General Lee Butler Reflects on Working Toward Peace
I
get a lot of questions like, "If you had been President
Truman, would you have made the decision to drop an atom
bomb on Hiroshima?" "Was this a revelation, was
it an epiphany, what was the catalyst for your change of
view?" The questions go to the issue of when I had
the responsibilities as the commander of the nuclear forces,
as a nuclear advisor to the president and, perhaps most
particularly, as the person who devised the nuclear war
plan. Did that give me pause? Were there reservations?
The evolution of my views was not an epiphany, not some
road-to-Damascus revelation. From the very outset, the nuclear
arena was superimposed with a blanket of secrecy that was
virtually impenetrable. Access to the knowledge and access
to the levers of power that control this arena were reserved
to a very small number of people throughout its history
in this country and in the Soviet Union.
I was commissioned as a lieutenant in June 1961. I became
the commander of the nuclear forces of the United States
in January 1991, almost thirty years later. Until the day
I assumed those responsibilities, I had never been given
access to the nuclear war plan of the United States in its
entirety, even though in Washington I had policy responsibilities
that directed the plan. I knew nothing about the submarine
operations of the strategic nuclear forces of the United
States, and I had an incomplete understanding of the process
that would lead to a command from the president of the United
States to unleash nuclear war in retaliation for a presumed
strike.
Deepening Doubts
Up to that point I had developed a series of reservations
and doubts that progressively deepened. I had no basis for
understanding whether these concerns proceeded from a lack
of information and insight, or whether they were rooted
in the reality of bureaucratic processes run amuck, by the
intrusion of the self-serving profit interests of the military-
industrial complex, by the collision of cultures and turf
in the Pentagon for budget dollars, or simply by the towering
forces of alienation and isolation that grew out of the
mutual demonization between the U.S. and the Soviet Union
over a period of forty-five years. I just didn't know.
Beginning in early 1991, I went through a process that
very quickly accelerated and confirmed my worst fears and
my worst concerns. What we had done in this country, what
I believe happened in the Soviet Union, and what I think
will inevitably happen in any country that makes the fateful
decision to become a nuclear power-to acquire the capability
to build and employ nuclear weapons-is this: the creation
of gargantuan agencies with mammoth appetites and a sense
of infallibility, which consume infinite resources in messianic
pursuit of a demonized enemy. When that happens, it quickly
moves beyond the capacity for any single individual or small
group of people, like the president, the National Security
Council, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, or the Joint
Staff, to control them or to understand. Let me give you
some illustrations of what I mean.
A Chilling Ballet
In those responsibilities of commander of the forces responsible
for the day-to-day operational safety, security, and preparation
to employ those weapons, I was increasingly appalled by
the complexity of this
ballet of hundreds of thousands of people managing, manipulating,
controlling, and maintaining tens of thousands of warheads
and extremely complex systems that flew through the air,
were buried in the bowels of the land, or patrolled beneath
the seas of the world.
The capacity for human error, human failure, mechanical
failure, or misunderstanding was virtually infinite. I have
seen nuclear airplanes crash under the circumstances that
were designed to replicate, but were inevitably far less
stressful than, the actual condition of nuclear war. I have
seen human error lead to the explosion of missiles in their
silos.
I have read the circumstances of submarines going to the
bottom of the ocean laden with nuclear missiles and warheads
because of failures, mechanical flaws, and human error.
I read the entire history, and when I came away from it-because
I was never given access to it before-I was chilled. I was
chilled to the depth of my strategic soul.
Consider my responsibilities as a nuclear advisor. Every
month of my life as a commander of the nuclear forces I
went through an exercise called the Missile Threat Conference.
It would come at any moment of the day or night. For three
years I was required to be within three rings of my telephone
so that I could answer a call from the White House to advise
the president on how to respond to nuclear attack. The question
that would be put to me in these conferences, and as it
would be in the event, was "General Butler, I have
been advised by the commander in chief of the North American
Air Defense Command that the nation is under nuclear attack.
It has been characterized thusly. What is your recommendation
with regard to the nature of our reply?"
That was my responsibility, and occasionally that call
came in the middle of the night as my wife, Dorene, and
I lay in our bedroom. I had to be prepared to advise the
president to sign the death warrant of 250 million people
living in the Soviet Union. I felt that responsibility to
the depth of my soul, and I never learned to reconcile my
belief systems with it. Never.
My third responsibility was to devise the nuclear war
plan of the United States. When I became the director of
Strategic Target Planning, another hat I wore as the commander
of the Nuclear Forces, I went down to my targeting room,
several floors underground. I told my planners that we were
going to get to know each other very well because I wanted
to understand the plan in its entirety. I think this story
is the most graphic illustration of the evolution of my
views and my concerns and, ultimately, my convictions. When
I began to delve into that war plan, I was absolutely horrified
to learn that it encompassed 12,500 targets. I made the
personal commitment-because I viewed it as absolutely integral
to my responsibilities and the consequences of that targeting-to
examine every single one of them in great detail.
Ending the Madness
It took me three years, but by three months I was absolutely
convinced that it was the most grotesque and irresponsible
war plan that had ever been devised by man, with the possible
exception of its counterpart in the Soviet Union, which
in truth probably mirrored it exactly. Because what that
plan implied was, among other things, in the event of nuclear
war between two nations, in the space of about sixteen hours
some twenty thousand thermonuclear warheads would be exploded
on the face of our planet, signing the death warrant not
just for 250 million Soviets, but likely for mankind in
its entirety.
The second thing that I began to grasp was that neither
in the Soviet Union nor the United States did any of us
ever understand those consequences, because the calculation
as to the military effectiveness of that attack was based
on only one criterion, and that was blast damage. It did
not take into account fire; it did not take into account
radiation. Can you imagine that? We never understood, probably
didn't care about, and certainly would not have been able
to calculate with any precision, the holistic effects of
twenty thousand nuclear weapons being exploded virtually
simultaneously on the face of the earth.
That was the straw that tilted my conviction with regard
to the prospects of nuclear war, and ultimately to an unavoidable
responsibility to end this. To end it! And by the grace
of God I came to that awareness and I inherited my responsibilities
at the very moment the Cold War was ending and, therefore,
I had the opportunity to end the madness.
So in those three years I did what I could to cancel all
of the strategic nuclear modernization programs in my jurisdiction,
which totaled $40 billion. I canceled every single one of
them. I recommended to the president that we take bombers
off nuclear alert for the first time in thirty years, and
we did. I recommended that we accelerate the retirement
of all systems designed to be terminated in present and
future arms control agreements, and we did. We accelerated
the retirement of the Minuteman II force. We shrank the
nuclear warplanes of the United States by 75 percent. By
the time I left my responsibilities, those 12,500 targets
had been reduced to 3,000. If I'd had my way and I'd been
there a while longer, I would have worked to reduce them
to zero. Ultimately I recommended the disestablishment of
my command. I took down its flag with my own hands.
Creeping Re-rationalization of Nuclear Weapons
When I retired in 1994, I was persuaded that we were on
a path that was miraculous, that was irreversible, and that
gave us the opportunity to actually pursue a set of initiatives,
acquire a new mind-set, and re-embrace a set of principles,
premised on the sanctity of life and the miracle of existence,
that would take us on the path to zero. I was dismayed,
mortified, and ultimately radicalized by the fact that within
a period of a year that momentum again was slowed. A process
that I have called the creeping re-rationalization of nuclear
weapons was introduced by the very people who stood to gain
the most by the end of the nuclear era.
The French reinitiated nuclear testing at the worst possible
moment, as the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty hung in the
balance. We have reinitiated the process of demonization
of "rogue nations"; what a horrible, pernicious
misuse of language! What an anti-intellectual, dehumanizing
process of reducing complex societies and human beings and
histories and cultures to "rogue nations." Once
you do that, you can justify the most extreme measure to
include the reintroduction of nuclear weapons as legitimate
and appropriate weapons of national security.
If we truly cling to the values that underlie our political
system, if we truly believe in the dignity of the individual,
and if we cherish freedom and the capacity to realize our
potential as human beings on this planet, then we are absolutely
obligated to pursue relentlessly our capacity to live together
in harmony and according to the dictates of respect for
that dignity, for that sanctity of life. It matters not
that we continuously fall short of the mark. What matters
is that we continue to strive. What is at stake here is
our capacity to move ever higher to the bar of civilized
behavior. As long as we sanctify nuclear weapons as the
ultimate arbiter of conflict, we will have forever capped
our capacity to live on this planet according to a set of
ideals that value human life and eschew a solution that
continues to hold acceptable the shearing away of entire
societies. That simply is wrong. It is morally wrong, and
it ultimately will be the death of humanity.
Biography
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