Cold War’s End Leaves Danger of Nuclear War

Back in the days of the Bush administration, Gen. Lee Butler, commander of the Strategic Air Command, would once a month go through a practice phone conversation with the White House concerning the end of the world.

“Gen. Butler, what is your recommendation?” the Bush stand-in would ask upon receiving an alert from NORAD that the Soviets had launched a nuclear strike against the United States. Butler had to answer fast, because, in a real attack, the president would have had only 12 minutes to decide whether to launch thousands of nuclear missiles in retaliation.

“Use them or lose them” would be the refrain running through Butler’s brain, well-versed in elegant nuclear deterrence theories of ladders of escalation. “I had to say the words recommending the death warrant of tens of millions of people, of civilization--20,000 weapons on both sides exploding within 12 hours--knowing the planet can’t withstand that.”

It still can’t. Butler, a 33-year military veteran who rose to be director of strategic plans and policy for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is retired now, and the Soviet Union is but a memory. Yet what haunts him, and what occasioned his rare willingness to be interviewed, is that the Cold War’s end has increased, not decreased, the prospect of accidental nuclear war.

Twenty-thousand nuclear weapons left over from the Cold War still stand poised for launching, and the MAD doctrine that guided them is very much in force. Neither the U.S. nor Russia has abandoned nuclear war fighting as the cornerstone of their respective national defense policies. “We still target them with nuclear weapons on hair-trigger alert,” Butler observed. “The world truly has been transformed, but what has not been transformed is our thinking about it.”

Russia’s political and economic disintegration now threatens our security more by inadvertence than by design, prompting key Cold War military establishment veterans like Butler to sound the alarm:

“The Russian command and early warning system is in a state of great decline; about two-thirds of the satellites they relied on for early warning capability are inactive or failing. They’re experiencing false alarms now on almost a routine basis, and I shudder to think about the morale and discipline of their rocket forces. There are worrisome aspects to all of that. That’s why people like myself are so puzzled and dismayed that our government won’t even address the problem.”

Addressing the problem requires bold leadership on nuclear disarmament that’s been sadly lacking in the Clinton years. There have been some cosmetic arrangements with the Russians as to nuclear safety and targeting issues but no real follow-up on arms control measures aggressively pursued by George Bush. Give credit where due: Bush recognized that the end of the Cold War permitted--nay, mandated--that the U.S. set an example by reducing the size and lowering the alert status of its nuclear force.

As Butler recalls, “The single most important arms controls were George Bush’s unilateral measures back in 1991, which took all of the tactical nuclear weapons off the ships and brought many back from Europe, took the bombers off alert and accelerated the retirement of the Minuteman II force. And Mikhail Gorbachev followed suit. It’s ironic that today we have a Republican Congress that thwarts arms control progress, and yet it was a Republican administration that really moved the ball down the field.”

Clinton has never been very interested in nuclear disarmament, and these days seems bent on alarming the Russian leadership by expanding NATO’s membership and military role in Eastern Europe, including a NATO-led war against Russia’s neighbor, Yugoslavia. This has strengthened the hand of hard-line communists and nationalists who control the Duma, undermining chances for nuclear arms control progress. Those elements also point to Clinton’s endorsement of the harebrained effort to revive the “star wars” Strategic Defense Initiative as further evidence that the U.S. is not committed to arms control.

Boris Yeltsin has his flaws, but humiliating him and undermining more moderate forces in Russia is the path of disaster. In 1995, Yeltsin was awakened in the middle of the night because one branch of his crumbling military had failed to inform another of prior knowledge of a Norwegian rocket launch, which they confused with a U.S. Trident missile. Fortunately, this error was corrected before Yeltsin’s 12 minutes of decision-making passed. No wonder Butler is concerned.