Michael Krepon

I'm the co-founder of the Stimson Center, ranked among he top ten think tanks in the United States focusing on hard problems of international security. I've received the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s lifetime achievement award for my work to prevent the testing and use of nuclear weapons, to prohibit chemical weapons, to promote confidence and security building measures in South Asia, and to prevent warfare in space.

My story, like so many others, begins with an immigrant’s tale -- a frightened ten-year old girl who made her way with an older brother from the Lithuanian-Polish border to Ellis Island. That girl, my mother, joined the rest of her family in Dorchester, Massachusetts, where my grandfather, an inn-keeper in the Old Country, set up a small convenience store. My mother found the love of her life hanging around that store. My father's parents emigrated from Ukraine. Born in America, he dropped the last two syllables from his name to improve his prospects in life when he married. When my father could afford the down payment on a six-room house, he moved the family out of our tenement apartment to Sharon, Massachusetts. My parents wanted their children to do what they couldn't. Their dreams, including going to college, were invested in my sisters and me, and we are a reflection of them.

When I was thirteen, my dad, a blue-collar worker, succumbed to cancer – probably from making munitions at the Watertown Arsenal during World War II. With the help of civic organizations in Sharon, I received enough money to enter Franklin & Marshall College. I worked my way through college, starting as a dishwasher. With the help of a history teacher, I discovered, like the Scarecrow in the Wizard of Oz, that I had a brain. I then went to The Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies where I studied diplomacy and the Middle East. To pass my Arabic proficiency exam, I spent the summer of 1969 at Berkeley, where I learned much besides Arabic. I spent the summer of 1970 at the American University in Cairo, when I seized the opportunity to travel to Syria, Lebanon and upper Egypt.

I also majored in anti-war activism at graduate school. After returning from Cairo, I helped start up a non-profit to help my fellow citizens rethink the Vietnam War and U.S. foreign policy. Then I worked on Capitol Hill. After Jimmy Carter’s election, I joined the State Department, where I began working on nuclear arms control. The Reagan administration wanted me to leave and, with a Council on Foreign Relations Fellowship, I wrote my first book at Princeton. After returning to Washington, I worked at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace for six years before co-founding the Stimson Center in 1989.

Our founding motto at Stimson was “Pragmatic Steps Toward Ideal Objectives.” Stimson is ranked in the top one per cent of all U.S. think tanks even though we still lack an endowment. We excel at policy entrepreneurship and helping young talent advance professionally. After stepping down as the founding President and CEO of Stimson in 2000, I taught for nine years at the University of Virginia as a professor of practice in the Politics Department, while continuing to work on my projects at Stimson.

I’ve written and edited twenty-three books and monographs. Most are collective efforts resulting from Stimson programming. My newest book is my most ambitious: "Winning and Losing the Nuclear Peace: The Rise, Demise, and Revival of Arms Control." I’ve also written over 500 articles. My weekly blog posts at armscontrolwonk.com reach 30,000 readers. I also write occasionally for Forbes.com.

Having raised two kids who now have kids of their own, my wife, Sandra Savine, and I have settled on nine acres of woods, moss and ferns in North Garden, Virginia, near Charlottesville.