The following dialogue between General Lee Butler, Commander-in-Chief of the US Strategic Command until 1994 and Richard Butler, former Executive Chairman of the Canberra Commission on the elimination of nuclear weapons was moderated by former Senator, Alan Cranston. General Lee Butler, with his experience and agonies over the risks of nuclear warfare and accidents, raised the flag for International Nuclear Disarmament both on moral and technical grounds. The dialogue was sponsored by the Nuclear Weapon Elimination Initiative during the 1998 State of the World Forum in San Francisco.

Lee Butler: When I retired from my position as the Commander-in-Chief of US Nuclear Forces in 1994, I did so actually with a fair sense of gratification and hope that, having escaped the Cold War period without a nuclear holocaust by some combination of skill, luck and divine intervention, mankind would have the wisdom to move on to a much brighter and more hopeful era. But that hope and that confidence began to erode pretty precipitously. As I watched the nuclear weapons establishment being to invent new reasons to use these things after the Soviet threat disappeared, when France reinitiated nuclear testing perhaps at the worst possible time with the comprehensive test ban treaty hanging in the balance I moved from dismay to alarm and finally outrage.

I had long since begun to entertain very deep reservations about this whole enterprise of nuclear weapons and what they portended, even while I was still on active duty, well before I became the Commander of Strategic Nuclear Forces of the United States. What I ultimately concluded is that I had to act on the voice of my conscience. As I went through this process of personal assessment and evaluation, it really forced me to cope to grips with some fundamental truths. And perhaps the most difficult of those was that we never truly understood that what was at stake was not the fate of just the antagonist, but that of all mankind. What I also concluded was that there was neither any military, nor political, nor moral justification, for shearing away entire societies. And that no mere mortal should be endowed with the authority to make those kinds of decisions. If there had been an attack underway from the Soviet Union and we had retaliated, what it would have meant was that in the space of about 12 hours, 20,000 multi-megaton warheads would have been exploded in the United States and the former Soviet Union. And by that decision we would have sealed the fate of the human race. My third responsibility was to design the nation's nuclear war plan with 12,500 targets. As I sat and reflected on those responsibilities and what they entailed, I came to grips with the personal and the professional, and most importantly, the moral and ethical consequences of being in that position. I finally decided that I could not sit in silent acquiescence to the perpetuation of policies and practices and the forced postures that carried this threat well beyond the cold war period which gave rise to it.

When I joined the Canberra Commission, by trembling flanks were immediately reinforced by a group of the finest people that I could possibly have been allied with. At one point Jacques Cousteau unilaterally joined, if I remember that correctly. It was a remarkable moment. For the time he was with us, he added an extraordinary note of moral authority to what we were doing. As I sat daily over a period of many months in the company of people like Joseph Rotblat, Jayantha Dhanapala, Richard Butler, Lord Michael Carver, Michel Rocard and so on, I was aware for the first time in my life of how many people had labored for so long to try and bring to the attention of people like myself that there was another dimension to what we were and what we stood for. The conclusion of that experience was that we unanimously endorsed what I think is today still the finest statement on nuclear weapons and why they must be abolished. It is enshrined in the first page of that document. And it is principally the work of Richard Butler, who at the end of the day when we all had pontificated, was left with the blank page. And while we managed to piece together a multi-page document, someone had to synthesize it and tell us what we really were trying to say.

Richard Butler: In the Canberra Commission on the Elimination of Nuclear Weapons, we had a whole spectrum of people. We had people who at one end of the spectrum had been weapons managers like the prime minister of France. Let's call them the hard people. On the other end of the spectrum we had people who had never managed that sort of stuff in their life. I'm proud to tell you one of them was an obstetrician/gynecologist and what he had done with his life was to bring into the world 2,200 babies. So we had a spread of people. But how do you make a realistic report coming from such a disparate group? How do I deal in this very specific way to get the document that Garreth Evans wanted? One that would change the world and above all get it by consensus, because we knew the value it would acquire if we all agreed to it. And we got there. There was no dissenting report or opinion. We had four meetings, one in Canberra, one in New York, one in Austria, and then the last one again in Canberra. And I remember a moment in the meeting in New York when the back of this thing was broken. We emerged there as a consensual group on the world's most important subject. Lee Butler told us something like what he's told you a bit tonight. He told us about the horror of nuclear weapons, the truth of them. And that truth is embodied in that first blank page. That page says these things. First, as long as nuclear weapons exist, they will be used, whether by accident or design. Second, any use of them will be a catastrophe. You see what I'm saying, is that these points were made real for us by the man who had his finger on the button. So we were able to agree about that. And thirdly, and I attach a profound importance to this, especially in the State of the World Forum because this has to do with the people of the world as against those who run the government. The third point was this, that if the people of the world fully understand those two facts-the inevitability of use, and the catastrophic effects-they will say to those who purport to speak for them in government that they don't want it. And any reason that you give us that says this is for your self-defense is not acceptable. We, the people, don't want it. There has been a degree of obfuscation in the nuclear age. That this is too complex for you to understand. Joseph Rotblat has spent his life (90 next week) explaining to the world that this is nonsense. This is not too complex to understand and it is too important to know that this stuff is not acceptable to humankind. Now, I believe that this conference is important because it is about people telling those who purport to represent them in what they want. I also believe that, Our Common Enterprise, will be flawed, and fail, unless it has as one of its centerpieces if not its foundation: the elimination of nuclear weapons.

Lee Butler: Let me continue on this same theme about the rights of peoples to speak and to be heard. I gave a speech at Stanford last night at the joint invitation of the Center for International Security and Arms Control and the School of Humanities. It was the first in a lecture series entitle, "Ethics and International Politics". And as I thought through the underlying meaning of that title, I suggested to my audience that the issue before mankind is: whether the dictates of state sovereignty and supreme national interest should be allowed to impose arbitrary limits on the capacity of peoples to themselves elevate the bar of decent civilized behavior, and whether we should not conversely prohibit on the part of states that which is destructive and calls into question the welfare of the planetary family. What really is at stake here is not just nuclear weapons, but in the broader issue of how conflicts will be resolved, I thin it is the battle for the soul of mankind. My quarrel with nuclear weapons is that if you subscribe to the most fundamental of human values as they are enshrined in our democratic document, you cannot at the same time hold sacred the mystery of life and sacrosanct the capacity to destroy it utterly. My quarrel is that we cannot enshrine in perpetuity nuclear weapons as the ultimate arbiter of human conflict.

As I saw the cold war ending it was for me, the most astonishing turn of events I could ever have imagined since it gave us the gift of time. It gave us the extraordinary and unexpected opportunity to rethink and reset the rules as to how nations and peoples should deal with each other. I felt that in my position, my singular responsibility was to do everything in my power and authority to begin to reduce the nuclear component of the cold war period as rapidly as possible. What I had imagined would happen is that, hard upon the heels of that, the international community would then set about doing what it had hoped to do, at least during two previous points in the century, and that is to give international organizations the authority to begin to impose the rule of law according to the dictates of a commonly accepted code of decent civilized behavior. And so for me it is dismaying to see this priceless but perishable opportunity slipping away from us. Not just the fact that we have the absurd spectacle of an arms control agreement, whose core objective of 3500 operational weapons ten years from now, is caught up in sort of a macho sovereign standoff, but that number is beyond the reach today of a Russia which is in economic chaos and whose nuclear forces are in serious decline. I was stunned by the decision of my government and the endorsement by its NATO partners to expand that organization in the aftermath of the cold war. To me, that was one of the greatest strategic mistakes of this century, because what we had an opportunity to do was to restructure the rules of European security. This was the politics of atonement, not the work of visionary statesmen. What we did was to render insecure an already fearful Russian state. I think that this generation of political elites in the nuclear states of the western world, in Beijing and in Moscow run the risk of the historical indictment that they have proved unworthy of their age. If they fail to reduce the most acute risks that we ever mounted against our own survival and if they fail to exploit the opportunities that were won at such a price and at such great risk, they deserve the indictment of history.

Richard Butler: Never forget the enormity of what is at issue here. Just imagine if nuclear weapons had been used, say during the Cuban missile crisis, when the radioactive dust had settled and the bodies had been counted, people would have said: "Why in the name of God didn't any of you people tell us about this. That this was the degree of carnage that is involved. You never told us the truth about this." Now we don't have to suffer that. We actually do know the truth, partly through people like Lee Butler, and what we have got to do is fix it rather than count the bodies. Now, two things must be done. One is the role that war is seen to play in society and the other, quite specifically, is the concept that weapons will give you victory. Now, as far as war is concerned there is a project taking place at this Forum that has to do with the elimination of war as an instrument of state policy. It strongly deserves support. For too long have we lived with the independent nation state as the main actor in international relations as against the people.

And for too long have we lived with the notion of state sovereignty, under which the only legitimate way for the state to pursue their interests is to actually destroy other people; war is viewed as a legitimate instrument of state policy. This is something that I truly believe the peoples of the world on the whole don't support, don't want; it's a big task, but it's something that a meeting like this has to address. I am not questioning the legitimate aspirations of the state provided it is sufficiently democratic. There are multifarious ways to achieve the interests of the people other than by killing more people. Secondly, one of the things that shores up the traditional notion of war as an instrument of state policy is something that is highly technical; and it is this business of the role of weapons. There's a deep seated belief, held over many years, that more weapons, more powerful weapons, bigger weapons, just more of them with a capital M, will get you victory. It's actually not true. I won't bore you with the history of failure of strategic bombing. We have already talked about the ludicrousness of nuclear weapons. Read the Canberra Commission report. You know one of the real truths about nuclear weapons, they don't win you anything. But the main point that I would like to make is this: any attempt to acquire more and better weapons simply produces in your adversary the will to do the same. And so you have arms races, etc. The argument that in the field of weapons, more is better, that more brings you victory is ephemeral, transitory and nonsense. The history of the twentieth century from the Treaty of Versailles through the rearmament of Germany to the victory over the fascists in the Second World War and then to the unleashing of the nuclear arms race is actually proof of the truth of what I'm saying: that more weapons simply begets an arms race. So what we have to address is state sovereignty and the de-legitimization of war as an instrument of the exercise of that sovereignty.

Lee Butler: Let me see if I can give you the strategic context in which I thought about these issues just prior to taking command of the Strategic Forces, when I was still a three star director of Strategic Plans and Policy for Bill Crow and then Colin Powell. Colin Powell took office in October of 1989. That was of course the beginning of the watershed. The Berlin Wall came down and we began to see the paradigm shatter. Colin Powell and I had a long series of conversations about what that implied for the armed forces of the United States. What was clear is that a model of our security establishment had just been broken for all time; and that was the prospect of global war with the Soviet Union.

I had one of life's defining moments in Colin Powell's office. Shortly after he came in, the phone rang, he called me down. He said, "Lee, just kind of an initial hello. You and I are going to be doing a lot of work together. You are my strategic planner and policy-maker. I have only got about five minutes," he said, "why don't you give me your world view and then we will talk more later." As it turned out, I had actually spent some considerable time in the preceding two years thinking about how one would answer that kind of question. I said, "I think there are two principal forces running through our universe and they date back about 500 years and they have to do with the origins of the nation-state system. Number one is a very destructive force. It's what I call the continuing fractionalization of mankind into highly ethnocentric entities seeking self-determination within self-defined borders, and we are about to reap that whirlwind with the end of the cold war. Second, is what I call the compelling global quest for a higher order of economic well-being but in a world where physical and intellectual resources are widely and unevenly distributed. Number one, based on my recent back and forth trips to the Soviet Union, I see an empire on the verge of collapse. I don't know when it's going to come about, but my bet is it's going to happen within the next two years which means it is going to be on my watch and yours, and we are going to have to deal with it."

He said, "Go on."

I said, "The other is the prospect of a very real chance to rewrite European security through the integration of its disparate and historically warring powers."

He said, "OK, next."

I said, "The major danger of nuclear holocaust is in the Middle East and on the Korean peninsula because that is where it presents itself most dramatically, that is if we and the Soviet Union can get ourselves out of the box we have been in for 40 years. OK, what's next. To deal with the cauldron of misery that affects about two-thirds of the people on this earth and which will ultimately become for them a motivation to simply get even, and take as many of us out with them as they can as their miserable life comes to an end."

He said, "OK, I want you to take two weeks and come back to me with a proposal on how we restructure the armed forces of the United States. Give me their new mission statements, tell me what the threats are, what new structures, equipment training present themselves, and I will worry about the implementation. "

And I said, "I wouldn't trade jobs with you for the world." I came back in two weeks and I gave him my proposal which was, first, to cut the armed forces of the United States by one-third. It was actually 40 percent. He backed it off to a third because he understood political realities. Secondly, we concluded that on the list of priorities, first and foremost was to scale back nuclear dangers. And that's why a year and a half later he put a fourth star on my shoulders and sent me to strategic air command and said call me in six months and tell me what we ought to do with it. And I called him in six months and said, I think we ought to stand it down. And one year later we did. So what I am suggesting to you, coming back to my opening comment, is that I think that this present generation of leaders run the very grave risk of being indicted for not being worthy of the opportunities and responsibilities of their age; I saw at the outset of this period men and women of great stature who did have vision and who did not form their policies by polling, but on the basis of principle. What I see is, that it settles very directly on the shoulders of all of us here. It becomes our time to state the manifesto. And to rewrite the moral underpinnings of what was the nuclear age. And decide what kind of world we are going to bequeath to our children and our grandchildren.

Richard Butler: I have walked through the museums of Europe many times and seen ancient weapon systems on the walls: helmets and crossbows and suits of armor and so on; you know they worked in some ways up to a point, but, still a lot of people got killed. But today, with the costs and the technologies involved in modern weapon systems, we have got a crisis, for we believe that these high tech weapons, like playing arcade video games, will solve our problems without any body bags. This belief is rising. But on the other hand, there is no proven track record that says that this is true, and even if it proves true, it will only be temporary. You have to understand that the history of the use of ever more sophisticated weapon systems is that in the end they don't actually solve the problem. The original source of the argument was human, cultural and ethnic, and they are the things that we have to address. And we have to try to convince those who are running for office and those whom they employ that we no longer believe in the weapons-solve-the-problem fix. And there is no way that war as an instrument of state policy can solve remotely the things that truly afflict people today. The major threats to global security have irreducibly one thing in common: they are non-military, they are poverty, they are in the environment, in narcotics, in HIV/AIDS, and in some human rights' areas. There are things afoot in the world that are far more threatening to the security, and I define security in the Rooseveltian way of the tenure of life and some other freedoms. They cross national boundaries and are not controllable by weapons. They are themselves non-military and they are devastating. Now those are the major threats to global security. And for the state to say, we will fix this by the exercise of traditional military power is nonsense.

We have got to break the phony connection between sovereignty and the waging of war. It doesn't address security for anyone and we have got to break the manifestly phony connection between the idea that more weapons brings more certain victory. And fundamentally underneath all this, the paradigm case as we end the twentieth century is that we have to tell those who purport to speak for us that we don't want their nuclear weapons. At all.

Lee Butler: I am going to summarize my beliefs and my values and my convictions in the words of a man who is one of my professional heroes and who I have often quoted on this score. General Omar Bradley made these comments in 1948 as he summarized what he had learned in his life as a warrior and at the dawn of the nuclear age. He said, "We live in a world that has achieved brilliance without wisdom and power without conscience. We live in an age of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We have unlocked the mystery of the atom and forgotten the Sermon on the Mount. We know more about dying than we know about living. More about killing than sustaining life. That cannot be the legacy that we leave to our children. And it is our responsibility to ensure that it is not."