Cold War Mentality Still In Place

In the 1960s horror comedy “Dr. Strangelove,” Gen. Jack D. Ripper is a cigar-chompimg paranoid who happily triggers a nuclear Armageddon. Warned about millions of casualties, he growls, “I didn’t say we wouldn’t get our hair mussed.”

You guffawed at the movie’s doomsday cartoon. But you walked away wondering if ditsy psychotics like Gen. Ripper in Pentagon and Kremlim war rooms were playing nuclear dice.

We got lucky, though.

Only once have nuclear weapons been used (1945), although Kennedy and Khrushchev had a close brush in 1962.

Those eerie days of backyard nuke shelters and kids’ drilling for war by hiding under school desks are gone. Nuclear angst is hidden in a closet.

Never mind there are still 70,000 nuclear warheads in the world. Accidents and terrorism happen. Our ICBM silos and nuke-armed submarines are kept on high alert.

Why not get rid of the madness - or at least lower these weapons of doom to a sane minimum?

Men who’ve had hands close to the nuclear trigger - 35 generals and admirals from all over the world - were in Washington to ask exactly that.

They’ve looked at the nightmare up close and in a horrified reversal said, “No mas.”

For Gen. Lee Butler, the epiphany struck when he became head of the Strategic Air Command. He went to the Omaha headquarters war room to inspect the 12,000 Soviet Union targets. He was shocked.

Dozens of warheads were aimed at Moscow (as Soviets once targeted Washington). U.S. planners had no grasp of the explosions, firestorms and radiation from overkill.

“We were totally out of touch with reality,” says Butler.

On a 1994 trip to Russia, Butler visited a nuclear base he had targeted. Instead of a powerful armada in the war plan, he saw rusted hulks.

“I’d been dealing with a caricature,” says Butler. “The place wasn’t worth a conventional strike.”

Few Americans have been as deep inside the U.S. nuclear arsenal as Gen. Butler, now a lean, boyish 57. He’s commanded a B-52 squadron, spent hours in cockpits, silos and submarines, made policy. He has certified hundreds of nuclear crews, approved thousands of targets.

Chillingly, he says, “I’ve studied a distressing array of accidents and incidents.”

The onetime Keeper of the Nukes says Washington leaders are stuck in an “intellectual fog” and “terror-filled anesthesia” - “the idea that after $4 trillion and 70,000 nuclear weapons, somehow we’re in charge, that all this is manageable.”

His happiest hour was calling his B-52 wings: Cold War’s over, take your planes off alert.

But that’s not good enough. “Elimination (of all nuclear weapons) is the goal with all deliberate speed,” says Butler.

Butler has some anti-nuke allies - Alexander Lebed, Boris Yeltsin’s ex-security chief; Gen. Andrew Goodpaster, former allied commander in Europe; Gen. Charles Horner, who commanded the Gulf War air force - who are hardly fuzzyminded Utopians.

They know the counter-argument: Nuclear weapons are here to stay, so the United States must keep a huge stockpile to deter and retaliate against nuke bullies.

Butler’s answer: We’re the world’s conventional powerhouse. Nukes are morally unusable. In a nuke-free world, we’d be stronger.

Predictably, Pentagon brass and Clinton administration’s honchos labeled Butler and his nuclear-free heretics as dreamy do-gooders.

Defense Secretary William Perry, an old friend of Butler’s, said, “You can’t uninvent the nuclear bomb.” Perry scoffed at “unilateral elimination” - something Butler hadn’t suggested.

Perry blames the Russians. Though there were big cuts in the Reagan-Bush years, the Clinton team hasn’t budged the Russian parliament to accept START II (3,500 long-range warheads apiece.)

Butler thinks Perry and Clinton are too cautious. He asks why we keep land-based ICBM’s and submarine-launch missiles on high states of alert “as though the Cold War never ended.”

The general’s no-nukes vision took a hard shot from ex-Cold War hardliner James Schlesinger, who fumed on PBS, “The nuclear genie can’t be stuffed back in the bottle. China, Israel, Pakistan won’t give them up. Nuclear abolition’s unachievable, dangerous.”

Gen. Chuck Horner told him, “Even if Saddam had used a nuclear weapon in the Gulf War, I couldn’t have used one to wipe out Baghdad. Our B-2’s, laser weapons are power enough. Nuclear weapons have diminishing use. We can get rid of them in a half-century.”

Fifty years? That’s why Lee Butler and his horror-struck generals hope to snap our nuclear numbness. How many warheads do we need to bounce the rubble? “Dr. Strangelove” may be 1960’s satire, but too many Gen. Jack D. Ripper’s are still in charge.

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