WILLIAM W. KAUFMANN

Abstract

William W. Kaufmann died on December 14, 2008, in his sleep, at the age of 90. During the cold war, he was a key figure among the “defense intellectuals”—less famous but more influential than most—who moved freely from think tanks to the Pentagon to academia and back again, crafting the theories of nuclear deterrence and translating them to policy. Yet by the '80s, in the final, rococo phase of the standoff, he'd come to reject much of his old thinking and emerged, quite publicly, as one of the defense establishment's most accredited critics.