http://www.thenation.com/disarmament/index.htm

By Jonathan Schell, The Nation

|| General George Lee Butler ||

Gen. George Lee Butler was the last commander of the Strategic Air Command before it was folded, in 1992, into the U.S. Strategic Command, of which Butler was also commander until 1994. He joined the Kiewit Energy Group in that year as president. His face is boyish and rosy-cheeked, his manner energetic and precise. His voice, which is clipped and disciplined, would sound right crackling over a military telephone or radio. And Butler was, in fact, from 1991 until 1994, the man to whom the President, if the evil day had come, would have issued the command to launch America's nuclear arsenal, and who, in turn, was charged with delivering that order down the line. He acquired a nuclear education and experience that, in its length, depth and variety, is possibly unmatched by that of any other American of his generation. He was a professor of nuclear subjects at the Air Force Academy, and then was assigned to the Pentagon, where, "deeply embroiled in the bitter aftermath of the SALT Iagreement,"as he explained to me, he first came to "appreciate the delicious phrase used by former Arms Control and Disarmament Agency director Kenneth Adelman that arms control was a ‘holy war,'"and to see the negotiations themselves--"the bureaucratic warfare on both sides euphemistically called arms control"--as "in many respects a surrogate for the nuclear battle that never transpired." He was educated in those years to command nuclear forces, and he did command them, at the highest level. And yet, when that education was done, he decided that nuclear weapons should be abolished.

      Butler first publicly announced his dedication to the goal of nuclear abolition in 1996 at a meeting of the State of the World Forum, at which Gorbachev also spoke, reaffirming his dedication to the same goal, and there is a certain analogy to be drawn between the two men. Both rose to the top of a system that was devoted to high ideals but relied on terror as the means for achieving them. Each believed deeply in the system of which he was a part. Each was a man of outstanding intellect, energy and vision. And each, after reaching the apex of his system, turned against it in fundamental ways, for moral as well as practical reasons. Huge, tottering systems, history suggests, are in trouble when their best people turn against them. Gorbachev's change of heart foreshadowed the end of the Soviet Union. Does Butler's change of heart, we may wonder, herald a similar fate for the system of deterrence?

      "Your education regarding nuclear weapons has led you to call for the abolition of the object of study,"I noted. "The official consensus, however, remains that nuclear weapons are necessary for the indefinite future. Why do you think that view is wrong?"

      "Let's start by framing the intellectual context into which the question of abolition is normally placed. In the first place, I think that those who say abolition cannot be accomplished fall into a very common trap. It is the mistake of judging the prospects for future eventualities by today's circumstances. ‘General Butler, how can you possibly imagine a world without nuclear weapons? Look, Russia has them by the thousands, and so do other nations.' And the answer to that is very simply: The underlying hostility between the United States and the Soviet Union began to collapse with the arrival of Gorbachev, who had the capacity to understand that the society he was leading was a failure and absolutely had to be recast, and that, in addition, its relationship with the United States--and by extension with the rest of the world--had to be transformed. At that point, the game was over. The context was changed forever. We were faced with an array of circumstances that were left over from a forty-year buildup of systems and beliefs that, in many respects, had been just as murderous as a real war.

      "I'm always somewhat bemused by people who say that war was avoided. It was not avoided. In a sense, the cold war was a war in all its aspects. Yet, with a suddenness, a spontaneity entirely unpredicted by the vast majority of the participants, that conflict ended. We were completely unprepared. For example, we have no place to store the nuclear weapons that we have removed from deployment under current arms control agreements. We should understand that it will take some considerable time for all of this to recede--for our minds to accept again that we are all human beings with common values and motivations. We're striving to find our way out of this blind corner into which history and fate steered us for almost half a century. We should accept the fact that we begin from a very difficult starting place. But once that's understood, we also need to be aware that change is possible.

      "I give you, for openers, the end of the cold war. People who say to me that the elimination of nuclear weapons is utopian have somehow managed to completely ignore the fact that the end of the cold war was a far more utopian prospect than eliminating nuclear weapons is now. Only ten years ago, the cold war was a given--a permanent-seeming feature on the international landscape. Yet today it is behind us, and we are grappling with its denouement. Therefore, I think that the burden of proof is on anyone who uses ‘never' or ‘inconceivable' or ‘unimaginable' with respect to what, after all, would only be a further improvement of this already astonishing outcome. Who can fail to be amazed that we are already debating not the next generation of nuclear weapons, not the next nefarious act by the Soviet Union, but whether or not we should cut another thousand weapons from the arsenal, or whether it is time to take them off alert? Who can look at all this and fail to be awe-struck by the profundity of the change? And yet even as people witness all this they say that it is impossible to imagine a world without nuclear weapons!

      "That's point number one--the grievous intellectual error of imagining the future solely in terms of the present. Point number two: It is a measure of the arrogance of nations--but especially of the nuclear-weapon states--to assert that a nuclear-weapon-free world is impossible when, in fact, 95 percent of the nations of the world already are nuclear free.

      "If you believe at all in the sovereign equality of nations, it is untenable that a handful of nations should forever arrogate to themselves the right to nuclear weapons, while denying it to others. One more mistake people make when they imagine that nuclear weapons must be retained indefinitely is the belief that somehow the world is sufficiently static that current circumstances, in which only a handful of nations have these weapons, will endure forever. What that assumes is that no new, bitter enmities will develop on the face of the earth. We have a priceless opportunity to put behind us the possibility that we or other nations will be taken hostage by nuclear arms."

      "Permit me to be a devil's advocate for a moment," I responded. "Doesn't it stand to reason to think that, had it not been for the sobering effect of the nuclear arsenals, the two great powers of the cold war might have gone to war? Isn't there common sense in that idea?"

      "The bumper-sticker version of that--the short version--would be ‘Nuclear weapons prevented World War III,'" he said. "But then you step back and take a look at the assumptions that underlie this reasonable-seeming assertion. For the statement that nuclear weapons prevented World War III to be true, it would first have to be the case that the Soviet Union had had a compelling urge to launch an aggressive war against the West. At this moment, we have yet to find evidence for that. There's no question that the entire era in which Stalin rose to power and held sway over the Soviet Union was one of the most monstrous periods in history. No one can possibly be an apologist for Stalin. It's nevertheless true that serious historians with access to Soviet archives, such as John Lewis Gaddis, are beginning to make different findings--that in operational terms the Soviet Union was more circumspect. At the same time, it's perfectly understandable that, thanks to such Russian actions as the Berlin blockade, the breaking of agreements made at the end of World War II and the refusal to withdraw from Eastern Europe, American policy-makers came to believe that here was a Russia set upon global domination. I accept that. Yet the pernicious consequences, which had very real consequences for millions of people around the world, were that the United States abandoned the difficult intellectual work of trying to understand the motivations of this enemy in favor of a simple demonization of him. So point number one is that we really don't know to what extent the Soviets were inspired to confront us.

      "There's a second important point about Soviet policy to consider. The Soviet military did not understand deterrence as this was formulated by the West. Our view of nuclear deterrence was embodied in the excruciating expression ‘mutually assured destruction.' Their view, until the eighties--until Chernobyl--was that nuclear war was winnable and, therefore, they never operated according to our intellectual construct. Deterrence was really a uniquely Western construct. Therefore, those who insist that deterrence prevented World War III are seeing that proposition through a Western lens.

      "I don't say that the Soviets were unmindful of the destructiveness of nuclear war, but, in contrast to the United States, which paid mere lip service to protecting command and control and population, the Russians raised that to an art form. Why did they go to such lengths to bury their command centers at depths that we could never reach with our nuclear weapons? Why did they put whole cities underground? Why did they disperse their military infrastructure? How do you square that with our view of deterrence? Their view was, if war comes, we're going to win it. What it says to me is that nuclear weapons did not prevent or deter World War III. Let me give you another illustration. Declared U.S. policy, which was driven by a belief in deterrence, began to move in the direction of supposedly greater flexibility and response. What did the Russians do? They introduced an automatic feature into their command and control system--the dead hand--through which their forces would be launched automatically if their command and control was decapitated. Where's the deterrence in that?

      "It's crucially important to understand that the cold war presented the world of 1945 with a set of circumstances which it was completely unprepared to deal with. The world was exhausted by a global conflict of unprecedented proportions. And picture that suddenly statesmen are confronted with a challenge that, even in the best of times and circumstances, would have strained their imaginations, namely what to do about the split atom. Interestingly, it didn't necessarily have to be that way. Nothing at the outset, except perhaps the capriciousness of the gods, dictated that simultaneously with the arrival of the East-West confrontation would come a weapon whose destructive capacities perfectly mirrored the ideological enmity. Total ideological warfare was underwritten by total destructive capacity. What an historic coupling! Absent the atom bomb, there still would have been the bitter enmity between East and West. Europe still would have been divided. The Soviet Union still would have confronted the West at a multiplicity of points around the world. These things alone would have constituted a challenge of unprecedented proportions for American policy-makers. When you consider that all this was overlaid with the unlimited destructive power of nuclear arms, it boggles the mind to realize that, somehow, we got through it.

      "When I ask why there has been no third world war, I answer, first, that the trauma of the Cuban missile crisis was so great that both sides came to accept certain unwritten rules of the game that had already been taking shape. They boiled down ultimately to respect for spheres of hegemony, or influence. Within that totality, it's absolutely fair to conclude that the presence of nuclear weapons introduced great caution. It's equally true, however, to say that deterrence had this further peculiar quality: It worked best when you needed it least. In periods of relative calm, you could point with pride to deterrence and say, ‘Look how splendidly it's working!' It was in moments of deep crisis that not only did it become irrelevant but all the baggage that came with it--the buildup of forces, the high states of alert--turned the picture absolutely upside down. As you entered crisis, thoughts of deterrence vanished, and you were simply trying to deal with the classic imponderables of crises. Now what had deterrence brought you? I will tell you that in the Cuban missile crisis, the fact that we didn't go to war had nothing to do with deterrence. Talk to McNamara and others. They will tell you that there was no talk of deterrence in those critical thirteen days. What you had was two small groups of men in two small rooms, groping frantically in the intellectual fog, in the dark, to deal with a crisis that had spun out of control. That was the quality of the relationship: total alienation and isolation from one another.

      "That is why in my public statements I have resorted to saying that I think it is miraculous that we escaped this period without a nuclear conflict. Deterrence, in a word, never operated the way that we imagined or envisioned it would. It was never the construct supported by exquisite insights into mutual motivations and intentions that we thought it was. It led to an open-ended arms race--at that level, it failed utterly."

      "I'd like to ask for your responses,"I said, "to some of the specific arguments made against abolition:that getting rid of nuclear weapons will unleash conventional wars, that the weapons cannot be disinvented, that breakout will occur, giving the violator an unacceptable advantage."

      "Michael Quinlan [a former British Defense Ministry official] recently stated the argument regarding conventional war at the end of a long piece in one of the strategic journals,"he answered. "He says that he would rather live in a world with nuclear weapons but without the prospect of major conventional war. As if those were the only two possible outcomes! In truth, in the world of nuclear weapons we have seen some of the most murderous wars in history: Iraq and Iran--over 100,000 casualties; the Korean War; the war in Vietnam. What did nuclear weapons do to prevent, contain, constrain those conflicts?

      "Now the next argument: Nuclear weapons cannot be uninvented. I think any freshman professor of logic could take this argument apart in a millisecond. Because the response to that question is, ‘And so?' Are you suggesting that because the knowledge cannot be eradicated from the books and the files, from the histories, from the minds, that somehow we're powerless to construct systems of enforcement, agreements specifying collective action, capacities for intervention? Are you suggesting that we cannot establish norms of behavior which not only will powerfully act against building such weapons in the future but will make virtually automatic a response, in the event of violation, by the family of civilized nations, as occurred when Iraq invaded Kuwait--norms that state to potential violators that the moment we understand that you are bent on this course of action, you will be brought to the bar of justice? And we must reflect that a world that had agreed to eliminate nuclear weapons would be a hundred times stronger than it is today. Recall what the United States did in most difficult circumstances when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. George Bush did not hesitate to make that decision. Even when so august a figure as Sam Nunn recommended against it, Bush saw immediately what was at stake. I happen to have been immediately involved in presenting the pros and cons of a decision on whether to intervene or not. The point is that we have already seen convincing evidence that the world stands ready to do whatever is necessary to act against any leader who presumes to take such an egregious step outside a certain norm of behavior.

      "Now what of the argument that a nation might cheat on an agreement, and suddenly reveal that it had a cache of nuclear weapons?

      "Here again, the answer is, ‘So what?' We have had that circumstance already, with nuclear weapons present in the world. Saddam Hussein took no notice of the nuclear capabilities of the United States as he pursued his program of building nuclear weapons. Why? He was simply taking a lesson from our book. But what if we conveyed a new message: that the world should not accept as a norm the proposition that nuclear weapons will be used to intimidate or to influence the actions of other states--that this is simply an unacceptable basis of behavior for a nation-state because of the threat it poses to all nation-states?

      "Now, let's imagine an even worse circumstance--that one of these weapons is actually exploded. What at that juncture would be the right response, in a world in which the elimination of nuclear weapons has been agreed upon? It would be an immediate and unconditional intervention, which, if necessary, goes in and physically removes the leadership of the state, puts the country under occupation subject to a global mandate, for whatever period of time is deemed necessary, just as we did at the end of World War II with Japan and Germany. It would be done according to a law which was put in place to authorize just that, with forces and plans--and, most important, a commitment--that were firmly in place beforehand. If what the opponents are searching for is a perfect world in which threats of that kind will be forever eliminated, then they have made the classic error of making the perfect the enemy of the good."

      I wondered where General Butler stood on the question of the horizontal path.

      "One of the penalties of arms control as it came to be practiced during the cold war is that its patterns and routines have become so embedded that today we continue to bargain as if we were still in that context. The result is low-expectation negotiations that are highly formalistic, mechanistic and numbers-driven--in which modestly shrinking numbers are viewed as adequate progress. But the issues are now much larger. They have to do with the manner in which the forces are arrayed. One can almost be content with the proposition that, considering the restraints on dismantling warheads owing to the lack of facilities, we're going to have to live with large numbers of these weapons for some years to come.

      "If the assumption is that we're not willing to invest the money in dismantlement facilities, even though this would require only a fraction of the cost of any cold war weapon system, then nevertheless we can achieve the immediate needs of arms control in large measure simply by taking the weapons off alert. We should do this not so much because we fear the risk of accidental, inadvertent or unauthorized launch as because the two sides must cease sending each other the message that not only do we not trust each other but we are still of a mind to destroy each other and millions of people in a nuclear exchange. Why do we still have so-called tactical nuclear weapons in Europe? It's absurd to imagine that in a Europe that has been totally transformed, these weapons have any conceivable role. And not only that, they arguably are the most dysfunctional, menacing and generally counterproductive element in the current relationship--one that, for example, greatly feeds Russia's fear of the expansion of NATO. Why is it that, showing a singular failure of vision and willingness to begin afresh, we are hellbent to expand NATO? We could easily have proposed working for a few years, on a collegial basis with our former adversaries, to rewrite the rulebook regarding how the world proceeds at this point. This shouldn't be just a dialogue between the United States and the former Soviet Union. It should be 1945 afresh--starting again, with a whole new construct."

      "I was surprised how little feeling of celebration the end of the cold war produced,"I remarked. "Do you think that, in part, people are aware, perhaps unconsciously, that we have yet to deal with the underlying question of nuclear weapons? Perhaps, for the United States, the cold war cannot truly be over until we face up to the nuclear question."

      "I think that at some level there is a very real understanding that the bulk of the work is ahead of us," Butler replied. "We need to reflect on how revolutionary ideas get implemented and become evolutionary realities. The first and foremost test is whether, at its very core, the idea makes sense. And I believe that the idea of abolishing nuclear weapons passes that test with flying colors. Today, we are left with the spectacle of democratic societies clinging to the proposition that threats to the lives of tens of millions of people can be reconciled with the underlying tenets of our political philosophy. Who can argue that this is the best to which we can aspire? There's a terrible price to be paid, I believe, for accepting these terms. What is the measure of civilization? What is the test of morality? What are the scales on which, ultimately, the capacities of mankind to live in peace on this planet will be measured? Isn't it, in fact, not only highly to be desired but also likely that someday we will come truly to understand that the distinctions upon which, until now, we have based our assessments and calculations regarding the prospects of peace--considerations of culture, religion, color of skin--have been entirely superficial, and simply recognize that fundamentally we are--all of us--of a piece? That, at the level of our DNA, we are indistinguishable, and that, given the opportunity, we all aspire to common values, including the right to live in peace and harmony, free from fear, and with the opportunity to realize all of the talents with which our Creator endows us? Why would we cut off these prospects, which are set forth in the founding documents of our democracy, by embracing a creed which accepts that, given certain provocations, we will resort to methods which will extinguish the lives of tens of millions of people? That's barbaric. In fact, it is more barbaric than, perhaps, any measures for survival that you'll find in the animal kingdom. I have arrived at the conclusion that it is simply wrong, morally speaking, for any mortal to be invested with the authority to call into question the survival of the planet. That is an untenable allocation of authority, and yet it has become the central feature of the nuclear age.

      "Nuclear weapons are irrational devices. They were rationalized and accepted as a desperate measure in the face of circumstances that were unimaginable. Now as the world evolves rapidly, I think that the vast majority of people on the face of this earth will endorse the proposition that such weapons have no place among us. There is no security to be found in nuclear weapons. It's a fool's game."