George Bunn (diplomat)

George Bunn (May 26, 1925 – April 21, 2013) was an American diplomat, lawyer, and nonproliferation expert. He drafted the legislation that created the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (ACDA), was one of the lead U.S. negotiators of the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), served as Dean of the law school at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and spent the last two decades of his career at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University.

Bunn was born on May 26, 1925, in St. Paul, Minnesota, to Charles Bunn (lawyer and professor) and Harriet Foster Bunn (an author, noted particularly for children’s books such as Circus Boy). He grew up primarily in St. Paul and Madison, Wisconsin.

Bunn studied electrical engineering in the Navy during World War II at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. After the war, he studied physics, but after reading the Acheson-Lillienthal plan for nuclear disarmament and hearing some of the debate over civilian control of the atom, he concluded that global treaties would be needed to control nuclear weapons, and that lawyers would be needed to negotiate these treaties. "As a result," he told an interviewer, "I went to law school to try and save the world from The Bomb." He graduated from Columbia Law School in 1950.

Bunn married the former Fralia Hancock (known as Bonnie, and later Li) in 1949. The couple had three children, Jessie, Peter, and Matthew. They divorced in 1972.

In 1974, Bunn married Anne Coolidge (née Anne Crosby). The two were married until 1994. Both of Bunn’s wives pre-deceased him.

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