William W. Kaufmann died on December 14, 2008, in his sleep, at the
age of 90. During the cold war, he was a key figure among the
“defense intellectuals”—less famous but more influential than
most—who moved freely from think tanks to the Pentagon to academia
and back again, crafting the theories of nuclear deterrence and
translating them to policy. Yet by the '80s, in the final, rococo
phase of the standoff, he'd come to reject much of his old thinking
and emerged, quite publicly, as one of the defense establishment's
most accredited critics.