The Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, commonly known as the Non-Proliferation Treaty or NPT, is an international treaty whose objective is to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons and weapons technology, to promote cooperation in the peaceful uses of nuclear energy, and to further the goal of achieving nuclear disarmament and general and complete disarmament. Between 1965 and 1968, the treaty was negotiated by the Eighteen Nation Committee on Disarmament, a United Nations-sponsored organization based in Geneva, Switzerland.
Nuclear disarmament is the act of reducing or eliminating nuclear weapons. Its end state can also be a nuclear-weapons-free world, in which nuclear weapons are completely eliminated. The term denuclearization is also used to describe the process leading to complete nuclear disarmament.
John Francis Lehman Jr. is an American private equity investor and writer who was secretary of the Navy (1981–1987) during the Reagan administration in which he promoted the creation of a 600-ship navy.
Paul Henry Nitze was an American businessman and government official who served as United States Deputy Secretary of Defense, U.S. Secretary of the Navy, and Director of Policy Planning for the U.S. State Department. He is best known for being the principal author of NSC 68 and the co-founder of Team B. He helped shape U.S. Cold War defense policy over the course of numerous presidential administrations.
William C. Potter is Sam Nunn and Richard Lugar Professor of Nonproliferation Studies and Founding Director of the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey (MIIS). He also directs the MIIS Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies.
Fred Charles Iklé was a Swiss-American sociologist and defense expert. Iklé's expertise was in defense and foreign policy, nuclear strategy, and the role of technology in the emerging international order. After a career in academia he was appointed director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency in 1973–1977, before becoming Under Secretary of Defense for Policy. He was later a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Department of Defense's Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee, a Distinguished Scholar with the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) and a Director of the National Endowment for Democracy.
Jon Wolfsthal is an American security analyst currently serving as director of global risk at the Federation of American Scientists.
The Reykjavík Summit was a summit meeting between U.S. President Ronald Reagan and General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union Mikhail Gorbachev, held in Reykjavík, Iceland, on 11–12 October 1986. The talks collapsed at the last minute, but the progress that had been achieved eventually resulted in the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty between the United States and the Soviet Union.
The U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (ACDA) was an independent agency of the United States government that existed from 1961 to 1999. Its mission was to strengthen United States national security by "formulating, advocating, negotiating, implementing and verifying effective arms control, nonproliferation, and disarmament policies, strategies, and agreements."
Patricia Lewis is a British and Irish nuclear physicist and arms control expert, who is currently the Research Director for International Security at Chatham House. She is also currently Co-Director of the Global Commission on Internet Governance. She was previously the Senior Scientist-in-Residence and Deputy Director at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies at Monterey Institute of International Studies (MIIS). She was previously the Director of the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research (UNIDIR) and the Director of VERTIC.
The Under Secretary for Arms Control and International Security (T) is a position within the U.S. Department of State that serves as Senior Adviser to the President and the Secretary of State for Arms Control, Nonproliferation, and Disarmament.
Dr. Randall Caroline Forsberg led a lifetime of research and advocacy on ways to reduce the risk of war, minimize the burden of military spending, and promote democratic institutions. Her career started at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute in 1968. In 1974 she moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts to found the Institute for Defense and Disarmament Studies (IDDS) as well as to launch the national Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign. Randall Forsberg was accompanied by an important colleague by the name of Helen Caldicott while she was leading the Nuclear freeze movement in both Manhattan and Central Park. Both women were met with many challenges in their efforts to lead the Nuclear Freeze Movement. These challenges included gender discrimination and discreditation as influential leaders by the media. Forsberg's strong leadership in the nuclear freeze movement is thought to be very influential in the writing of foreign policy during the Reagan administration and is even credited with catalyzing the negotiation of the INF treaty between President Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev.
Gloria Charmian Duffy is a former U.S. Department of Defense official, businesswoman, social entrepreneur and nonprofit executive. Since 1996, she has been the president, CEO and a member of the Board of Governors of the Commonwealth Club of California, America's largest and oldest public forum, founded in 1903. From 2010 to 2017 she led the acquisition, financing, design, entitlements and construction of the club's first headquarters building, at 110 The Embarcadero in San Francisco. The grand opening for the club's new building took place on September 12, 2017. The building received a 2016 California Heritage Council award for historic preservation.
The International Luxembourg Forum on Preventing Nuclear Catastrophe — is an international non-governmental organisation uniting leading world-renowned experts on non-proliferation of nuclear weapons, materials and delivery vehicles.
William Robert Van Cleave was a former advisor to President Ronald Reagan, the United States Department of Defense, and Department of State as well as Emeritus Professor, former head, and the founder of Missouri State University's Department of Defense and Strategic Studies (DSS). The DSS program is now located in Fairfax, VA, 10 miles from Washington D.C. He was also advisory council member of the Center for Security Policy, board advisor of the American Center for Democracy and National Institute for Public Policy. As a strategic thinker, he is remembered as a leading Cold Warrior and long-standing hawkish policy advocate.
John Tirman was an American political theorist. From 2004, Tirman was executive director and principal research scientist at the MIT Center for International Studies. There he led the Persian Gulf Initiative, which conducted work on Iraq war mortality and U.S. and Iran relations, as well as other projects. He was the author or coauthor of 13 books on international affairs, many of them exploring and advocating the “human security” paradigm in global affairs, and was a frequent contributor to AlterNet, The Huffington Post, and The Boston Globe.
Thomas Graham Jr. is a former senior U.S. diplomat. Graham was involved in the negotiation of every single international arms control and non-proliferation agreement from 1970 to 1997. This includes the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaties, the Anti-ballistic missile (ABM) Treaty, Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF) Treaty, Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons Treaty (NPT), Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (CFE) Treaty and Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT). In 1993, Ambassador Graham served as acting director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (ACDA) from January to November, 1993 and Acting Deputy Director from November, 1993 to July, 1994. From 1994 through 1997, he was president Bill Clinton's special representative for Arms Control, Non-Proliferation, and Disarmament. Graham successfully led the U.S. government efforts to achieve the permanent extension of the NPT in 1995. Graham also served for 15 years as the general counsel of ACDA. Throughout his career, Thomas Graham has worked with six U.S. Presidents including Presidents Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and Bill Clinton. Ambassador Graham worked on the negotiation of the Chemical Weapons Convention and the Biological Weapons Convention and managed the Senate approval of the ratification of the Geneva Protocol banning the use of chemical and biological weapons in war, as well as the Biological Weapons Convention.
Bonnie Denise Jenkins currently serves as the under secretary of state for arms control and international security affairs. During the Obama administration, she was the U.S. Department of State's coordinator for threat reduction programs in the Bureau of International Security and Nonproliferation.
Alexei Georgievich Arbatov is a full member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Head of the Center for International Security at the Institute of World Economy and International Relations (IMEMO), and a scholar in residence at the Carnegie Moscow Center. He is a Russian political scientist, academic, author, and former politician.
