(b. January 16, 1907; October 19, 2004) Investment banker; important architect of U.S. national security policy during the Cold War, and arms control negotiator during the presidencies of Richard M. Nixon and Ronald Reagan.

Paul Nitze entered government service in 1940 after a decade as an investment banker in New York. At the end of World War II, he was vice chair of the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, an official study of the air war against Germany and Japan. The report he helped write emphasized that atomic bombs were important but not necessarily decisive weapons and that nations had to prepare for prolonged warfare in the nuclear age. After working on the Marshall Plan for postwar aid to Europe, Nitze became chair of the State Department's Policy Planning Staff in 1950. The Soviet detonation of an atomic device in August 1949, which ended the U.S. nuclear monopoly, and the Communist...