The Disarming Director

Sanford Gottlieb '46 retired at the end of 1993. Sort of. When your profession has also been your life, it's hard to walk away.

That's why at age 73 Gottlieb remains a vocal supporter of nuclear disarmament— the cause for which he worked almost his entire professional career as a director of various arms-control groups. When India and Pakistan tested nuclear weapons and when Congress prepared to vote on the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty in 1999, Gotdieb's op-ed pieces appeared in newspapers across the country.

Gottlieb deplores Congress's October vote against ratifying the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. "I think it has to be seen as part of a bigger picture. Its defeat indicates kind of a cavalier attitude toward international cooperation in general, and arms control in particular," he says. "If this prevails—and I don't think it will—it means the United States will increasingly isolate itself and live in a more dangerous world."

Gottlieb began working as a political action director for the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy in Washington, D.C., in 1960. The arms-control groups he worked with for 34 years helped secure a limited nuclear test-ban treaty during John F. Kennedy's presidency and helped keep the Vietnam War from escalating. His first book, Defense Addiction: Can America Kick the Habit? (West view Press, 1995), advocates a leaner military committed to peace-keeping operations. Gottlieb continues to do battle through occasional lectures and as a board member of 20/20 Vision, a grassroots environmental and peace organization based in D.C.

In 1965 Gottlieb, right, with Dr. Benjamin Spock and Socialist presidential candidate Norman Thomas, organized the first big non-student march onWashington against the Vietnam war.