet Union dissolved, Butler had been the four-star general who was Commander in Chief of our Air Force’s Strategic Air Command. And the General who in 1992 had “stood down” the Strategic Air Command and “stood up” the Strategic Command that replaced it. He had retired from the Air Force in 1994.
Two years after he retired from the Air Force, he had announced in a speech at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C that he believed nuclear weapons should be abolished.
Isn’t that a story you’d think would be—should be—widely known? And wondered at? In the United States at least?
When I first began to learn more of General Butler’s story, I was, as I recall, especially interested in finding out more about what was called the Strategic Integrated Operational Plan, the SIOP. The SIOP was our military’s plan for conducting a nuclear war.
The SIOP was, I eventually learned, created by a group called the Joint Strategic Target Planning Staff. They would develop SIOPs after getting general guidance from the Secretary of Defense in something called the NUWEP, Nuclear Weapons Employment Policy. The NUWEP itself was developed by the Secretary of Defense after getting general guidance from the President in a “presidential directive.”
The SIOP would be, in the language of military planners, SAC’s “operational” plan. And, as a “joint” and “integrated” plan, it would be the operational plan not just of the Air Force but of the other armed services to the extent they had a “strategic” mission. This would be mostly the Air Force with its bombers and ground-based Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles, and the Navy with its long-range submarine-based missiles.
The first SIOP had been put together during Eisenhower’s second term. It had been approved by the Joint Chiefs of Staff a month before Eisenhower left office. It was set to become effective on April 1, 1961. By then, John F. Kennedy would be president.
The SIOP was, of course, a super secret document. As secret a document as could be. Also secret was the process by which the JSTPS put it together.
We’d had a SIOP in place throughout the Cold War.
I had met someone who had been an Air Force fighter pilot during Vietnam and the Cold War. I mentioned to him my growing interest in General Butler, now being supercharged by my reading of Butler’s two-volume memoir, Uncommon Cause: A Life at Odds with Convention, published in 2016.
My new acquaintance said, to my surprise and delight, that he had been Butler’s classmate at the Air Force Academy. Had lived across the hall. He said he could give me contact information.
Without daring to hope for much, I emailed George Lee Butler, now retired from the Air Force of course, and asked him some of my questions about the SIOP. Again to my surprise and delight, I received a generous response. Several qualities were noticeable in the response other than the generosity of it. One was how specific and forthright it was. Another how scrupulous it was about what could and couldn’t be said without showing off at all about what he knew that he couldn’t tell me. And finally, how well and gracefully written it was.
That was the beginning of an email correspondence that has continued to the present day. During this time the qualities I noticed in his first response have never flagged, even though during that time General Butler has been through some hard changes, especially when he lost his obviously extraordinary and deeply loved wife, Dorene.
After which, we did take a break.
Our correspondence has been of immense help to me in what I have been trying to do in You Might Want to Know. I have been trying to tell readers what I believe they as American citizens, citizens of the world even, might want to know about nuclear weapons, and might need to know, even if they don’t know they need to know it. A very great deal of which I myself didn’t know until I set out to learn what I could of it.
In the course of this correspondence, I believe Lee Butler and I have become friends. In the course of reading and re-reading his memoir and my research into the record of what he did after he retired from the Air Force in 1994, my respect for him has only grown. I consider my relationship with him to be a great gift. We still have not met. I don’t know if we will. For the purposes of these accounts, I don’t think we need to. I tell you this because since I am about to tell you his story, my version of the story, of course. I believe you should know this about my relationship to him.
The material in any memoir, especially quoted speech, is not to be taken as accurate in every detail. It is clear to me, however, that Lee Butler took all possible pains to achieve accuracy in his accounts and that he never would have knowingly massaged his accounts or quotations to make himself look better or to make the story more exciting or plausible.
I am about to tell you my version of Lee Butler’s story because I believe his story deserves to be much more widely known than it seems to be. Most people I talk to, even those who have been in the military, seem to know nothing or almost nothing of it. Those who know something have had only the most superficial knowledge. What people say they know tends to package him in the either-or way we so often package each other today—as either “idealistic” or “practical,” for example, or as “liberal” or “conservative,” or as “militarist” or “pacifist”—in a way that forecloses any understanding of what the nuanced truth of the matter is.
I will be telling Butler’s story at this point in You Might Want to Know because it comments powerfully on something I believe we all need to know and think more about together—the very nearly unquestioned faith in “nuclear deterrence.” That faith pins in place thecurrent policies of our military and elected leaders when it comes to nuclear weapons. Lee Butler, himself a man of strong faith, a man who had at one time more power over our “nuclear deterrent” than anyone in the country but the President—and maybe even at some level the President—came to call that faith in deterrence deeply into question and to argue that it must be relinquished.
We will begin this story with Butler at the peak of his military career—as the four-star general who was Commander in Chief of the Strategic Air Command. He was, that is, the person in charge of our “strategic” nuclear forces, the person on whose order—if the nuclear deterrent had failed to deter—our military response to a nuclear attack would begin to be executed. Then we’d all see what would unfold.
Next: The “Brick”