William Kaufmann

William Weed Kaufmann (November 10, 1918 – December 14, 2008) was an American nuclear strategist and adviser to seven defense secretaries, who advocated for a shift from the strategy of massive retaliation against the Soviet Union in the event of a nuclear strike.

Early life Kaufmann was born in Manhattan on November 10, 1918, to Charles and Antoinette Kaufmann.

He was on the faculty at the Yale Institute of International Studies until 1951, when he was part of a group that left and founded Princeton University's Center of International Studies. While at Princeton in the mid-1950s, he wrote "Limited War", a, paper that argued for expansion of the conventional armies of Western Europe, instead of a reliance on nuclear weapons, to forestall an invasion by the Soviet Union. In 1956, he was hired by the RAND Corporation. He became a member of the political science faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1961 and also took a position that same year with the United States Department of Defense, splitting his time between both for several years.

In a report written with John D. Steinbruner in 1991 for the Brookings Institution, after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Kaufmann opined that the US could meet its post-Cold War defense obligations after cutting military spending by a third. The report noted that "the future ability of the United States to maintain the conditions of its security will depend as much on its moral authority, diplomatic skills and economic assets as on its military capabilities."