Introduction by Commander Robert Green
"On 1 October 1997 in Wellington, General Lee Butler USAF (Ret) delivered
the second Erich Geiringer Memorial Oration. [Dr Geiringer was a key mover
in getting the World Health Organisation to ask the World Court for its
opinion on the legal status of nuclear weapons in 1993. Sadly, he died a
year before the Court gave its opinion on 8 July 1996.] General Butler, as
Commander in Chief US Strategic Command 1992-94, was in charge of all US
nuclear planning. A year ago, he first spoke out for the abolition of
nuclear weapons. This speech, by probably the most important former US
military leader ever to visit New Zealand, took his arguments against
nuclear weapons an important stage further."
Personal thoughts on his own experience
1) To borrow novelist Flannery O'Connor's restatement of a classic quote,
"you shall know the truth and the truth shall make you odd."
2) My purpose in entering the debate was to help legitimize abolition as
an alternative worthy of serious and urgent consideration. My premise was
that my unique experience in the nuclear weapons arena might help kindle
greater antipathy for these horrific devices and the
policies that justify their retention by the nuclear weapon states.
3) Converts are being won on many fronts to the propositions that these
issues matter, that nuclear arsenals can and should be sharply reduced,
that high alert postures are a pernicious anachronism, and that
proliferation of nuclear weapons is a clear and present danger. I am
persuaded that in every corner of the planet, the tide of public sentiment
is now running strongly in favor of diminishing the role of nuclear
weapons. Indeed, I am convinced that publics are well out in front of
their governments in shaking off the grip of the Cold War and reaching for
opportunities that emerge in its wake.
4) Conversely, it is distressingly evident that for many people, nuclear
weapons retain an aura of utility, of primacy and of legitimacy that
justifies their existence well into the future, in some number, however
small. The persistence of this view lies at the core of the concern that
stirs my very soul.
5) I live with the knowledge that this abiding faith in nuclear weapons
was inspired and is sustained by a catechism instilled over many decades by
a priesthood who speak with great assurance and authority.
6) These enduring beliefs, and the fears that underlie them, perpetuate
Cold War policies and practices that make no strategic sense. They
continue to entail enormous costs and expose all mankind to unconscionable
dangers. I find that intolerable, and therefore I cannot stay silent. I
know too much of these matters, the frailties, the flaws, the failures of
policy and practice.
7) I came to see it as a modern day holy war, a cosmic struggle between
the forces of light and darkness. The stakes were national survival, and
the weapons of choice were eminently suited to this scale of
malevolence.
8) From the earliest days of the nuclear era, the risks and consequences
of nuclear war have never been properly understood.
9) The stakes of nuclear war engage not just the survival of the
antagonists, but the fate of mankind.
10) I have no other way to understand the willingness to condone nuclear
weapons than to believe they are the natural accomplice of visceral enmity.
They thrive in the divisive, emotion-charged climate born of alienation
and isolation. The unbounded wantonness of their effects is a perfect
companion to the urge to destroy completely. They play on our deepest
fears and pander to our darkest instincts. They corrode our sense of
humanity, numb our capacity for moral outrage, and make thinkable the
unimaginable. What is anguishingly clear is that these fears and enmities
are no respecter of political systems or values. They prey on democracies
and totalitarian societies alike, shrinking the norms of civilized behavior
and dimming the prospects for escaping the savagery so powerfully imprinted
in our genetic code. That should give us great pause as we imagine the
task of abolition in a world that gives daily witness to acts of
unspeakable barbarism. So should it compound our resolve.
11) I was caught up in the holy war, inured to its costs and consequences,
trusting in the assertions of the nuclear priesthood and the wisdom of my
seniors.
On Deterrence
1) Bound up in this singular term, this familiar touchstone of security
dating back to antiquity, was the intellectually comforting and deceptively
simple justification for taking the most extreme risks and the expenditure
of trillions of dollars.
2) We ignored, discounted or dismissed its flaws and cling still to the
belief that it obtains, in a world whose security architecture has been
wholly transformed.
3) Now, with the evidence more clear, the risks more sharply defined and
the costs more fully understood, I see deterrence in a very different
light. Appropriated from the lexicon of conventional warfare, this simple
prescription for adequate military preparedness became in the nuclear age a
formula for unmitigated catastrophe.
4) Deterrence evolved from an increasingly convoluted morass of
unwarranted assumptions, unprovable assertions and logical contradictions.
By the end of the first decade of the Cold War, it had effectively served
to suspend rational thinking about the ultimate aim of national security:
to ensure the survival of the nation.
5) Deterrence in the Cold War setting was fatally flawed at the most
fundamental level of human psychology in its projection of western reason
through the crazed lens of a paranoid foe.
6) Little wonder that deterrence was the first victim of real world crises,
leaving the antagonists to grope fearfully through a fog of mutual
misperception toward the brink of nuclear holocaust.
7) While we clung to the notion that nuclear war could be deterred, Soviet
leaders held fast the conviction that even a nuclear war must be won --and
took herculean measures toward that end.
8) Deterrence was a dialogue of the blind with the deaf. In the final
analysis, it was largely a bargain we in the West made with ourselves.
9) Deterrence was flawed equally in that the consequences of its failure
were intolerable.
10) Deterrence carried a demon seed, born of an irresolvable contradiction,
that spurred an insatiable arms race.
11) Through every corridor, in every impassioned plea, in every fevered
debate rang the rallying cry, deterrence, deterrence, deterrence.
12) Emptied of any rational content, deterrence was reduced to a cheap
carnival elixir, a rhetorical sleight of hand, deceptively packaged and
oversold.
13) Over time, planning was increasingly distanced and ultimately
disconnected from any sense of scientific or military reality. In the end,
the nuclear superpowers created astronomically expensive infrastructures,
monolithic bureaucracies and complex processes that defied control or
comprehension. Only now are the dimensions, costs and risks of these
nuclear nether worlds coming to light.
14) We cannot sit in silent acquiescence to the faded conscience, the
voice of reason and the rightful interests of humanity.
