The Master of the Game; Paul Nitze and the Nuclear Peace

New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988. First Edition [stated], presumed first printing. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. xvii, [1], 416, [10] pages. Footnotes. Notes. Index. Slight wear and soiling to DJ. The book includes a Preface, Prologue, Notes, and Index. Part One describes Offense; Part Two describes Defense. DJ has some wear and soiling. Nelson Strobridge "Strobe" Talbott III (born April 25, 1946) is an American foreign policy analyst associated with Yale University and the Brookings Institution, a former journalist associated with Time magazine, and a diplomat who served as the Deputy Secretary of State from 1994 to 2001. He was president of Brookings from 2002 to 2017. Following Bill Clinton's election as president, Talbott was invited into government where he served at first managing the consequences of the Soviet breakup as Ambassador-at-Large and Special Adviser to the Secretary of State Warren Christopher on the New Independent States. After leaving government, he was for a period Director of the Yale Center for the Study of Globalization. Talbott was the sixth president of the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., from 2002 to 2017. At Brookings, he was responsible for formulating and setting policies, recommending projects, approving publications and selecting staff. He brings to Brookings the experience of his careers spanning journalism, government service and academe, and his expertise in US foreign policy with specialties on Europe, Russia, South Asia and nuclear arms control. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. An inside account of the long, difficult search for a breakthrough in nuclear arms control, built around the controversial career of leading negotiator Paul Nitze. Paul Henry Nitze (January 16, 1907 - October 19, 2004) was an American politician 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 Cold War defense policy over the course of numerous presidential administrations. Nitze entered government service during World War II after having been hired by his Wall Street colleague James Forrestal when Forrestal became an administrative assistant to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. In 1942, he became finance director of the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs, working for Nelson Rockefeller. From 1944 to 1946, Nitze served as director and then as Vice Chairman of the Strategic Bombing Survey for which President Harry S. Truman awarded him the Legion of Merit. One of his early government assignments was to visit Japan in the immediate aftermath of the nuclear attacks and assess the damage. This experience framed many of his later feelings about the power of nuclear weapons and the necessity of arms control. In the early postwar era, he served in the Truman Administration as Director of Policy Planning for the State Department (1950-1953). He was also the principal author in 1950 of the highly influential but secret National Security Council policy paper, NSC 68, which provided the strategic outline for increased US expenditures to counter the perceived threat of Soviet armament. Nitze co-founded the School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) with Christian Herter in 1943. His publications during this period include U.S. Foreign Policy: 1945-1955. In 1961, President Kennedy appointed Nitze Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs. In 1963, Nitze became the Secretary of the Navy, serving until 1967. Following his term as Secretary of the Navy, he served as Deputy Secretary of Defense (1967-1969), as a member of the US delegation to the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) (1969-1973). Paul Nitze was a cofounder of Team B, a 1970s intelligence think tank that challenged the National Intelligence Estimates provided by the CIA. The Team B reports became the intellectual foundation for the idea of "the window of vulnerability" and of the massive arms buildup that began toward the end of the Carter administration and accelerated under President Ronald Reagan. Team B came to the conclusion that the Soviets had developed new weapons of mass destruction and had aggressive strategies with regard to a potential nuclear war. From a review posted on-line: Paul Nitze first became acquainted with the effects of nuclear weapons when he was doing a survey of the American bombing campaign against Japan and observed the aftermath of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. He worked in the Defense Dept. in the 1960s and then when the SALT I talks began in November 1969 he became a member of the American delegation. During Salt II he was the leading critic of the agreements and was one of the founders of the Committee on the Present Danger. Then he joined the Reagan administration as the person in charge of the American team to the intermediate nuclear forces talks. This tells Nitze's story concentrating on his period as an arms control negotiator from 1969 to 1988.