Nitze’s committee had done much to propagate the idea during Carter’s years in the White House, and Reagan named Nitze to be his chief arms negotiator. The chief Soviet affairs specialist on the National Security Council now was Richard Pipes, a Russian history professor at Harvard who had recently written a widely read essay in Commentary magazine called “Why the Soviet Union Thinks It Could Fight and Win a Nuclear War,” which implied that the United States should start thinking along the same lines. A young scholar named Keith Payne, who had coauthored an article in Foreign Policy called
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