In a strongly worded speech General Lee Butler has called for the abolition of nuclear weapons. General Butler was Commander in Chief of Strategic Air Command, and then as Commander in Chief of Strategic Command was responsible for all US nuclear weapons from 1992 to 1994. He was a member of the Canberra Commission which called for progress towards the abolition of nuclear weapons.
"I cannot stay silent. I know too much of these matters, the frailties, the flaws, the failures of policy and practice".
".. I came to a set of deeply unsettling judgements. That from the earliest days of the nuclear era, the risks and consequences of nuclear war have never been properly weighed by those who brandished it. That the stakes of nuclear war engage not just the survival of the antagonists, but the fate of mankind. That the likely consequences of nuclear war have no politically, militarily or morally acceptable justification. And therefore, that the threat to use nuclear weapons is indefensible."
"(deterrence) was based on a litany of unwarranted assumptions, unprovable assertions and logical contradictions. It suspended rational thinking about the ultimate aim of national security to ensure the survival of the state."
"I was responsible for war plans with over 12,000 targets, many struck with repeated nuclear blows, some to the point of complete absurdity."
"In the end, the nuclear powers, great and small, created astronomically expensive infrastructures, monolithic bureaucracies and complex processes that defied control or comprehension. ..
"What must now be better understood are the root causes, the mindsets and the belief systems that brought them into existence. They must be challenged, they must be refuted, but most importantly, they must be let go."
".. the cold war lives on in the minds of those who cannot let go the fears, the beliefs, and the enmities born of the nuclear age. They cling to deterrence, clutch its tattered promise to their breast, shake it wistfully at bygone adversaries and balefully at new or imagined ones. They are gripped still by its awful willingness not simply to tempt the apocalypse but to prepare its way.
"What better illustration of misplaced faith in nuclear deterrence than the persistent belief that retaliation with nuclear weapons is a legitimate and appropriate response to post cold war threats posed by weapons of mass destruction. What could possibly justify our resort to the very means we properly abhor and condemn ?"
"We cannon sit in silent acquiescence to the faded homilies of the nuclear priesthood. It is time to reassert the primacy of individual concience, the voice of reason and the rightful interests of humanity."
The full text of the speech is also available.