The Pathology of Weapons of War
"The world establishment is firmly entrenched in the
business of war: The permanent Members of the Security council of the
United Nations were together responsible for 81% of world arms exports
from 1996 - 2000. Indeed, the world leaders who express deep frustration
at the 'irresponsibility' of anti-globalisation protesters lead the
countries that make the most money in this terrible trade. The G8 countries
sold 87% of the total supply of arms exported in the entire world. and
the US share alone has reached almost 50% of this figure. As much as
68% of American arms manufacture goes to developing countries." Amartya
Sen (Published in Resurgence Magazine May/June 2003)
"The divine and the demonic are very close together;
only a thin line separates them/us. We who are indeed capable of divinity
are also capable of the demonic. And the deepest of all demonic activity
is the use of our divine imaginations to invent destruction."
Matthew
Fox, Original Blessing
We have made great progress in the last hundred years
in the realm of science and technology, in the treatment of disease
and the prolongation of our lives. But at the same time, we stand at
the brink of an abyss into which we may be plunged through our enslavement
to military technology. Weapons that were unimaginable a hundred years
ago can now obliterate all life on earth, sending us back to the beginning
of evolution. The drive for omnipotent power - to reach a position of
"full spectrum dominance" (a phrase used by the Pentagon) - now threatens
the planet and the life it sustains. However, it seems that the sheer
madness of the escalation of the power to destroy passes unnoticed by
the leaders of governments.
Fortunately,
the very urgency of the danger is activating an initiative on the part
of millions of people in many different countries to challenge their
governments' addiction to war and weapons, and to call them to account
for initiating wars that are embarked on in the name of self-defence,
freedom and democracy but leave a legacy of further violence and a lethal
trail of human suffering in their wake.
The theme of this website
is that each of us is an expression of a vast sea or field of consciousness
- invisible, and as yet barely recognised by us. We are part of a great
living web of life. We cannot achieve a position of dominance in relation
to nature, life or each other. The belief that we can continue indefinitely
to act as if nations were autonomous units, developing the power to
destroy life on a colossal scale without our demonic inventions returning
to us in the form of an 'enemy', armed with precisely the weapons we
have developed for our own protection, is not only an illusion but a
pathology - a madness. But it is a madness that is very difficult to
see because the drive for omnipotence and dominance is an unconscious
behaviour pattern - that is deeply rooted in the pre-human layers (limbic
brain) of the modern psyche Now we are threatened with destruction by
weapons that may fall into the hands of individuals who will spare no
effort to encompass the destruction of a hated enemy. (see The Struggle
for Primacy and Dominance and the Roots of War under the section
Comment on the Home page; also seminar 9 - the Dragon).
For over fifty
years the concentration on the development of these weapons - first
and foremost by the United States and the Soviet Union, but also the
United Kingdom, France, China, Israel, India, Pakistan, North Korea
and now Iran - has brought into being the very situation that was most
feared - the power of a nation, group, or disturbed individual to destroy
life on an apocalyptic scale. The general public is not aware that at
the present time 16 states either possess, are developing or are attempting
to acquire nuclear weapons. 20 states possess, are attempting to acquire
or are preparing a system capable of using biological weapons. 26 states
are in a similar position with regard to chemical weapons.
What has been hidden
from the public over the last fifty years about the manufacture and
stockpiling of biological and chemical weapons is now being revealed
and suggests a scenario more horrifying even than that offered by nuclear
weapons. (1) The propensities for evil in the
human imagination exceed most people's grasp. Few can grasp the enormity
of the fact that scientists and military personnel are capable, whether
in the interests of self-defence or with the intention of destroying
a feared enemy, of inventing and developing weapons which could unleash
an irreversible catastrophe on the world. We did not witness the dropping
of the atomic bombs on the civilian population of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
in the way that we witnessed the horrific attack on the twin towers
in New York. Yet even as we discovered what had happened in Japan, we
were barely able to take in the obscenity of that act, justified at
the time as necessary to shorten the war with Japan. Now we are faced
with the possibility of more such atrocities but on a vastly increased
scale, not only through the destructive power of nuclear weapons, but
of biological, chemical and genetically targeted ones as well.
We, the inhabitants
of the planet, are not fully aware of the dangers of the continued development
of nuclear, biological and other weapons because weapons are selected
and funds (derived from the taxes we pay) committed to their development
by governments and military experts without our knowledge. We do not
know that these weapons are in existence until there is mention of their
being used against us or until, (as in Iraq's use of chemical weapons
against the Kurds or the use of depleted uranium by the United States
and Britain in Iraq and Afghanistan), we hear of the victims of such
weapons, which victims include members of our armed forces. Nor have
most people the time to focus on these crucially important issues and
the technological expertise or the power to challenge their governments.
What makes us,
as a species, capable of engendering such evil and worse, incapable
of recognising and acknowledging that it is evil? Why are we still so
unconscious? What is the compulsion that drives us to imagine, invent
and develop ever more demonic weapons of destruction? The arrow, the
battleaxe, the sword and the gun once used in hand-to-hand fighting
have been replaced by nuclear bombs, missiles tipped with deadly depleted
uranium, cluster-bombs that act like land mines, biological and chemical
weapons - even the technology to eliminate specific ethnic groups and,
incredibly, to interfere with the upper layers of the atmosphere or
the magnetic field of the earth (2) - all weapons
of destruction which can be targeted at the 'enemy' without involving
loss of life on 'our side'. Every twenty minutes someone is either killed
or maimed by a land mine somewhere in the world. We rarely hear mention
of the babies and children maimed and deformed by depleted uranium.
It is probable
that we are contributing to the increase of aggression by the very fact
of constantly preparing for war. The military obsession with the technology
of war is the factor that makes its occurrence inevitable. Once the
technology is imagined and brought into being, it is almost impossible
to contain. It has to be "tried out" in action. We have reached
the point where the continued anticipation of the need to defend ourselves
against future enemies and the drive to invent ever more sophisticated
weapons has become self-defeating. The leaders of nations and the military
branch of governments are currently living in a mind-set that is out
of date in relation to the needs of the planet and now threatens our
very survival as a species.
Survival instincts
married to the imaginative capacity for evil in the human psyche bring
evil into being in the form of weapons of destruction and the suffering
their use engenders. The enemy is now Hitler, now Stalin, now Saddam
Hussein, now Osama bin Laden and, most recently, Iran and North Korea.
There will always be a greater, more powerful enemy as long as we continue
to produce ever more lethal weapons and as long as we continue to demonise
our enemies as being the sole perpetrators of evil. The real enemy hidden
in the shadow aspect of our own nature is our inability to see the enormity
of what we are prepared to do to life and to each other in continuing
down this path.
Three-quarters
of all scientists work for industry or the military. Colossal sums of
money are spent every year on the production of weapons - over $1 trillion
on military expenditure world wide. Colossal sums of money are made
through the sale of arms. We produce arms and sell them to countries
which may be at war with their neighbours, yet may eventually involve
members of our armed forces as victims of those same weapons. War and
weapons of war cause devastation, pollute earth and water, create millions
of destitute refugees (currently over 50 million) who are deprived of
their homes and livelihoods. Land mines destroy the lives and limbs
of thousands of children yet ever more continue to be laid. All this
should arouse outrage but the majority of the world's population has
only a minimal grasp of what is being done or of how it might affect
them. Dr. Rosalie Bertell, in her book, Planet Earth, the Latest
Weapon of War, writes,
Wars result in immediate deaths and destruction, but
the environmental consequences can last hundreds, often thousands of
years. And it is not just war itself that undermines our life support
system, but also the research and development, military exercises and
general preparation for battle that are carried out on a daily basis
in most parts of the world. The majority of this pre-war activity takes
place without the benefit of civilian scrutiny and therefore we are
unaware of some of what is being done to our environment in the name
of 'security'. (3)
After
the Second World War, the expertise to develop nuclear, biological and
chemical weapons spread from the United States and the Soviet Union
all over the world (see below). Anthrax, one of the most deadly of these
weapons, was recognised as "a winner" because it can wipe out the population
of an entire city which will remain contaminated for generations. Iraq,
Iran, North Korea, the United Kingdom, China, India and Pakistan have
access to the expertise needed to make biological, chemical and nuclear
weapons. Via Pakistan's nuclear expertise and scientists supportive
of his cause, Osama bin Laden and his followers have access to nuclear
material and the power to make some kind of bomb - perhaps a 'dirty'
bomb combining nuclear waste and conventional explosives, as well as
biological and chemical weapons. Pakistan's "father of the bomb," the
scientist Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan, has now sold the technology for developing
it to Libya, Iran and North Korea (2004).
The facts given
here can only give rise to the utmost revulsion that we - whether ourselves
or an 'enemy' - can conceive of treating human beings in this way in
the interests of our own self-defence or in the service of a religious
ideology. There is hardly a country that is exempt from this catalogue
of evil since each hurries to equip itself with the latest technology
of war insofar as it has the financial means to do so. There is another
aspect to this addiction: we could, for far less than is currently being
spent on weapons and the War on Terrorism, eliminate hunger in the world
and ensure that everyone was provided with the basic necessities of
life. Why are we willing to spend so much more on weapons and war than
on helping people to survive?
What fissure
exists in the mind of a scientist working on these weapons or an individual
giving the order to produce and use them that their dedication to their
work, their ideology or their military agenda overrides the capacity
for empathy with other human beings? What fissure exists in the mind
of each one of us who accepts the furtherance and use of this technology
because of the protection it seems to offer us or because we don't know
what else to do. We are, in effect, by complicity, potential murderers
on a massive scale. We may name this loyalty to a particular national
group or a particular religion but what of a deeper loyalty to life
that has brought us into being, or the possibility of life for future
generations and for the planet itself?
What can be done?
Since our present path is leading us to catastrophe, we have surely
to look for another way. It seems almost certain that the insistence
on the need for a new vision will come from individuals. Governments
and politicians may be too locked into the struggle for power to heed
the danger that people can clearly see. It is time that the production
and proposed use of these weapons is named a crime against humanity
as the Club of Budapest has done www.clubofbudapest.com.
If enough individuals can find the foresight and greatness of spirit
to renounce these weapons, they will eventually break the negative chain
of cause and effect and help to dismantle the illusion that evil can
be eradicated in an enemy before it is recognised and renounced in ourselves.
A
letter to the Times (17/2/04) from the distinguished scientist, Dr.
Joseph Rotblat (President Emeritus of the Pugwash Conferences on Science
and World Affairs) is worth quoting here (extract) because he has worked
tirelessly for just such an outcome.:
"Dr. Mohamed El Baradei, the Director-General of
the International Atomic Energy Agence (IAEA) hit the nail on the head
when he pointed out that the onus is on the established nuclear powers
to lead the way in nuclear disarmament. As long as some states, including
the most powerful ones, believe that their security demands the possession
of nuclear weapons, how can we deny such security to other states which
consider themselves to be vulnerable?...The elimination of nuclear weapons,
and the establishment of a safeguard regime to prevent the clandestine
acquisition of nuclear weapons, present extremely difficult problems,
but they will never be solved unless an effort is made to tackle them.
The body set up to do this, the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva,
is prevented from doing its job by the continued refusal by the nuclear
powers to put it on its agenda. Unless this issue is given high priority
it is inevitable that other nations will seek security in keeping or
acquiring nuclear weapons and eventually terrorist groups too will acquire
nuclear weapons."
©Anne Baring
1. see BBC
Documentary July 13th and 14th, and November 19th, 1998; Channel Four
Documentary October 29th, 2001, UK.
2. Rosalie Bertell, Planet
Earth, the Latest Weapon of War, The Women's Press, London, 2000.
See review under Booklist.
3. ibid, p. 2.
The following data on biological weapons and warfare have been
gathered from television documentaries. The information is drawn from
the notes I made at the time. A more complete account is given in a
recently published book called Germs: Biological Weapons and America's
Secret War (see notes).
Biological weapons were developed by Japan in its war with China prior
to the Second World War. (4) The Japanese military
were trying to find efficient ways to kill people by methods other than
conventional weapons. Biological weapons seemed a cheap and lethal weapon.
Doctors and scientists were ordered to find ways of transforming disease
into weapons. The Japanese developed a bomb that could carry anthrax
and bubonic plague. They released plague infected fleas over the city
of Ningpo in 1940. 500 people died and many more were infected. Only
one survivor is alive today.
Bacteria
were planted in the water supplies and wells of Chinese villages.
People
were deliberately infected with the bacteria and those showing signs
of illness were taken away and made unconscious in order to take samples
of the infection from their bodies. They were then killed.
These
methods were practised on Chinese prisoners taken to unit 731 at a town
called Pingfan who never came out of it alive. If Japanese scientists
or guards objected, they were beaten or shot…"You had to obey," "We
feared punishment" were the words of one guard who survived. 3000 Chinese
prisoners died at the hands of Japanese doctors. They chloroformed the
prisoner, then drained the blood from his body and squeezed it to extract
every drop of blood that carried the infective agent.
Bacteria were sprayed from the air over Chinese prisoners.
The
Japanese tried to destroy all evidence of the biological experiment.
At the end of the war the United States should have put the Japanese
scientists and doctors on trial because Pingfan was known about. But
it feared that the Soviet Union would get hold of the information. A
deal was made with the Japanese that Japan would hand over all its information
on biological weapons in return for not being tried for war crimes in
this domain.
In 1942 the United States began to develop biological weapons that could
attack humans, plants and animals and tested these in the Nevada desert
and in the South Pacific. In addition it developed the means to kill
by means of radiation (spraying over large areas the radio-active by-products
from the manufacture of plutonium) (5) Obviously
these weapons were intended for use on an unsuspecting civilian population.
The American public did not begin to find out about the existence of
these weapons until the time of the Vietnam War. The British were also
developing and testing biological weapons at Porton Down because they
feared the Germans were developing them.
In 1969 the United States (at the suggestion of the then President,
Richard Nixon), renounced the use of them.
In 1972, 104 nations signed an agreement to renounce the use of biological
weapons.
However, the Soviet Union continued secretly to develop them in remote
areas like Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. In 1982 a factory was built in
Kazakhstan for the production of biological weapons. 800 scientists
and technicians worked here at the peak of its production. Scientists
developed the use of anthrax and plague as weapons and worked on a project
which included combining viruses like smallpox and ebola to create a
"doomsday virus" which could be loaded into warheads. Enough of these
weapons were produced to kill everyone on the planet nine times over.
(6) They were also working on the genetic engineering
of viruses and testing substances on human genes in order to develop
genetic weapons. It is clear that certain scientists became fascinated
and indeed, intoxicated by their power to invent new ways of destroying
human beings. With the collapse of the Soviet Union this technology
became dangerously available to other nations that were willing to pay
huge sums of money to the now impoverished scientists and technicians
to obtain it.
4. The atrocities in Pingfan are not the only ones that
took place during this war. Iris Chang, an American woman of Chinese
descent, investigated and chronicled the details of the barbaric acts
inflicted by Japanese troops on the Chinese population of Nanking in
1937. Her controversial book was published in 1997. Deeply affected
by the horror of what she was describing, she was hospitalised for depression.
On November 9th, 2004, when she was in the midst of working on another
book on the Bataan Death March, she committed suicide.
5. Professor M.S. Blackett, Military and Political
Consequences of Atomic Energy, Blackwell Press, 1948.
6. Germs: Biological Weapons and America's Secret War by Judith Miller,
Stephen Engelberg and William J. Broad. Publisher: Simon and Schuster,
New York, 2001.
- -----
------ 
A WAKE UP CALL - General
Lee Butler
The public seems to have forgotten about the dangers
of nuclear weapons now that the Cold War is over. But many high-ranking
military officers are sufficiently alarmed about the possibility of
their accidental use to urge abolishing all nuclear weapons, including
those in the U.S. arsenal.
----- One Admiral, Noel Gayler, former
U.S. Commander in Chief, Pacific Command, puts it this way: "Does nuclear
disarmament imperil our security? No, it enhances it."
----- Admiral Eugene Carroll, former director
of U.S. military operations for all U.S. forces in Europe and the Middle
East, states: "Nuclear weapons are the sole military source of our national
insecurity. We, and the whole world, would be much safer if nuclear
weapons were abolished."
Recently, a full-page ad in The New York Times and other
major newspapers called for the U.S. to take the lead in ridding the
world of all nuclear weapons. Among those who signed the ad: Admiral
Stansfield Turner, former Director of Central Intelligence and Commander-in-Chief,
Allied Southern Forces, Europe; General Andrew Goodpaster, former Supreme
Allied Commander, Europe; Admiral William J. Crowe, Jr., former Chairman,
Joint Chiefs of Staff; General Charles Horner, former Commander, Coalition
Air Forces, Desert Storm; Admiral William A. Owens, former Vice-Chair,
Joint Chiefs of Staff. The ad calls for immediately de-alerting the
thousands of land- and sea-based missiles now ready to launch in minutes,
and deeply reducing nuclear stockpiles.
One of the first high-ranking military officers to speak
out for abolishing nuclear weapons was General Lee Butler, who, as Commander-in-Chief
of United States Strategic Air Command, had planning and operational
responsibilities for all of America's strategic nuclear forces. Butler
retired from the military in 1994, fully intending not to comment publicly
on national security matters. But two and a half years later, he could
no longer stay quiet about "my deepening dismay as a citizen of this
planet."
----- In Waging Peace Worldwide,
the journal of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, Butler tells about
his experiences in the military and what led him to devote his life
toward the elimination of nuclear weapons.
-----I get a lot of questions
like, "If you had been President Truman, would you have made the decision
to drop atom bombs on Japan?" "Was this a revelation, was it an epiphany,
what was the catalyst for your change of view?" The questions go to
the issue of when I had the responsibilities as the commander of the
nuclear forces, as a nuclear advisor to the President and, perhaps most
particularly, as the person who devised the nuclear war plan…
----- The evolution of my views was not
an epiphany, not some road to Damascus revelation. From the very outset,
the nuclear arena was superimposed with a blanket of secrecy that was
virtually impenetrable. Access to the knowledge and access to the levers
of power that control this arena was reserved to a very small number
of people throughout its history in this country and in the Soviet Union.
----- I was commissioned as a lieutenant
in June 1961. I became the commander of the nuclear forces of the United
States in January 1991, almost 30 years later to the month. Until the
day I assumed those responsibilities, I had never been given access
to the nuclear war plan of the United States in its entirety, even though
in Washington I had policy responsibilities that directed the plans.
I knew nothing about the submarine operations of the strategic nuclear
forces of the United States, and I had no idea how the decision process
took place that would lead to a command from the President of the United
States to unleash nuclear war and retaliation for a presumed strike.
Deepening Doubts
Up to that point I had developed a series of reservations and doubts
that progressively deepened. I had no basis for understanding whether
these concerns were based on lack of information and insight or whether
they were rooted in the reality of bureaucratic processes run amuck
by the intrusion of the self-serving profit interests of the military-industrial
complex, by the collision of cultures and turf in the Pentagon for budget
dollars, or simply by the towering forces of alienation and isolation
that grew out of the mutual demonization between the U.S. and the Soviet
Union over a period of 45 years. I just didn't know.
----- Beginning in early 1991, I went through
a process that very quickly accelerated and confirmed my worst fears
and my worst concerns. What we had done in this country, what I believe
happened in the Soviet Union, and what I think will inevitably happen
in any country that makes the fateful decision to become a nuclear power-to
acquire the capability to build and employ nuclear weapons-is this:
the creation of gargantuan agencies with mammoth appetites and a sense
of infallibility that consume infinite resources in pursuit of a messianic
vision of a demonization.
A Chilling Ballet
In those responsibilities of commander of the forces responsible for
the day-to-day operational safety, security, and preparation to employ
those weapons, I was increasingly appalled by the complexity of this
ballet of hundreds of thousands of people managing, manipulating, controlling,
and maintaining tens of thousands of warheads and extremely complex
systems that flew through the air, were buried in the bowels of the
land, or patrolled beneath the seas of the world.
----- The capacity for human error, human
failure, mechanical failure, misunderstanding, was virtually infinite.
I have seen nuclear airplanes crash under circumstances that were designed
to replicate-but were inevitably far less stressful than-the actual
condition of nuclear war. I have seen human error lead to the explosion
of missiles in their silos. I have read the circumstances of submarines
going to the bottom of the ocean laden with nuclear missiles and warheads
because of failures, mechanical flaws, and human error. I read that
entire history, and when I came away from it-because I was never given
access to it before-I was chilled. I was chilled to the depth of my
strategic soul.
----- Secondly, consider my responsibilities
as a nuclear advisor. Every month of my life as a commander of the nuclear
forces, I went through an exercise called the Missile Threat Conference.
It would come at any moment of the day or night. For three years I was
required to be within three rings of my telephone so that I could answer
a call from the White House to advise the President on how to respond
to nuclear attack. The question that would be put to me in these conferences,
and as it would be in the event, was "General Butler, I have been advised
by the Commander-in-Chief of the North American Air Defense Command
that the nation is under nuclear attack. It has been characterized thusly.
What is your recommendation with regard to the nature of our reply?"
----- That was my responsibility, and about
half the time that call came in the middle of the night as Dorene and
I lay in our bedroom. I had to be prepared to advise the President to
sign the death warrant of 250 million people living in the Soviet Union.
I felt that responsibility to the depth of my soul, and I never learned
to reconcile my belief systems with it. Never.
----- My third responsibility was to devise
the nuclear war plan of the United States. When I became the Director
of Strategic Target Planning-another hat that I wore as the Commander
of the Nuclear Forces-I went down to my targeting room, many floors
beneath the surface. I told my planners that we were going to get to
know each other very well because I wanted to understand the plan in
its entirety. I think this story is the most graphic illustration of
the evolution of my views and my concerns and, ultimately, my convictions.
When I began to delve into that war plan, I was absolutely horrified
to learn that it encompassed 12,500 targets. I made the personal commitment-because
I saw it as absolutely integral to my responsibilities and the consequences
of that targeting-to examine every single one of them in great detail.
Ending the Madness
It took me three years to complete this analysis but only three months
to be convinced that it was the most grotesque and irresponsible war
plan ever devised by man, with the possible exception of its counterpart
in the Soviet Union, which in truth probably mirrored it exactly. Because
what that plan implied was, among other things, in the event of nuclear
war between two nations, in the space of about 16 hours 20,000 thermonuclear
warheads would be exploded on the face of our planet, signing the death
warrant not just for 250 million Soviets, but for mankind in its entirety.
----- The second thing that I began to
grasp was that neither in the Soviet Union nor in the United States
did any of us ever understand those consequences, because the calculation
as to the military effectiveness of that attack was based on only one
criterion, and that was blast damage. It did not take into account fire;
it did not take into account radiation. Can you imagine that? We never
understood, probably didn't care about, and certainly would not have
been able to calculate with any precision, the holistic effects of 20,000
nuclear weapons exploding virtually simultaneously on the face of the
earth.
----- That was the straw that tilted my
conviction with regard to the prospects of nuclear war, and ultimately
to an unavoidable responsibility to end this. To end it! And by the
grace of God I came to that awareness and I inherited my responsibilities
at the very moment the Cold War was ending and, therefore, I had the
opportunity to end the madness.
----- So in those three years I did what
I could to cancel all of the strategic nuclear modernization programs
in my jurisdiction, which totaled $40 billion. I canceled every single
one of them. I recommended to the President that we take bombers off
nuclear alert for the first time in 30 years, and we did. I recommended
that we accelerate the retirement of all systems designed to be terminated
in present and future arms control agreements, and we did. We accelerated
the retirement of the Minuteman II force.
----- We shrank the nuclear warplanes of
the United States by 75 percent. By the time I left my responsibilities,
those 12,500 targets had been reduced to 3,000. If I'd had my way and
I'd been there a while longer, they would have been reduced to zero.
Ultimately I recommended the disestablishment of my command. I took
down its flag with my own hands.
Creeping Re-rationalization of Nuclear Weapons
When I retired in 1994, I was persuaded that we were on a path that
was miraculous, that was irreversible, and that gave us the opportunity
to actually pursue a set of initiatives, acquire a new mindset, and
re-embrace a set of principles having to do with the sanctity of life
and the miracle of existence that would take us on the path to zero.
I was dismayed, mortified, and ultimately radicalized by the fact that
within a period of a year that momentum again was slowed. A process
that I have called the creeping re-rationalization of nuclear weapons
was introduced by the very people who stood to lose the most by the
end of the nuclear era.
----- The French re-initiated nuclear testing
at the worst possible moment, as the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty hung
in the balance. We in the United States have re-initiated the process
of demonization of "rogue nations." What a horrible, pernicious misuse
of language! What an anti-intellectual dehumanizing process of reducing
complex societies and human beings and histories and cultures to "rogue
nations." Once you do that, you can justify the most extreme measures
to include the reintroduction of nuclear weapons as legitimate and appropriate
weapons of national security.
A Second Chance
That was my evolution. That's
how I transitioned from the coldness of the Cold War years, when I became
an officer in the United States military at the height of the Cold War
just prior to the Cuban Missile Crisis, to someone today who simply
sees himself as a citizen of this planet and who was given an opportunity
to step back from the brink of nuclear catastrophe. I left office feeling
that this process, this extraordinary and unimaginable opportunity,
had been delivered to us by a Creator who forgave our transgressions
and who gave us a second chance. Now we seem determined to fritter it
away. I can't tolerate that. This is why Dorene and I have decided to
devote the balance of our lives on this planet to do our best to save
it.
General Butler founded the Second Chance Foundation,
12020 Shamrock Plaza, Suite 105, Omaha, NE 68154.
A QUESTION OF VALUES
- By General Lee Butler
When I speak to former colleagues about nuclear abolition,
they often ask three questions. One of them is, "What are you smoking?"
A lot of people are just utterly mystified. They simply cannot understand
why, from their perspectives, my views have changed so dramatically.
Some of my mail is pretty hateful. It has absolutely no impact on my
conviction or my assessment, but I've had to learn to live with the
loss of relationships that I treasure.
----- The second question is, "I understand
what you're saying and I kind of endorse it in principle, but why in
the world do you think this is really even possible?" I got a question
from my friend Warren Buffet when I discussed this with him. He said,
"Lee, I agree in principle with what you are saying. I endorse it and
I want to do what I can to help. But don't you think that instead of
zero we ought to have just one?" That is the kind of question that I
get from most people. Shouldn't we just have one? My answer is very
simple. "Warren, if it's just one, how is it that we get to have it,
and who gets to decide that?" And then there's a long pause, and the
response is, "I've never thought of it that way."
----- The third set of questions that
I get really pose a challenge. That is, "Lee you've just lost it. Nuclear
weapons prevented World War III. They are all that stand between us
and the forces of barbarism, the terrorists, the rogue nations. We,
above all people, have the responsibility to continue to provide the
barrier, the shield that shelters civilization and all that we hold
dear. Nuclear weapons are the answer."
----- My response to that is really very
simple. I've thought about this for a long time. It is the very core
of my belief system. We cannot at once hold sacred the mystery of life
and sacrosanct the capacity to destroy it utterly. They are irreconcilable.
If we truly claim to the values that underlie our political system,
if we truly believe in the dignity of the individual, and if we cherish
freedom and the capacity to realize our potential as human beings on
this planet, then we are absolutely obligated to pursue relentlessly
our capacity to live together in harmony and according to the dictates
of respect for that dignity, for that sanctity of life. It matters not
that we continuously fall short of the mark. What matters is that we
continue to strive. What is at stake here is our capacity to move ever
higher the bar of civilized behavior. As long as we sanctify nuclear
weapons as the ultimate arbiter of conflict, we will have forever capped
our capacity to live on this planet according to a set of ideals that
value human life and eschew a solution that continues to hold acceptable
the shearing away of entire societies. That simply is wrong. It is morally
wrong and it ultimately will be the death of humanity.
These two statements by General Lee Butler and the introduction
to them were published in issue 55 of the Timeline section, the Foundation
for Global Community website www.globalcommunity.org.
and are reproduced on this website with the permission of Kay Hays,
Managing Editor, Timeline.
Nuclear Age Peace Foundation 1187 Coast Village Road,
Suite 123,---
Santa Barbara, CA 93108 www.wagingpeace.org
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WAR BUSINESS
By Douglas Mattern
President, Association of World Citizens
We are now in the third year of the new century and we
stand bewildered by what happened to the wonderful expressions of hope
and joy that were expressed in the millennium celebrations. Today the
world is a mirror image of the 20th century, which was the most brutal
and destructive in human history. A major factor is the war business
that promotes militarism and conflict while producing enormous financial
profit. A tragic indicator of the values of our civilization is that
"There's no business like war business."
Just think of all the missiles, bombs, etc. that will
be replaced for profit by the armament industry after the current U.S.
military assault on Iraq. In the first 14 days the U.S. dropped over
8,700 bombs, including more than 3,000 cruise missiles. This includes
cluster bombs, which is one of the most barbaric weapons ever created
by the human mind.
Cruise missiles cost over $500,000 each. The Apache Longbow
Helicopter costs about 22 million dollars each. The Bradley Fighting
Vehicle costs over 1.2 million dollars. Each B-1 Stealth bomber costs
over $2 billion.
Today it's Iraq on the receiving end of U.S. bombing.
This country seems to have a proclivity for bombing small developing
countries. Over the past several decades the list includes: Vietnam,
Cambodia, Laos, Cuba, Indonesia, Grenada, Lebanon, Libya, Sudan, Bosnia,
Afghanistan, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Panama, Congo, and Iraq
the first time around.
Since 1992, the U.S. exported over $142 billion dollars
worth of weapons to states around the world. This macabre world market
is dominated by the U.S., which accounted for nearly half of all weapon
sales in 2001, more than $12 billion dollars for U.S. manufacturers.
The Center for International Policy estimates that about 80 percent
of U.S. arms exports to the developing world go to non-democratic regimes.
Of the active conflicts in 1999, the U.S. supplied weapons
or military training to parties in 39 of 42 conflicts. Other leading
nations in this "merchants of death" business include Russia, France,
Great Britain, China, Germany, and to a lesser degree, Sweden, Israel,
Belgium, Belarus, Italy, North Korea, and more.
For U.S. companies, even larger profit is in the annual
Pentagon budget. Over $60 billion was allocated to purchase new weapons
for 2003. The Pentagon spends over $30 billion annually in research
and development for new weapons.
The U.S. armament industry is the second most subsidized
industry after agriculture. The administration's FY 2004 military budget
is a big increase over 2003 at nearly $400 billion when including funding
for nuclear weapons that is under the Department of Energy (DOE) Budget.
Moreover, military spending is scheduled to increase over the coming
years with projections of a $502 billion budget in FY 2009.
Steven Kosiak, director of budget studies at the Center
for Strategic and Budgetary Assessment, says, "We've come to the point
where we're spending more money than we spent during the Cold War."
This money is to pay for a new generation weapons, including the militarization
of space, which is a dream of never ending profits for the weapons industry.
The top lobbyist for the 2000 elections was Lockheed
Martin at $2.8 million. In 2001, Lockheed-Martin had $14 billion in
sales of weapons to the U.S. and foreign buyers. Moreover, Lockheed
Martin recently received a $3.5 billion contract to sell F-16 jet fighters
to Poland. As a new member of NATO, Poland, along with Hungary and the
Czech Republic, agreed to modernize their military and purchase new
weapons. For the Lockheed sale, the U.S. Government loaned Poland $3.8
billion. The expansion of NATO is a vehicle to sell U.S. weapons, and
not surprising, the weapons industry is the biggest lobbyist for NATO
expansion.
The small arms trade is also a lucrative business, totaling
between 4-6 billion dollars per year. The leading exporters in terms
of value are the U.S. and Russia. But this business is spread around
the world with over 1,000 companies in some 98 countries involved in
the production of small arms and/or ammunition. Small arms kill over
500,000 people a year in conflicts.
HANDGUNS & MURDERS
The violence and obsession with armaments goes down to rifles and handguns,
with the U.S. leading the parade. There are more than 65 million handguns
in the U.S., and some 192 million in total firearms. In 1998 alone,
dealers sold an estimated 4.4 million guns in the U.S., nearly two million
of them handguns. The result was 12,102 people murdered by firearms.
The nuclear weapons industry may soon get a new boost
as the Bush team is threatening to resume nuclear testing at the Nevada
underground site to develop new nuclear weapons, including "bunker busters"
for use against hardened underground targets.
The Cold War ended over a decade ago, but the Stockholm
International Peace Research Institute reports the world nuclear stockpile
in 2002 totaled over 30,000 warheads. In addition to deployed nuclear
warheads, thousands more are held in reserve and are not counted in
official declarations. Moreover, thousands of U.S. and Russian warheads
are on a hair-trigger alert, ready for launch in a few minutes notice.
The Center for Defense Information reports the United States spends
$27 billion annually to prepare to fight a nuclear war.
Today the war business is in full swing with thousands
of scientists and engineers going to work daily with the task of building
or developing new weapons, including space-based weapons that would
turn the heavens above into a new source of terrorism for humanity below.
At the same time, UN Secretary General Koffi Annan reminds
us that half of humanity lives in poverty, existing on an average of
$2 a day. The Arias Foundation reports that world military spending
increased from $798 billion in 2000 to $839 billion in 2001. Half of
the world's governments spend more on the military than for health care.
This expenditure is a monumental waste of our wealth, resources, and
intellectual talent for the means of destruction and astonishing profits
for the armament companies. The war business is the world's ultimate
criminal activity.
BARBARISM TODAY
We are at a pivotal point in history, thus the decision by the U.S.
and Britain to wage war on Iraq, rather than working tirelessly for
a civilized resolution through the United Nations, is a step backward
to the barbarism of 20th century warfare. Time is crucial! It's imperative
that we do all that is necessary to initiate a dramatic change to end
the violence and war that now threatens the very fabric of our civilization.
This requires that we pull down the curtain on the "architects
of destruction" and put the war business permanently out-of-business.
And it means ending the foolish quest to establish an American empire.
We must put our energy and priority into strengthening and building
a new United Nations. As former UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali
puts it, a third generation UN.
The first generation, the League of Nations, represented
governments only. The current second generation UN is also comprised
of governments which have the power, but it also includes a tremendous
input and dependence on Non-Government Organizations (NGOs). The third
generation UN must be democratic and also include the representation
of the world's people and NGOs, and with some corporate responsibility.
This could include a two-tier Parliament. One tier comprised of governments,
and the second tier comprised of civil society.
The imperative change in the third generation UN must
be the ability to resolve conflicts between nations and peoples through
the framework of world law. There is no workable alternative to end
the war system with all of its political, economic, and cultural elements.
"The age of nations is past, the task before us now, if
we would survive, is to shake off our ancient prejudices and build the
earth." - Teilhard de Chardin
Douglas Mattern is president of the Association of World
Citizens (AWC); a San Francisco based international peace organization
with branches in 50 countries, and with UN NGO status. The website for
AWC is http://www.worldcitizens.org/"http://www.worldcitizens.org/ http://www.worldcitizens.org/
Sources for material in this article include: Center for Defense Information
(CDI) Federation of American Scientists (FAS) Stockholm International
Peace Research Institute (SIRPI) United Nations Development Program
(UNDP) United Nations Department for Disarmament U.S. State Department
e-mail worldcit@best.com
Please see 'Booklist Page' for a review of Dr. Rosalie
Bertell's recent book, Planet Earth - The Latest Weapon of War
(The Women's Press Ltd., London, 2000).
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NUCLEAR-FREE ZONE -
General Lee Butler
Let me begin by simply expressing my appreciation to those
of you who have laboured for so many years, understanding intuitively
what took years for those of us, presumably experts in this business,
to appreciate.
----- And that is, that at the heart of
the matter, nuclear weapons are the enemy of humanity. Indeed, they're
not weapons at all. They're some species of biological time bomb whose
effects transcend time and space, poisoning the Earth and its inhabitants
for generations to come.
----- It took me almost forty years to
grasp the truth. It required thirty years simply to reach the point
in my career where I had the responsibilities and, most importantly,
the access to information and the exposure to activities and operations
that profoundly deepened my grasp of what this business of nuclear capability
is all about.
----- What I have come to believe is that
much of what I took on faith was either wrong, enormously simplistic,
extraordinarily fragile, or simply morally intolerable. What I have
come to believe is that the amassing of nuclear capability, to the level
of such grotesque excess as we witnessed between the United States and
the Soviet Union over the period of the fifty years of the Cold War,
was as much a product of fear and ignorance and greed and ego and power
and turf and dollars, as it was about the seemingly elegant theories
of deterrence.
----- Let me just take a moment and give
you some sense of what it means to be the Commander of Strategic Nuclear
Forces, the land and sea-based missiles and aircraft that would deliver
nuclear warheads over great distances. First, I had the responsibility
for the day-to-day operation, discipline, training, of tens of thousands
of crew members, the systems that they operated and the warheads those
systems were designed to deliver - some 10,000 strategic nuclear warheads.
I came to appreciate in a way that I had never thought, even when I
commanded individual units like B52 bombers, the enormity of the day-to-day
risks that comes from multiple manipulations, maintenance and operational
movement of those weapons. I read deeply into the history of the incidents
and the accidents of the nuclear age as they had been recorded in the
United States. I am only beginning to understand that history in the
former Soviet Union, and it is more chilling than anything you can imagine.
Much of that is not publicly known, although it is now publicly available.
----- Missiles that blew up in their silos
and ejected their nuclear warheads outside of the confines of the silo.
B52 aircraft that collided with tankers and scattered nuclear weapons
across the coast and into the offshore seas of Spain. A B52 bomber with
nuclear weapons aboard that crashed in North Carolina, and on investigation
it was discovered that with one of those weapons, six of the seven safety
devices that prevent a nuclear explosion had failed as a result of the
crash. There are dozens of such incidents. Nuclear missile-laden submarines
that experienced catastrophic accidents and now lie at the bottom of
the ocean.
----- I was also a principal nuclear adviser
to the President of the United States. What that required of me was
to be prepared on a moment's notice, day or night, seven days week,
365 days a year, to be within three rings of my telephone and to respond
to this question from the president: "General, the nation is under nuclear
attack. I must decide in minutes how to respond. What is your recommendation
with regard to the nature of our reply?"
----- In the thirty-six months that I was
a principal nuclear adviser to the President, I participated every month
in an exercise known as a missile threat conference. Virtually without
exception, that threat conference began with a scenario which encompassed
one, then several, dozens, then hundreds and finally thousands of inbound
thermonuclear warheads to the United States. By the time that attack
was assessed, characterized and sufficient information was available
with some certainty in appreciation of the circumstance, at most he
had twelve minutes to make that decision. Twelve minutes - for a decision
which, coupled with that of whatever person half a world away who may
have initiated such an attack, held at risk not only the survival of
the antagonists, but the fate of humankind in its entirety - the prospect
of some 20,000 thermonuclear warheads being exploded within a period
of several hours.
----- Sad to say, the poised practitioners
of the nuclear art never understood the consequences of such and attack,
nor do they today.
----- I never appreciated that until I
came to grips with my third responsibility, which was for the nuclear
war plan of the United States.
----- In January 1991, when the Cold War
had already been declared over, I went downstairs, on my first day in
office, to meet my war planners in the bowels of my headquarters. Finally
for the first time in thirty years, I was allowed full access to the
war plan. Even having some sense of what it encompassed, I was shocked
to see that in fact it was defined by 12,500 targets in the former Warsaw
Pact to be attacked by some 10,000 nuclear weapons, virtually simultaneously
in the worst of circumstances, which is what we always assumed.
----- I made it my business to examine
in some detail every single one of those targets. I doubt that that
had ever been done by anyone, because the war plan was divided up into
sections and each section was the responsibility of some different group
of people. My staff was aghast when I told them I intended to look at
every single target individually. My rationale was very simple. If there
had been only one target, surely I would have to know every conceivable
detail about it, why it was selected, what kind of weapon would strike
it, what the consequences would be. My point was simply this: Why
should I feel in any way less responsible simply because there was a
large number of targets? I wanted to look at every one. -----
At the conclusion of that exercise I finally came to understand the
true meaning of MAD, Mutually Assured Destruction. With the possible
exception of the Soviet nuclear war plan, this was the single most
absurd and irresponsible document I had ever reviewed in my life.
I was sufficiently outraged that I alerted my superiors in Washington
about my concerns. The shortest version of all of that is that I came
to fully appreciate the truth that now makes me seem so odd. And that
is: we escaped the Cold War without a nuclear holocaust by some combination
of skill, luck and divine intervention, and, I suspect, the latter
in greatest proportion.
----- The saving grace was that the Cold
War was ending at this very moment. I was faced with a decision of great
personal consequence. Now having fully appreciated the magnitude of
our nuclear capability and what it implied, when joined in an unholy
alliance with its Soviet counterpart, what was I to do? Awaiting in
my inbox were $40 billion of new strategic nuclear weapons modernization
programmes, wanting only my signature. What should be our goals for
the next rounds of arms-control negotiations? How hard should I fight
to maintain the budget of strategic forces, to keep bases open? And
what to do with the nuclear war plan in all of its excess? My conclusion
was very simple: I of all people had the responsibility to be at the
forefront of the effort to begin to close the nuclear age.
----- I withdrew my support for every single
one of those $40 billion of nuclear weapons programmes and they were
all cancelled. I urged the acceleration of the START 1 accords and that
Minuteman 2 be taken out of the inventory at an accelerated pace. I
recommended that for the first time in thirty years bombers be taken
off alert. The President approved these recommendations and, on the
25th September 1991, I sat in my command centre and with my red telephone
I gave the orders to my bomber troops to stand down from alert. I put
twenty-four of my thirty-six bases on the closure list. I cut the number
of targets in the nuclear war plan by 75%, and ultimately I recommended
the dis-establishment of Strategic Air Command, which the President
also approved. I took down that flag on the 1st of June 1992.
----- As you can imagine, I went into retirement
exactly five years ago with a sense of profound relief and gratitude
- the relief that the most acute dangers of the Cold War were coming
to a close, and gratitude that I had been given the opportunity to play
some small role in eliminating those dangers. You can also imagine,
then, my growing dismay, alarm and finally horror that in a relatively
brief period of time, this extraordinary momentum, this unprecedented
opportunity began to slow down. Once again the creeping re-rationalization
of nuclear weapons began. The START 2 treaty was paralysed in the US
Senate for three years and now in the Duma for three more. The precious
window of opportunity began to close, and now we find ourselves in the
almost unbelievable circumstance in which United States nuclear weapons
policy has reverted to that of 1984. That our forces with their hair-trigger
postures are effectively the same as they were at the height of the
Cold War.
----- What a stunning outcome. I would
never have imagined this state of affairs five years ago. This is an
indictment. The leaders of the nuclear weapons states today risk very
much being judged by future historians as having been unworthy of their
age, of not having taken advantage of opportunities so perilously won
at such great sacrifice and cost of re-igniting nuclear arms races around
the world, of condemning humankind to live under a cloud of perpetual
anxiety.
----- This is not a legacy worthy of the
human race. This is not the world that I want to bequeath to my children
and my grandchildren. It's simply intolerable. This is above all a moral
question and I want to reiterate to you a quote. I took this quote to
heart many years ago. It is from one of my professional heroes - General
Omar Bradley, who said on the occasion of his retirement, having been
a principal in World War II and having witnessed the aftermath of the
bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki: "We live in an age of nuclear
giants and ethical infants, in a world that has achieved brilliance
without wisdom, power without conscience. We have solved the mystery
of the atom and forgotten the lessons of the Sermon on the Mount. We
know more about war than we know about peace, more about dying than
we know about living."
----- We have a priceless opportunity to
elevate, to nudge higher and to learn to live on this planet with mutual
respect and dignity. This is an opportunity we must not lose. My concern
was such that I could not sit in silent acquiescence to the current
folly…
This article is taken from Resurgence Magazine,
Edition 200 (May/June 2000), and is an edited text of a speech given
the previous year at the Canadian Network Against Nuclear Weapons. It
is reproduced here with permission from Satish Kumar, editor, Resurgence.
General Lee Butler was Commander-in-Chief of the United
States Strategic
Command, Offnut Air Base, Nebraska. He retired in 1994.
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