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."