The article that follows is a good reminder of the fundamentals of the nuclear equilibrium which preserved humanity during the Cold War. After 1991, the United States took the initiative to demolish the arms control edifice. For what reason if not to be able to plan for a nuclear war?
D.K.
By Matthew Sharp
June 26, 2026
In the space of a few years in the late 1960s, US policymakers debated and set US policy on three issues that subsequently formed the basis of US nonproliferation and arms control policy: A senior group in 1965 decided that nonproliferation should be an overriding US policy interest. President Lyndon Johnson’s advisors developed the conception that diplomacy to constrain nuclear arsenals (arms control) should be advanced as a preferred alternative to armament at the 1967 Glassboro Summit with the Soviet Union. And in 1968, negotiators of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) reached an understanding of the linkage between nonproliferation and disarmament in that treaty, and the means for enforcing that linkage.
The conclusions from these three events have been central to US and international nuclear policy for a generation and remain significantly relevant to current policy challenges. But today’s US policymakers seem to have forgotten or dismissed the logic that their predecessors found compelling. They must be reminded of these moments, but not without reflection: Policymakers must revisit those earlier debates and assess whether today’s context requires changes in core US policy positions.
The 1965 Gilpatric Committee: Nonproliferation becomes a core US security objective. When President Johnson stood up the Gilpatric Committee in 1964 to study the parameters of Washington’s nonproliferation policy, Nobel laureate Glenn Seaborg reported in his book, Stemming the Tide, that committee chair Roswell Gilpatric described the group’s key task as exploring “whether nuclear proliferation may not be inevitable and in some cases even desirable.” Two months later, the committee decided otherwise, concluding that “preventing the further spread of nuclear weapons is clearly in the national interest despite the difficult decisions that will be required.” Committee records reveal serious discussion and consideration of alternative priorities before reaching that conclusion.
Secretary of State Dean Rusk and other participants in the conversation argued that selective proliferation—potentially to India in response to China’s first test earlier that year—should be preserved as an option. But the group firmly rejected this option, arguing in their final report that “we do not believe the spread of nuclear weapons would or could be stopped there.” The State Department also maintained that alliance and regional security goals should take precedence over nonproliferation, which should not be allowed to undercut ongoing discussions with NATO about nuclear sharing through the Multilateral Force, a US proposal to produce a fleet of ballistic missile submarines and warships, staffed with NATO personnel and armed with nuclear ballistic missiles to defend Western Europe. The committee ultimately recommended the opposite, prioritizing negotiations for the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) and advising alternatives to the Multilateral Force as mechanisms to reassure US allies where needed. In his memoirs, Rusk indicates the ultimate decision to drop the Multilateral Force was in part motivated by the sense it had become an impediment to NPT negotiations.
A third consideration was commercial: Seaborg, then chair of the Atomic Energy Commission, argued that if discrete nuclear transfers were blocked by an overly rigid nonproliferation policy, US reliability as a trade partner could be called into question and broader nuclear commerce could be damaged as a result. The committee decided that it was comfortable with this potential tradeoff, concluding that commercial and alliance issues (and the government agencies representing them) “must give such non-proliferation policies far greater weight and support than they have received in the past.”
A final important issue discussed at length at the last meeting was the committee members’ assumption that states would forego proliferation only with robust US security guarantees. These could complicate existing security arrangements or compel US involvement in reckless foreign nuclear wars. The committee’s report suggests efforts to avoid new guarantees where possible, but doing what was necessary in this area to achieve the nonproliferation objective.
The conclusion that nonproliferation objectives should prevail over regional, alliance, commercial, and even some security objectives was new; questions of how to balance these kinds of policy confluences had been debated at senior levels in the months before. The prevailing argument reflected in the group’s final meeting is the overriding need to reduce the likelihood of nuclear war.
Committee member and former presidential science advisor George Kistiakowsky summarized the line of thinking that guided the committee to its conclusions, stating bluntly that the short-term benefits of nonproliferation exceptions would be outweighed by the long-term consequences his grandchildren would bear. The risk that any proliferation could cascade and increase the likelihood of nuclear war seems to have been seen as decisively setting the policy priorities. Johnson would invoke this same logic after the committee briefed him on its conclusions, and Seaborg notes that “much of what the committee recommended would, within three years, become national policy.”
The 1967 Glassboro Summit: Arms control as a security tool. Nuclear arms control—the use of diplomacy and negotiation rather than armaments to address security threats—has strong roots in Johnson’s June 1967 summit with Soviet Chairman Alexei Kosygin in Glassboro, New Jersey. A primary US objective for the meeting was to initiate expert-level talks addressing antiballistic missile systems (ABMs) and strategic arms
In his memoirs, Rusk summarizes the US position in the lead-up and at Glassboro: “We were skeptical that antiballistic missiles would work at all … we realized that if we and the Soviets began building antiballistic missile systems, inevitably both sides would multiply their offensive weapons so they could saturate and penetrate ABM systems.” This was deemed to be ineffective in security terms, costly, and in Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara’s words, “insane.” At Glassboro, Johnson proposed avoiding this cycle through mutual restraint, foregoing both the ABM systems and the offensive build-ups.
The US position was reached in the context of a budget fight: On one side, McNamara, who opposed the deployment of the US Nike-X ABM system to match a new Soviet capability and protect US cities from Soviet intercontinental ballistic missiles as wasteful and ineffective. And on the other side, the Joint Chiefs were arguing that the system was necessary for national security. The disagreement came to a head at a December 1966 budget meeting at Johnson’s Texas ranch.
In the months before and after this meeting, McNamara made financial and technological arguments against the system and emphasized that the likely Soviet response would negate short-term benefits. Mort Halperin, who joined the ranch discussion as the new Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs, later wrote that the Chiefs argued even a partially effective system could reduce American casualties in nuclear war; it was worth saving millions of American lives, even if millions more would perish.
But McNamara’s biggest obstacle was political. Halperin notes Republican politicians were already weaponizing an “ABM gap” against Democrats as the 1968 elections approached, and Johnson was not eager to defy concerned Democratic candidates and Senate leadership. In the December meeting, McNamara had offered a compromise: The President’s budget request would create a Nike-X “contingency fund,” addressing the immediate political issue, but these funds would be allocated only if diplomatic efforts failed to secure negotiated constraints with the Soviets. Johnson endorsed making deployment and diplomacy alternative means of addressing the same threat, and a dialogue with Moscow was proposed the next day. Six months later, McNamara and Johnson made their case to Kosygin at Glassboro.
In terms of the compromise, the meeting failed: Kosygin wouldn’t commit to negotiations, and Johnson’s next budget funded Nike-X. But in the longer term, McNamara’s logic prevailed. Rusk recalls the Soviets “went home, did their staff work, and eventually came to the same conclusion we did: ABMs would simply accelerate an arms race in offensive weapons.” In the summer of 1968, Moscow agreed to the proposed talks.
The Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia derailed Johnson’s efforts, but Richard Nixon picked up the ball in the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT), which produced a 1972 treaty banning ABMs on both sides. Nike-X was never built, and Glassboro’s premise of diplomacy to address security concerns drove the following decades of arms control negotiations.
1968 NPT Negotiations: Linking nonproliferation and arms control. The Gilpatric Committee’s 1965 prioritization of nonproliferation unblocked negotiation of what became the NPT. But early US-Soviet NPT drafts were silent on disarmament, treating the two issues separately. US officials were surprised when their Allies insisted that disarmament must be included in any NPT. In a June 1967 meeting between Rusk and Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko, they acknowledged the pressure to address disarmament was irresistible and hoped vague, preambular language on disarmament might satisfy the demands.
It didn’t. Rusk later wrote that non-nuclear states “insisted that we take that clause out of the preamble and make it binding as an operational part of the treaty. Under that pressure, we and the Soviets moved that clause to Article Six of the treaty, agreeing to make a serious effort to limit and reduce our nuclear arsenals.”
U.S. policymakers understood they were on the hook to deliver. In an April 1968 address to the UN, American UN Ambassador Goldberg said, “my country believes the permanent viability of this treaty will depend largely on our success in the further negotiations contemplated by article VI…following the conclusion of this treaty, my government will, in the spirit of article VI…pursue further disarmament negotiations with redoubled zeal and hope and with promptness.” In March 1968, according to Glenn Seaborg’s journals, ACDA head Bill Foster briefed Johnson that the nuclear weapon states “would have an obligation under Article VI of the treaty to move in good faith toward arms control and disarmament measures,” mentioning specific steps to that end. After Glassboro, Johnson and Kosygin exchanged letters noting that the initiation of arms control talks would help secure adherence to the NPT. Planned U.S.-Soviet strategic arms control talks were announced July 1, 1968, the same day both states signed the NPT.
NPT negotiations also resulted in two mechanisms for accountability: a review conference and a treaty duration of 25 years, neither of which was contained in the initial drafts. Ambassador Goldberg told the UN that “force is imparted to article VI by … periodic review at intervals of five years, to determine whether the purposes of the preamble and the provisions of the treaty are being realized.” Seaborg saw Article VI accountability as the main purpose of these Review Conferences, and treaty expiration as leverage for the non-weapon states should disarmament progress be inadequate. His expectation was born out. Disarmament divisions blocked consensus at the 1980 and 1990 conferences, and nearly did so in 1975. 1985 was boosted by optimism following Reagan-Gorbachev engagement, and the treaty’s indefinite extension in 1995 was enabled by an intense push to show progress on disarmament.
Negotiation and implementation of the NPT thus resulted in a common understanding that the treaty’s strong nonproliferation provisions were contingent on meaningful progress on disarmament, and that the Review Conferences would assess performance of these obligations.
Why these lessons still matter 60 years later. While these three key nuclear policy decisions from the 1964–1968 period became central to US nuclear policy in the decades since, today’s US policymakers seem to have either forgotten the logic behind them or come to different conclusions on all three.
The Gilpatric committee prioritized nonproliferation over competing policy interests out of concern that proliferation could not be controlled and would lead to an increased likelihood of nuclear war. But India’s acquisition of nuclear weapons—a specific concern of Gilpatric participants—did not create a large-scale proliferation cascade, nor has nuclear war occurred. And near-universal adherence to the NPT was achieved without significant new security guarantees. These facts may inform complacency among US policymakers that nonproliferation goals can be achieved without the hard choices Gilpatric members endorsed.
Indeed, some senior US officials today appear prepared to entertain just the kind of selective proliferation Gilpatric members dismissed as uncontrollable and unwise. But short of actual proliferation, a more competitive commercial nuclear environment may also motivate efforts to relax past US nonproliferation standards in nuclear cooperation negotiations, for example, with Saudi Arabia. Similarly, the economic necessity of quickly reopening the Strait of Hormuz clashes with the time necessary for negotiations to resolve the Iranian nuclear issue credibly, motivating the postponement of this international security issue in the interest of economic imperatives.
On the surface, assumptions about arms control as a tool seem steadier. With strong echoes of the dynamics at Glassboro, Biden administration officials made the case that China’s nuclear buildup will prompt US increases in response, while attempting in parallel to open an arms control dialogue. The Trump administration seems to be taking a similar approach, and as in 1967, China has to date declined dialogue.
But beneath the surface, there are important differences in logic.
Both US administrations anchored their arguments in international norms, asserting that China is obligated under the NPT to engage in vaguely-defined arms control—an argument China has forcefully rejected. To better follow the Glassboro script, US officials would instead present to China that the United States intends to address the security threat presented by China’s growing arsenal through either diplomacy or corresponding US increases, with a preference for the first. This logic is implicit in US statements today, but the 1964–1968 years show that it required more direct presentation, at the presidential level, and then a year of consideration to persuade Kosygin.
Washington’s understanding of the relationship between nonproliferation and disarmament in the NPT seems also to have changed since 1968. When this year’s treaty review conference closed without reaching a consensus result, the final US statement bemoaned the incorrect focus of many parties, arguing that the NPT is a treaty for nonproliferation, not disarmament. The US delegation correctly assessed the center of gravity for the attention of the other treaty parties: Many more speakers in the closing session expressed disappointment with respect to disarmament progress than addressed the nonproliferation challenge in Iran, putatively the cause for the broken consensus. US policymakers seem to have come to a different conclusion than their predecessors in 1968, who clearly understood that the NPT had important disarmament obligations, and that a primary purpose of the review conferences would be to assess their progress. No nuclear-weapon state at this year’s conference felt the need to pretend such progress was in evidence.
Sixty years later, it is more than fair to reevaluate—and even change—past nuclear policy decisions in the light of a new context, informed by a generation of experience implementing those decisions. Current and future US administrations could well come to different conclusions than their predecessors did during the Johnson administration. But in the 1960s, those positions were developed after extensive and serious consideration at very senior levels, exploring alternatives and laying out clearly the relevant factors. A similarly serious, open discussion should be undertaken today before changing US nuclear policy.
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