The Avoiding Nuclear War program was launched in 1983, when in the year after David Hamburg became president of the foundation. “The world was in great danger,” he says, looking back. “It was our desire to mobilizethe strongest possible talent, draw upon the deepest knowledge and the most rigorous research methods to understand the sources of the danger and ways out of this predicament.”

During his presidency, which spanned the years up to 1997, the avoidance of nuclear conflict became a hallmark concern of both Hamburg and the foundation. Of his leadership on this issue, William J. Perry, U.S. Secretary of Defense in the Clinton administration and currently, co-director of The Preventive Defense Project, a research collaboration between Stanford and Harvard universities, says, “In my opinion, preventing the proliferation of nuclear weapons is the single most important security issue we face and I believe that David Hamburg contributed to the most significant and productive work in the field. He did it,” continues Perry, “with his intellectual leadership, by attracting other people to work in that field, by sponsoring first-class studies, and by influencing legislation such as Nunn-Lugar.”

Direct U.S-Soviet contacts, particularly military-to-military discussions, became of increasing importance in the early-to-mid-1980s as the Corporation focused on the threat to world peace posed by the continuing Cold War stand-off. Grantmaking during this time included major support for multidisciplinary programs (involving the physical, biological and behavioral sciences) aimed at analyzing international conflicts and illuminating policy choices that might reduce the likelihood of nuclear war.

Multi-year, million-dollar-level grants went to such institutions as Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government (for establishing methodology to examine the paths to nuclear war); the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (for its Arms Control and Defense Policy Program); and to Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Arms Control (for a project focusing on U.S.-Soviet crisis management along with a fellowship program to acquaint scientists interested in arms control and security questions with the technical, political, historical, legal and economic aspects of these issues so they would be better able to play a role in shaping effective national policies).

As the decade continued, the Corporation fostered independent research, policy analysis and dissemination among scholars and policymakers that invited both sides of the U.S.-Soviet divide into shared discussions. One such program brought together Soviet and American experts to develop a common crisis prevention framework that would keep a small incident from escalating into a nuclear conflict. Measures to strengthen the “hotline” between the two nations came out of the Corporation’s grantmaking to organizations such as Harvard’s Kennedy School and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Other related programs revolved around informal interaction between U.S. and Soviet military officers about the latest views on nuclear weapons and civilian-military relations.

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