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AUL C. W
PAUL
AUL
C. WARNKE
Ambassador Paul C. Warnke was a leading and
tireless proponent of arms control. A member of
the Arms Control Association Board of Directors
for nearly two decades, Warnke had a distinguished career
of promoting arms control from within and outside
government. Most notably, he served as the director of
the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (ACDA) under
President Jimmy Carter. During this period, he also
led the effort to negotiate binding limits on U.S. and Soviet
nuclear forces at the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks
(SALT). Although Warnke resigned from the government
in 1978 under pressure from those who thought he was
not taking a tough enough stance with Moscow, the U.S.-
Soviet arms talks eventually produced SALT II in 1979.
However, SALT II never entered into force because President
Carter asked the Senate to halt its consideration of
the treaty following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
Before President Carter’s 1976 nomination of Warnke to lead ACDA, he had already riled
defense conservatives for criticizing their view that the United States needed to match or
surpass the Soviet Union weapon-for-weapon. He set out his ideas in a renowned and
controversial 1975 Foreign Policy article, “Apes on a Treadmill.” Warnke wrote, “The contention
that, whatever the practical military utility, we will incur political disadvantages
unless we maintain a lead across the spectrum of strategic and conventional forces, is both
a recipe for endless escalation of defense costs and a self-fulfilling prophesy.” Instead, he
recommended that the United States show restraint in its weapons developments on the
premise that the Soviet Union would follow suit. “The Soviets are far more apt to emulate
than to capitulate,” Warnke argued.
Warnke never shied away from saying what he felt was right. As Assistant Secretary of
Defense for International Affairs during the Lyndon Johnson administration, Warnke spoke
out against U.S. involvement in Vietnam. He was one of the highest-level government officials
to give public voice to his criticisms of the war.
After leaving the Carter administration, Warnke returned to the private sector to practice
law. Yet he remained a fervent advocate of arms control measures to ease tensions with the
Soviet Union and to protect U.S. security. In his later years, he served on President Bill
Clinton’s Presidential Advisory Board on Arms Proliferation Policy and strongly promoted
a comprehensive nuclear test ban.
Paul Warnke died on October 31, 2001. In June 2003 the Warnke family generously donated
his papers to Georgetown University’s Lauinger Library, where they will be housed in the
Library’s Special Collections. In a ceremony marking the gift, Ambassador Robert Gallucci,
Dean of Georgetown University’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, said, “We
are so fortunate to have Paul Warnke’s papers at Georgetown University. His negotiation
of the SALT II Treaty and his intellectual contributions in the field of arms control made a
very dangerous period of the Cold War safer for all of us.”
—Arms Control Association
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