George Bunn, a gentle spirit with a fixed resolve to help make the world less hospitable to nuclear weapons, died on Sunday. In an earlier post, I referred to George as a norm builder — one facet of a life well-lived. Some of the others can be found in this obituary released by Stanford University:
George Bunn, one of the world’s most revered advocates for a world without nuclear weapons and a consulting professor at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation for two decades, has died.
“Negotiator of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, dean of the University of Wisconsin Law School, professor at Stanford, world traveler, mentor to many young people fighting the good fight for a world without nuclear weapons – and my father,” said his daughter, Jessie Bunn. “Let’s remember him with love and funny stories.”
A memorial service will be held this summer in Palo Alto, where Bunn still played his flute and sang in the church choir, and home to Stanford University, where he could be seen riding his bike to his office in Encina Hall well into his 80s.
His family said Bunn, 87, died of spinal cancer on Sunday.
Bunn studied engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and joined the Navy toward the end of World War II. In 1945, Ensign Bunn joined the crew of the USS Logan, a Navy troop transport ship bound for the invasion of Japan. The atomic bombs dropped by the United States on Hiroshima and Nagasaki prevented that tour.
“As he was to have been part of the force to invade Japan, he was convinced that the atomic bomb saved his life – yet he devoted most of the rest of his life to the effort to bring the fearsome power of nuclear weapons under international control,” said his son, Matthew Bunn, himself a nuclear nonproliferation scholar at Harvard’s Belfer Center.
Bunn was a leading figure in the early days of nuclear arms control in the 1960s. During the Kennedy administration, he drafted the legislation that created the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency and became the agency’s first general counsel.
He is best known for having helped negotiate the 1968 nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), the landmark international compact that helped to curtail the use of nuclear weapons worldwide… Bunn later became U.S. ambassador to the Geneva Disarmament Conference, and taught as the U.S. Naval War College and the University of Wisconsin Law School, where he also served as dean.