Short answers, pulled from the story.
Raymond L. Garthoff was an American diplomat and scholar born on the 26th of March, 1929, and died on the 7th of December, 2024. He was a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a specialist in arms control, the Cold War, NATO, and the former Soviet Union. He served as U.S. Ambassador to Bulgaria and was executive secretary of the U.S. delegation to the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks beginning in 1969.
Beginning in 1969, Garthoff served as executive secretary of the U.S. delegation to the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks. He described himself as "the regular Department representative on the verification panel working group," the main working group for SALT I preparations. In September 1970, he became deputy director of the State Department's Bureau of Political-Military Affairs.
Garthoff disagreed with the 1976 Team B characterization, championed by Richard Pipes, of Soviet nuclear doctrine as accepting nuclear war as winnable. Garthoff argued this was an overstatement that distorted what Soviet military thinking actually said. His 1990 book Deterrence and the Revolution in Soviet Military Doctrine addressed this question at length.
His major works include Detente and Confrontation (1985, revised 1994), covering American-Soviet relations from 1970 to 1980; The Great Transition (1994, 834 pages), covering 1981 to 1991; and Reflections on the Cuban Missile Crisis (revised 1989). His memoir, A Journey Through the Cold War, was published in 2001.
Before joining the State Department in the early 1960s, Garthoff was a Soviet analyst at the RAND Corporation from 1950 to 1957, then an analyst in the CIA's Office of National Estimates from 1957 to 1961. He earned a B.A. from Princeton in 1948 and a PhD from Yale in 1951.
Raymond Garthoff died on the 7th of December, 2024, at the age of 95. He died at a retirement community in Mitchellville.