Nuclear Arms Could Bring Apocalypse

By General Lee Butler

This week more than 100 former or present heads of state and other senior international civilian leaders have signed their names to a powerful statement of common concern regarding nuclear weapons and have endorsed a reasoned path towards abolition. They join their voices with 62 retired military leaders, including myself, who a year ago called for specific steps to reduce the nuclear threat and work toward eventual elimination of nuclear weapons.

I became engaged in the debate over nuclear weapons on the premise that my unique nuclear experience might help kindle greater antipathy for those horrific devices and the policies that justify their retention.

For many, nuclear weapons retain an aura of utility and legitimacy that justify their existence well into the future. This view, reflected in the recent modifications of US nuclear weapons policy, is at the core of my concern.

I was for years among the most avid keepers of the faith in nuclear weapons. My contemporaries and I lived through a terror-ridden epoch punctuated by crises whose resolution held hostage the saga of humankind. We were thrust into 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 suited to this scale of malevolence.

We believed that superior technology brought strategic advantage, that greater numbers meant stronger security and that the ends of containment justified any means. These beliefs intensified and prolonged an already acute ideological animosity. They spawned successive generations of new and more destructive nuclear devices and delivery systems. They incited primal emotions and set in motion forces of ungovernable scope and power. Today these enduring beliefs and fears perpetuate Cold War policies and practices that expose all mankind to unconscionable dangers.

I struggle constantly with the task of articulating my convictions without denigrating or diminishing the motives and sacrifice of countless colleagues. But I have come to a set of deeply unsettling judgements: Too many of us have failed to properly understand the risks and consequences of nuclear war.

The stakes of nuclear war engage not just the survival of the antagonists but the fate of mankind. The likely consequences of nuclear war have no politically, militarily or morally acceptable justification, and therefore the threat to use nuclear weapons is indefensible.

Nuclear weapons 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. They pray on democracies and totalitarian societies alike, shrinking the norms of civilized behavior and dimming the prospects for escaping the savagery so powerfully imprinted in out genes.

Deterrence, the simple prescription for adequate military preparedness in the lexicon of conventional warfare, suspended rational thinking in the nuclear age about the ultimate aim of national security: to ensure the survival of the nation. It disconnected planning from any sense of scientific or military reality.

Deterrence failed completely as a guide in setting rational limits on the size and composition of military forces, spurring an insatiable arms race with a reckless proliferation of the most destructive power ever unleashed, tailored for delivery by a vast array of vehicles to a stupefying array of targets.

Deterrence serves the ends of evil as well as those of noble intent. It holds guilty the innocent as well as the culpable. It is a gamble no mortal should pretend to make. It invokes death on a scale rivaling the power of the creator.

Sadly, the Cold War lives on in the minds of men who cannot let go the fears, the beliefs, and the enmities of the nuclear age. They cling to deterrence, clutch its tattered promise to their breast, shake it wistfully at bygone adversaries and balefully at new or imagined ones. They are gripped still by its awful willingness not simply to tempt the apocalypse but prepare its way.

To them I say we cannot at once keep sacred the miracle of existence and hold sacrosanct the capacity to destroy it. It is time to reassert the primacy of individual conscience, the voice of reason and the rightful interests of humanity.

General Lee Butler USAF (Retired), was the commander of the U.S. Strategic Air Command and commander of the U.S. Strategic Command.

Copyright © 1996. The Light Party.