The Washington Post December 4,1996

Retired Nuclear Warrior Sounds Alarm on Weapons By R. Jeffrey Smith
Washington Post Staff Writer
12/04/96

OMAHA--Three years ago, Air Force Gen. George Lee Butler commanded a military headquarters on the outskirts of this city with the power to Propel the worm toward a nuclear conflict. At his direction, bombers laden with 2,880 warheads could have raced down runways and flown toward the former Soviet Union or anyplace else Washington targeted for ruin.

Today, Butler is alated to give a lunchtime speech in Washington in which he will make a dramatic departure from the views he publicly espoused as commander in chief of America's nuclear arsenal--the pinnacle of his 37-year career in military uniform. He is to describe U.S. nuclear policy as "fundamentally irrational" on grounds that' such arms pose a great threat to mankind.

Butler, who once personally approved thousands of targets for U.S. nuclear weapons, now advocates that Washington urgently pursue the elimination of such arms around the globe. He says taking such an extreme measure is the only Way to forestall a horrible nuclear accident and prevent warheads from falling into the hands of rogue states or terrorists.

Butler, who will be joined in making this plea by Andrew J. Goodpaster, a former supreme allied commander in Europe, has timed his speech to coincide roughly with the release on Thursday of a statement by 60 generals:and admirals around the world calling for additional nuclear arms cuts and the phased elimination of nuclear arms.

The joint statement was organized by Goodpaster, co-chair of the group that promotes U.S.- European relations, retired British Brig. Michael Harbottle and former senator Alan Cranston (Calif.). Signers include Gen. John R. Galvin, another former supreme allied commander in Europe; and Gen. Charles H. Horner, former commander of the US. Space Command and a key officer in the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

"Nuclear weapons are inherently dangerous, hugely expensive, militarily inefficient and morally indefensible," Butler says now. He acknowledges that this view is a kind of heresy for a former CINCSAC, or commander in chief of the Strategic Air Command-a job that often has gone to some of the country's most hawkish military leaders such as Gen. Curtis E. LeMay the model for Jack D. Ripper in "Dr. Strangeglove.

But, after having earned four stars in the Air Force and served from 1992 until his retirement in 1994 at SAC and earlier as a commander of several wings of B-52 bombers laden with-nuclear bombs and cruise missiles, Butler says he has studied an appalling array of accidents and incidents" involving such weapons. He also says he knows that even a single question would threaten millions with deadly radiation and, in a crisis, could readily expand to all out war.

Seated in his private business office atop a downtown building several miles from the SAC command post but close enough to be within the range of any wartime nuclear blast there, Butler says those who argue such arms are still needed in the aftermath of the Cold War are victims of the "intellectual smog" that justified the absurd pressures of having to decide in less than 30 minutes whether to order a nuclear retaliatory strike and wipe out an entire nation.

Butler, 57, a compact man who retains the lean look of a career military officer, says he has been pushed along in his personal journey from self-described nuclear warrior to abolitionist by various insights gleaned during three decades of work related to nuclear weapons.

Watching strategic aircraft struggle to take off in a simulated crisis at the split-second intervals demanded by war planners provoked early doubts in the 1970s about the feasibility of actually waging nuclear war according to such complex and detailed instruction.

Coming to SAC headquarters and finally reading the secret war plan in effect for the bulk of the Cold War, which ignored the radiation and fire created by nuclear blasts and called for raining dozens of warheads on Moscow alone amid thousands of overall detonations, helped convince him that Washington had lost touch with the reality of nuclear weapons" and the horrible consequences of a single blast.

Several visits to the former Soviet Union, including a private 1994 visit to a decrepit Russian naval base he had studied while planning a nuclear strike, persuaded him that "I really had been dealing with a caricature all those years" of a highly powerful and resilient foe. Instead, he said, he found "severe economic deterioration" and sites that hardly warranted a conventional attack, much less a nuclear one.

In the half-century of the nuclear era, Butler is one of the most prominent military officers to reverse ground on the merits of the weapon still widely viewed as central to U.S. military and diplomatic power.

A senior Pentagon official, who said he does not share all of Butler's views and did not want his name used because of the great sensitivity attached to this issue, called the former SAC commander "one of the brightest, most capable and thoughtful persons" he has known in the military. He also said he expects that Butler's comments " will certainly help to raise the level of the debate to the senior elite that makes decisions about such matters.

Although Butler's view is a distinctly minority one in military ranks a growing number of former officers and civilian defense experts in the United States and elsewhere have begun to embrace the cause of nuclear abolition in recent months.

The planned statement Thursday by a group that includes 36 Russian and American generals and admirals will call on the five declared nuclear powers and three undeclared powers to begin moving toward abolition by negotiating new treaties and removing nuclear warheads from missiles. Butler particularly favors the latter idea, which would have the effect of removing all missiles from alert status for the first time in 37 years.

Butler and several others say they decided to speak publicly about the perils of maintainiog nuclear arsenals partly out of frustration over the absence of any formal U.S. negotiatians with Russia on this subjed since President Clinton took office in 1993--a circumstance that they say stands in contrast with the nine years of START talks that yielded two treaties under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush.

Senior Clinton administration officials explain that they are awaiting ratification of the second START accord by the Russian Parliament,or Duma, before proceeding with new talks to reduce US and Russian strategic arsenals below the official level of 3~500 warheads mandatad by that accord in the year 2003. But they concede ratification by the Duma seems doubtful anytime soon.

Butler said he undertands that he is swimming against a tide of Public and official apathy about the risks of nuclear conflict now that the Cdd War is over, and more than 160 nations have formally agreed to ban an nuclear testing. But he said the urgency of acting quickly was particularly brought home to him by the bombing of the World Trade Center on Feb. 26, 1993.

He said he thought immediately about how much worse it might have been: "Analysis has Shown that not only could the van [used in the bombing] have contained a nuclear device, it could have done so very readily ... and a very large one, in which case it would simply have obliterated lower Manhattan in its entirety and wreaked enormous devastation over an area of 50 to 75 square miles."

One of Butler's early insights into the perils of waging nuclear war came in the late 1970s, when he was assigned to the 416th Bombardment Wing at Griffiss Air Force Base outside Rome, N.Y. There he was responsible for ensuriag that: several thousand nuclear warheads at the base could be dropped if necessary on a wide array of targets across the Soviet Union.

The plan for using the bombers, he said, was and is enormously complex. At Griffiss, it called for launching 18 airplanes filled with at least four nuclear bombs each at nine or 10 second intervals, even in the middle of a snowstorm if necessary to escape the blast effects of incoming warheads. Each pilot would then fly for at least five hours, descend to an altitude of several hundred feet and "penetrate at low level into a hostile Soviet Union over a route they've never seen."

The pilots would launch "all of these missiles and bombs at precise moments; even while subject to attack by fighters and surface-to-air missiles. And they would then get to their recovery base."

Butler said that while practicing for this mission at Griffiss and later at Mathers Air Force Base in California, he watched B 52s laden with warheads and fuel "on icy runways sliding out of control" and in one case saw a bomber careening back to earth after takeoff with the loss of all hands. "What I took away from this was that this is a heroic assumption about the timing....How do we know we'll have adequate time to escape to safety.

But Butler said he raised no questions then, knowing that "any commander worth his or her salt knows one thing and that's the mission, What are you here to do?

Eventually Butler was promoted to be the Air Force director of operations and later appointed director for strategic plans and policy at the Joint Staff, the office responsible for translating broad presidential guidance on nuclear targeting Buidance into general military instrtctions for the nuclear targeting staff in Omaha. During his tenure, he said, "there were at least a dozen studies done on the subject of a nuclear war ... having to do with some of the most arcane analytical calculations you can imagine."

The routine translation of horrific devastation as dry computation he witnessed thdn was Butler's introduction to what he now describes as the woefully inadequate grasp of the totality of the effects of major nuclear strikes" among many of those who made the field their profession.

Appointed to command SAC in January 1991, Butler took the unprecedented step of intruding into the domain of the Air Force captains and Navy lieutenants who prepare.the detailed plans for nuclear war and ordering a complete revision of the nuclear target list for the former Soviet Union and its former East European allies.

Reviewing the nuclear targets one-by-one, Butler was able to eliminate roughly three-quarters of those that existed in 1991, confining any future attack to Russian soil and designating just a few thousand remaining targets there; He also ordered that all U.S. strategic bombers be taken off aiert, vastly reducing the risks of a nuclear accident.

Today, however, after reflecting more on his experiences, Butler is angry at what he calls the persistent "terror-filled anesthesia" about nuclear arms. with "the luxury to step back mentally and think about the implications af having spent four trillion dollars and producing 70,000 nuclear weapons . . . I realize that the notion nuclear weapons bring security-the idea that somehow we were in charge, that somehow all of this was infallible and manageable amd we could make it work . . . is fatally flawed."