http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/31113-ex-chief-of-nuclear-forces-general-lee-butler-still-dismayed-by-deterrence-theory-and-missiles-on-hair-trigger-alert

Ex-Chief of Nuclear Forces Still Dismayed by Deterrence Theory, Missiles on Hair-Trigger Alert
Tuesday, 02 June 2015 00:00
By Robert Kazel, Nuclear Age Peace Foundation | Interview

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Few knew it, but for Butler that sense of abhorrence gradually began to encompass nuclear weapons in general, as he became privy to more secrets about them. After he retired from the Air Force in 1994 as head of the U.S. Strategic Command (where he had authority over land-based missiles, bombers, and nuclear submarines), he worked for a time as president of a Nebraska-based energy company. Then, his life transformed in a way that he could never have anticipated. The former Air Force career officer and decorated Vietnam War pilot, considered one of the most knowledgeable experts on nuclear weapons and strategy in the world, began talking like the most passionate of anti-nuclear activists. A fascinated media listened, all over the world.

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Today, Butler is 75, and he has never stopped believing nuclear arms to be an enormous danger and outrageously immoral. They permit imperfect leaders to play God, he says, and make it all too easy for the planet to be ruined for all future generations in a span of hours. He’s incredulous that scores of U.S. missiles are still kept on hair-trigger alert, poised to be launched in minutes. And he is more disillusioned than ever that defense strategists and politicians keep defending nuclear deterrence: a theory born in the 1950s that asserts nations can prevent nuclear war by keeping nuclear weapons ready for use in retaliation. Butler believed that once, fervently. But he now says deterrence probably never made much sense, and certainly is unbelievable in a world of unstable, unpredictable regional nuclear actors and terrorists who seek to actually use weapons of vast, destructive power.

Now Butler has penned his life story, a project he painstakingly worked on for many years after he and his wife, Dorene, left Omaha and moved to a gated community in Laguna Beach, Calif., in 2001. The self-published memoir, which he expects to be out this summer, recounts his boyhood in Georgia as part of an Army family and his 33-year military career starting with his graduation from the Air Force Academy in 1961. It explains in depth why he ultimately called for the total elimination of nuclear weapons, and discusses his disillusionment with government officials who, he says, have allowed shortsightedness, petty politics and bellicosity to obstruct the road to world nuclear disarmament.

Butler wants the autobiography, Uncommon Cause: A Life at Odds with Convention, to stand as his legacy. He’s hoping it will educate and inspire some of those who shape the world’s nuclear policies today.

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