Abolitionist Generals and the Nuclear Policy Debate

By Luther J. Carter

The nuclear weapons policy establishment--high government officials past and present, national security analysts and scholars, and kibitzers at the think-tanks--has generally agreed that nuclear arsenals reached obscenely high levels during the Cold War and should now be substantially reduced. But the predominant view, certainly in government, is that nuclear deterrence remains vital to U.S. security. For most of the establishment, abolition of nuclear weapons is still a dreamy idea at the fringe.

But dramatic evidence of a push to give abolition a new currency came from an unexpected quarter late last year when some of the world's most experienced atomic arsenal commanders, the "international generals and admirals," spoke out. The two generals in the lead were:

General George Lee Butler

General George Lee Butler, who from early 1991 to mid-1992 headed the Air Force Strategic Air Command, then until 1994 headed SAC's successor, the unified Strategic Command; and

General Andrew Goodpaster, staff secretary to President Eisenhower from 1954 to 1961 and Supreme Allied Commander in Europe from 1969 to 1974.

They appeared together at a National Press Club forum on December 4. Butler expressed "deepening dismay at the prolongation of Cold War policies and practices in a world where our security interests have been utterly transformed."

"Deterrence," he said, "reigns unchallenged, with its embedded assumption of hostility and associated preference for forces on high states of alert." Speaking from 27 years' experience with bombers, missile silos, and high command posts, Butler asserted that "elegant theories of deterrence wilt in the crucible of impending nuclear war." He asserted that "employment of a nuclear weapon by the United States in the post-Cold War world, no matter the provocation, would irretrievably diminish our stature."

Butler urged the nuclear weapons states "to accept that the Cold War is in fact over, to break free of the norms, attitudes and habits that perpetuate enormous inventories, forces standing alert and targeting plans encompassing thousands of aimpoints." Butler and Goodpaster acknowledged that no one can say when or even whether the final goal of abolishing nuclear weapons will be at hand. But they predicted that, because the phased withdrawal and destruction of nuclear weapons would require many years and probably decades, there would be time to work out technical problems, to ease the conflicts and political struggles that encourage possession of nuclear weapons, and to build confidence in safeguards and verification systems for an abolition regime.

Sixty other generals and admirals--many formerly high-ranking commanders in the U.S. and Soviet military, together with retired officers from North Atlantic Treaty Organization countries and a few other states--also called for abolition in a statement paralleling those by Butler and Goodpaster. They advocated a long-term policy of "continuous, complete, and irrevocable elimination of nuclear weapons."

The abolitionist appeals by the generals are an astonishing historical turn-about. Indeed, perhaps the most forceful argument for eliminating nuclear weapons has now come from the very quarter supposedly most wedded to them. How is this? For his part, General Butler speaks from first hand of an "appalling array of accidents and incidents" involving such weapons even in peacetime.

Predictably, a White House spokes-man, commenting on the Butler speech, said that while President Clinton also favors, and pursues, a step-by-step approach to nuclear arms reduction, "we continue to believe that nuclear deterrence will remain a cornerstone of our strategy in protecting America's vital national interests."

The White House was on four squares with the present Pentagon leaders and not a few private national security advisers, of whom former Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger is perhaps the archetype. The White House specifically rejected the generals' call for removing nuclear weapons from alert and placing their warheads in controlled storage.

But defense doctrines that keep U.S. forces--and Russian forces, in a mirror image--on alert may be on the way to being shown dangerously wrong. Bruce Blair of the Brookings Institution recently told the House National Security Committee that the U.S.-Russian agreement in 1994 to stop aiming their missiles at one another was reversible in seconds and thus "entirely cosmetic and symbolic."

Blair said the response time for Russian early warning and nuclear release procedures is 15 minutes. "It's inherently dangerous and compounded by the deterioration of Russia's command-control system and missile attack early warning network," he added. Blair recalled the false alarm brought on in January, 1995, by the firing of a Norwegian scientific rocket. This triggered, for the first time in Russian and Soviet history, a strategic alert of launch-on-warning forces, an emergency telephone conference of President Yeltsin and other national command authorities, and "activation of their famous nuclear suitcases."

With the Cold War over, polls show a public complacency about nuclear dangers. But an image-conscious White House cannot ignore Washington's public policy community of think-tanks and public interest groups. In 1997 more than a dozen groups are expected to release reports or books on sharply reducing, and maybe eventually eliminating, nuclear weapons. To create an "expert consensus," directors of a number of the forthcoming studies have put together a Committee on Nuclear Policy at the Henry L. Stimson Center. Its members include General Butler and General Goodpaster, together with some other former luminaries of the defense and intelligence establishments, plus analysts from Brookings, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Atlantic Council, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and so on.

Of especially great impact may be the report coming late this spring from the National Academy of Sciences Committee on International Security and Arms Control, chaired by John P. Holdren of Harvard. The ubiquitous General Butler is a part of this study, too, as he was of last year's study by the Canberra Commission on the Elimination of Nuclear Weapons that was commissioned by the Prime Minister of Australia.

There are plenty of contradictions for all the studies to ponder. Consider this by-play between the Air Force's Strategic Air Command (SAC) and the Navy's strategic force of Trident missile submarines:

Two days after taking charge of SAC in 1991, General Butler called together his senior staff of 20 generals and one admiral and presented his case. "With the end of the Cold War," he said, "SAC's mission (is) essentially complete." Butler told his staff to think of smaller forces, fewer targets, reduced alert status, and accelerated arms control. "This was a wrenching adjustment that prompted angry debate, bruised feelings, and the early termination of a dozen promising careers," Butler has recalled. "But in the end, my staff unanimously supported my decision to recommend that SAC itself be disestablished after 46 years at the nuclear ramparts."

But while SAC's B-52 bombers were in fact taken off ground alert, the Pentagon's Single Integrated Operational Plan (SIOP) requires the covering of all listed targets. So it was that targets no longer covered by the B-52s became targets for the Navy's Trident fleet.

SIOP thus provided an effective, if inscrutable, justification for continuing to keep all the Trident submarines on patrol two-thirds of the year by using alternating Blue and Gold crews. Each of the eighteen Tridents is a $5-billion weapon system carrying 24 missiles and 192 independently targetable warheads, mostly of 100 kiloton yield but some of nearly half a megaton. A single Trident could kill most of Russia's urban population.

In a recent Wall Street Journal article two former Clinton administration officials, John M. Deutch and Ashton Carter, declared that "the SIOP calculus is no longer the appropriate method of determining the size of the U.S. nuclear force." In their view, the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START) should be followed by Continuous Arms Reduction Talks (CART) covering all tactical as well as strategic nuclear weapons.

Besides the intellectual pressures from the private public policy community, the Clinton White House may be feeling more overtly political pressures from the activist Abolition 2000 movement. In the spring of 1995 at the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) extension conference a variety of mostly small nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) from around the world formed an Abolition Caucus. Later that year the caucus established the Abolition 2000 Global Network of several hundred supporting organizations tied together by e-mail and the Internet.

The Network doesn't have much political weight yet but a potentially sensitive political pressure point is available to it, namely the annual preparatory meetings at the UN that will precede the year-2000 review of the NPT. The Network will focus on how well the nuclear weapons states are meeting their treaty obligation to seek nuclear disarmament.

White House aides have been offering assurances that President Clinton has a full arms reduction agenda and is doing all he can to reduce the nuclear danger. They can now point to the agreements that Clinton reached with Boris Yeltsin at Helsinki, particularly the agreement to begin negotiating START III once START II has been ratified by the Russian Duma (which is quite problematic). An announced aim is to reduce strategic warheads to 2000 to 2500 to a side, compared to the 3500 under START II. Moreover, warheads removed from missiles could not be held in reserve, as many are at present, but would all come under a "transparent" regime of accountability, dismantling, and destruction.

Whatever the actual outcome of these agreements, Clinton was indeed forthcoming at Helsinki, and for this Butler and the other generals are surely due some credit. But stronger evidence of the generals' influence will be manifest if and when the White House repudiates nuclear deterrence as a doctrine needlessly perpetuating the nuclear dangers of the Cold War.

A "paradigm shift" toward abolition may first be manifested by a drastic reduction in land- and sea-based missiles kept on alert. The generals will have encouraged this by highlighting the dangers of nuclear deterrence and by lending the imprimatur of their high field commands to an abolitionist cause that might otherwise be more easily attacked as soft-headed and impractical.

LUTHER J. CARTER ('80), a Wasington journalist, has received grants from the Rockefeller Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, and the Ploughshares Fund for his work on nuclear issues. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science where from 1965 to 1980 he was a writer for Science. His email address: lcarter345@aol.com

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