On the truth of nuclear deterrence

Interview with General George Lee Butler.

As Commander of the United States Strategic Command from 1991 to 1994, General George Lee Butler held the top position in the U.S. nuclear war establishment. It was on his recommendation that the U.S. President could have given the orders to launc h a nuclear strike against the Soviet Union, the consequences of which would have spelt the end of civilisation as we know it. Today Butler is one of the world's strongest critics of nuclear weaponisation and the theory of nuclear deterrence, and, owing to the unique position to which he rose, perhaps its most authoritative.

Butler says that he wore three hats as the head of the U.S. Strategic Command. As commander of the U.S. forces he was responsible for the safety and security of the forces; he was in charge of war planning; and he was the principal adviser to the U.S. Pr esident on strategic nuclear issues. At the end of this 30-year journey, and from the vantage point where he stood, Butler arrived at a "personal and professional crossroads". He likes to provide a "15-second reply" when asked the reasons for his moral a nd intellectual transformation with a favourite literary quote of his: "You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you odd."

Butler was in Bangalore recently as part of a U.S. delegation from the Committee on International Security and Arms Control (CISAC) of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, to attend a meeting at the National Institute of Advanced Studies. He spoke to < B>Dr. T. Jayaraman and Parvathi Menon at length about his critique of deterrence, the U.S.-Soviet nuclear stand-off during the Cold War years, and the lessons that that has for other nations that have chosen to traverse the nuclear path.

Excerpts from the interview:

From being a person whose role was to tell the U.S. President when he could push the nuclear button to being perhaps one of the world's most trenchant critics of the idea of nuclear deterrence and nuclear weapons as a means of security, it has been qu ite a swing. How did this happen?

Two things really. First, 30 years of experience in this arena during the course of which I transitioned from what I would say was quite a typical U.S. perspective of someone who lived almost through the entire experience of the Cold War and the consumin g fear that the U.S. lived with the prospect of an immediate, what you would call a 'bolt-out-of-the-blue', nuclear strike from the Soviet Union. Very early in the U.S.-Soviet relationship, we demonised each other. We built caricatures of each other. Mos t of that took place before Stalin died. As the hopes and aspirations at the end of the Second World War began to fade and we saw the Soviet Union establish its hegemony over the eastern part of Europe, as we saw them expanding their orbit and their infl uence, explode their own atom bomb; the Berlin Blockade, Korea.... the impact of this on the U.S. was very traumatic. When the war in Korea broke out we were completely unprepared. For us that was the signal that Communism was on the march, and that it was going to come to dominate Asia - in concert with China of course - because as you remember that we had this big debate on who lost China. So we suddenly saw this Communist wave sweeping the world, and it generated, particularly coupled with the nu clear connections of the Cold War, an atmosphere of fear in the U.S. that just literally consumed us. I've described it as an emotional hijacking - that we had the sense that the Soviet Union was, in (Ronald) Reagan's words, an Evil Empire.

That was the backdrop in which our 50-year relationship with nuclear weapons has to be understood. Because it was that fear that drove us to such extremes that ultimately we were the victim of such excess as fabricating 70,000 nuclear devices. Of buildin g a stockpile that at its peak was 36,000 operational weapons of 115 different types that could be exploded by 65 different means - landmines, torpedoes, artillery shells, large bombs and so on. It explains how we transitioned so easily from a world of long-range aircraft that took hours to reach their targets to missiles that took minutes. Reducing presidential decision time to 12 minutes. With the fate of the world at stake! And yet we came to see all of this as acceptable, even desirable, because it comported with our view that the only way to prevent a nuclear war was the formula of mutually assured destruction.

And then, in the course of that relationship, we reached a point in 1962 with the Cuban missile crisis where literally, the bet, which I view deterrence as... we almost lost the bet. It was while we discovered this that circumstances served us up a situa tion we had never anticipated, and that was that the Soviets would put short-range nuclear missiles in Cuba. We were utterly astonished. We would never have imagined such a thing. But from the Russian perspective that was just quid pro quo for our puttin g our short-range missiles in Turkey. For them it seemed perfectly logical. They were just levelling the playing field. And so, a subtle misunderstanding based on different strategic perspectives very nearly carried the world to a nuclear war, all in the name of deterrence.

I see that history 30 years later from the standpoint of what we now know because the archives have been opened, documents are now available, former antagonists are talking to each other; one of my closest professional colleagues is Marshal Sergeyev, the Defence Minister of Russia. As I discuss with people like him what our perceptions were then, it is very chilling. Because what we had was a very incomplete, distorted and in many cases totally erroneous view of the perceptions of those tensions.

So with respect to your first question of my critique of deterrence. Fundamental in my critique is, in the final analysis, it is not what you think deters, it is what your opponent thinks. And we never knew what he thought. So there is an absolutely fund amental flaw in the psychology of deterrence. And that is, you are not in charge of it, it is your enemy. If your enemy is totally isolated and alienated from you, how can you pretend to think you know what his thoughts, his intentions and his motivation s are? Second, there is an engine at work which in our own experience often took decisions out of our hand - and that was technology. Industry comes in and says, "I have a new weapon. I have a new aircraft. I have a new missile." The third of course is t hat circumstances change, governments change, people change. And what would seem as prudent and wise today may be taken out of your hands tomorrow by a different view that says no, we must build more. A crisis arises, and all assumptions and decisions th at you made go out of the window, and deterrence takes on a whole new hue.

So, that is my answer to your question. How did I make this transition? I made this transition because over a period of 30 years, as I rose in rank and responsibility, and was given additional duties, what I also got was access. The secrecy was so impene trable that there were only that (holds up his hands to gesture the figure 10) many people at any given time in the U.S. who truly have access to all the information that would be essential to trying to comprehend this enormously complex business.

The second thing was that my experience was unique. If you really want to be deeply knowledgeable, such that you can reflect usefully and intelligently on the subject, here is what you have to master.

* Theory. You can spend a lifetime trying to do just that.

* Policy. Who writes policy? Where does it come from? What is the relationship to theory?

* Intelligence. The U.S. intelligence community is one of the most complex cultures that you would ever imagine. It comprises at least a dozen agencies, not just the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency). But those agencies all have their own cultures, belie f systems, histories, traditions. How do you get anything intelligent out of them?

* War plan. The strategic nuclear war plan in the U.S. is the most closely held secret that we have. Very few people have access to it, let alone understanding.

* Nuclear weapons design and fabrication. The laboratories are cultures all to themselves. You can spend a lifetime trying to understand a laboratory. The DRDO (Defence Research and Development Organisation) here in India? Who understands their role? How complex is it? Imagine our own circumstances.

* The military-industrial complex. All the giant corporations involved, with their own motivations and intentions. In fact, we spent $ 6 trillion in 50 years on this.

* Operational practices. Thousands of war plans. Thousands of missiles. Dozens of submarines. All operating under the authority of individual services who are cultures, with their own views, who are in competition for money, and whose operations are very secret.

* Arms control. Arms control is at the centre of this whole business since the early 1960s. In our country there is a very keen observer who once described arms control as a "holy war". The CTBT (Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty), Fissile Material Cutoff Tr eaty, the NPT (Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty). Feelings run very deep on this score.

S. SURESH

Well, I spent my life in all of those cultures and had access in a way to all of them. It's unique - I spent thousands of hours at the negotiating table with my soldiers and generals. I was the commander of the nuclear forces. I owned the submarines and the airplanes and the land-based missiles. I was the nuclear adviser to the President. It was my job to say: "Mr. President, my recommendation is...", and thus the prospect of sounding the death-knell for 250 million people. I was the Director of the St aff that built the U.S. nuclear war plan - 12,500 targets. And when I took that job, I looked at every single one of those targets. Every... single... one. No one in history had ever done that. They would look at batches of targets. No. If you don't go t hrough them in that detail, you don't begin to see all the breakdowns of logic and the gaps between policy and planning. You don't see what we all should have understood, which is the natural tendency of bureaucracies to want more, to do more, to hide th eir knowledge and their thoughts.

So in 1991, just as I come to these responsibilities and get this knowledge, a wholly unanticipated, miraculous thing happens. The Cold War ends. Now what was I to do? A typical bureaucratic response? Defend my empire? Defend my budget? Defend my forces? Defend my people? Continue to portray Russia as a threat?

No. My conclusion was quite the opposite. We escaped the Cold War without a nuclear holocaust by some combination of skill, luck and divine intervention, and I think mostly the latter. Secondly, as I came to understand the magnitude of the nuclear war pl an, and of the consequences of its execution - what would happen if we actually launched 8,000 thermo-nuclear warheads against Russia in response to 10,000 nuclear missiles launched by them? The first thing that I understood was that in our calculation o f the effects of the war plan the only element we took into account was blast deaths. Blast - the force of the explosion - not fire, not radiation, and certainly not the holistic effects if that many weapons exploded anywhere across the globe. I was abso lutely astounded. I thought that was simple common sense, just logic. But now I understand what happens in large bureaucracies that have very little oversight over a period of many years.

As I came to appreciate the consequences of the execution of a nuclear war plan, I reached my second conclusion. These aren't weapons at all. We are doing them a great disservice by calling them weapons. That is too mundane a term to describe what happen s in a nuclear explosion. I have described them in my public remarks so that people understand what I am really thinking of is a species of biological and genetic time-bomb, whose effects transcend time and space. They are poised to deform the world and its inhabitants for generation after generation. That is what we are dealing with. I frequently hear people talk about nuclear weapons as if they were hand-grenades. One is catastrophe unparalleled. And yet we talk about them in round numbers as if they were just ordinary things. It is part of the effect of the emotional hijacking.

My third conclusion was that mutual assured destruction was a formula for unmitigated disaster because of what Carl Sagan has described as nuclear winter. That is a very real phenomenon and so what was at stake was not just the fate of antagonists; it wa s the fate of man. We... never... understood... that. The Russians however came to understand it after Chernobyl. A single element of a single nuclear power pack explodes, and there is a relative puff of radioactivity compared to one nuclear weapon, and look at the results. Hundreds dead; thousands condemned to deformities, not just in this but in the next generation. Hundreds of thousands of hectares taken out of production for years to come. We can recall the horror of that and yet we still are casual about a nuclear war involving 20,000 nuclear missiles.

So that's my journey. It took me 30 years to accumulate the experience, to gain access, because of the authority I was given, the responsibilities to utter the words: "Mr. President, I recommend a major nuclear response to this attack." I did it every mo nth for 37 months in simulated nuclear war exercises. And then to look at that war plan, and to go back and try and understand how in the world could anyone imagine that that was a rational thing to do. It was the single most preposterous, absurdly irres ponsible war plan. With the possible exception of the Soviet plan, which imagined even more weapons than these. Their attack probably would have involved 10,000 nuclear weapons. When I talk about this with public audiences, I give them a calculation to h elp them understand what that means. There are 50 States in the United States of America. You just divide the number of Soviet warheads evenly by the number of States. That's 200 per State. I live in the State of Nebraska. There are only a million and a half people in Nebraska and half of them live in two cities. You could utterly destroy the State of Nebraska ... with two nuclear warheads, and you still have 198 left.

When I listen to the words of other states, which are in a different part of their experience, in the beginning, that is why I came back into the public arena. I just wanted you to know my experience and the lessons that I have learnt. It may have nothin g to do with yours, but I would seem irresponsible if I didn't make you aware of my reflections. So if you do find it useful, then, there's no charge!

One of the issues raised by the people who have opposed India going towards nuclear weapons is the strong element of jingoism in the discourse in India and Pakistan in their politics, the ultra-nationalism of various kinds, the elements of religious t ensions internal to countries, that spill over into policymaking in international affairs. So, given that these strains may be there, and without exaggerating them too much, what would be the prospects for stability if India deploys a minimum nuclear det errent?

Whatever the relationship between India and Pakistan, there is bound to be a dynamic between them now with a nuclear dimension that wasn't there earlier. It's a new element. So I think that the great challenge that these two nations face is to understand how this new element intersects with all the little flames down here that keep the pot boiling with regard to the nature of the relationship - jingoism or nationalism, scientists who have a personal stake in this, industry which stands to make some mon ey... they may not be within your control. Part of my understanding is that in India, the public is never really drawn into the debates, there has not really been any public debate about nuclear weapons policy and planning.

In the U.S. volumes were written on this. Well, as you get into your nuclear experience and the public is drawn into it, to the degree that this might fuel the flames, a great challenge is going to be how you control the degree to which that feeds back i nto your view of deterrence and the size of your war plan. Public sentiment can be a very powerful thing. We've been through that many times in our own experience. Are India and Pakistan immune from those tensions, temptations and pitfalls? Perhaps so. B ut it is a reality that we went through, and it is part of what informs my own concern, which is that deterrence is not static. It's very dynamic, it's very susceptible to conditions that arise and relationships that are imposed on you by scientific disc overy or the self-serving interest of this or that section.

In India the dynamic would be that if weaponisation continues as projected, then it would be a three-way dynamic as China is involved.

Of course. That's a very different matter from our dynamic in the U.S.-Soviet context. So, yes. You're in new territory here with imagining how deterrence works in a three-legged relationship.

One part of the assessment that some people have written about is that for some period of time it is likely to be a two-legged deterrence with more build-up being required before China really enters the equation which will primarily be between India a nd Pakistan.

It would be interesting to talk to China about how they view that. Because at the end that's what matters. Does it have any relationship with how people think in Beijing? How do they look at this? I've heard a variety of assessments.

In the context of South Asia, will it be possible to devise a command and control system that will be able to cope with the dangers of nuclear build-up in India and Pakistan given their geographical proximity?

It depends on how serious you want to be about it. With respect to the U.S. and the Soviet Union for example - and that is $ 6 trillion we spent - a significant fraction of that was spent on early warning, space-based and land-based. Because deterrence absolutely depends on, if it is going to be stable, continuous knowledge of what the other side or sides are doing. One of the things that currently worries us about Russia is that two-thirds of its satellites are out of operation. There is a sector that they just don't see at all and that worries us. Lack of that information may cause some rumour that can be blown out of proportion. So question number one is how serious do you want to be about early warning. Secondly, communications. My headquarters wa s the communications centre of the universe. I could communicate with my forces in a dozen different ways. Under any circumstance, even in the midst of an incoming attack, I wanted to be absolutely sure that I had command and control. But that is not all . There's the whole question of coding and surveying military relationships, and who has authority and should that authority be passed on? These are just some of the questions that India and Pakistan have to address to convince themselves and anyone else who is interested that they are serious about command and control. I read the words of (Minister for External Affairs) Jaswant Singh who has given very knowledgeable expression to the fact that India knows how to command and control its forces, you don' t have to worry about that. We are a responsible, democratic country, we can do it. And I applaud that, it gives me a great deal of confidence. But at the same time, I know what lies ahead if you want to put real substance behind that statement.

Could you tell us something about the foundation you have started?

In the fall of 1995 when the French resumed nuclear testing, I was personally dismayed at this - as someone who at the end of his career had the opportunity to begin to scale back nuclear dangers, to shrink the forces, to shrink the war plans, to take bo mbers off alert, to cancel modernisation programmes, and to see the START II Treaty signed, believing that it would be completely ratified. And then of course, the START II treaty languished on our side for three years, at which point events in Russia es sentially made it redundant. The U.S. still has the same nuclear weapons policy that they had in 1984.

So here we are, five years later, and not only has there not been any significant progress, but in many respects the momentum has stalled and in many cases it's reversing. I could not sit quietly and watch this happen. For me the defining moment was when I was asked to join the Canberra Commission. My personal position was sure to draw strong criticism, it would probably cost me most of my former friendships and would impose a great burden on my personal time and effort. But I made a commitment to speak out which I did in December of 1996 at the National Press Club. My objective then was to put the issue of abolition back on the agenda in a serious manner, in the hope that the novelty that a former commander of the nuclear programme campaigning for abo lition might rekindle interest, but more than that, for action on this.

The charter of the foundation I established in December 1998, called Second Chance, is to promote public education and awareness about the dangers posed by nuclear weapons. The second part of the charter is to sponsor activities I believe would be useful in reducing the dangers posed by nuclear weapons. There is no mission on abolition or elimination, the focus is on dangers because I think that's what matters now. If we get to zero, then I think that's terrific, but I think we're only going to get ther e by doing things in the interim that will reduce the interest and ultimately the numbers which matter a great deal less than the policies and the postures that drive those numbers.