Charles Van Doren, at 84; was arms-control specialist
WASHINGTON - Charles Norton Van Doren, a retired State Department official who served for nearly two decades as an arms-control specialist, died Aug. 23 at Sibley Memorial Hospital of congestive heart failure. He was 84.
Mr. Van Doren joined the new US Arms Control and Disarmament Agency in 1962. He served initially in the Office of General Counsel before becoming the agency's assistant director. He worked on the Limited Test Ban Treaty, the Non-Proliferation Treaty, and other international agreements designed to block the spread of nuclear weapons.
After retiring from government service in 1981, he was principal consultant on nonproliferation for suburban Ogden Environmental and Energy Services.
He wrote articles, was involved with the publication of a book on arms control for the Council on Foreign Relations, and taught seminars on nuclear energy law at Georgetown University.
In a 1981 report for the Arms Control Association, a private nonprofit group, he wrote that Israel's destruction of an Iraqi nuclear reactor near Baghdad a few months earlier had subverted international efforts to control the spread of nuclear weapons and "only invites retaliation."
He concluded that there was no evidence that Iraq was trying to develop or manufacture a nuclear explosive device.
In a 1986 letter to the editor of the New York Times, he said he had dedicated his 19-year government career to heading off the spread of nuclear weapons, and he expressed his opposition to the Reagan administration's decision to continue nuclear weapons testing. The administration had taken the position that a comprehensive test ban treaty would increase the risk of proliferation.
"Can the administration seriously believe that if there were a comprehensive test ban our North Atlantic Treaty Organization and Asian allies would decide to abandon the nonproliferation treaty and develop their own nuclear weapons as a consequence?" he wrote. "No one seriously versed in the field believes that they would respond in that way."
Mr. Van Doren was born in Orange, N.J. (The Charles Van Doren who was a figure in the TV quiz show scandals of the 1950s is a cousin.) After graduating from Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, he attended Harvard University for two years before serving in the Army in the South Pacific during World War II.
Years later, he told family members that it was in the Army that he began hearing about an emerging energy source so potent that a device smaller than an orange could power a battleship across the Pacific without refueling. Intrigued, he began to investigate nuclear energy.
After the United States dropped bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he resolved that his life's work would be to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons.
He received his undergraduate degree from Harvard in 1946. After getting his law degree from Columbia University in 1949, he joined his father's New York law firm, Simpson, Thacher & Bartlett. He worked on energy and public utility issues for 13 years before moving to Washington and joining the State Department.
A gifted amateur pianist, accompanist, and composer, he was a member of the Friday Morning Music Club and composed settings of poems by e.e. cummings, Browning, Frost, and others.
His marriage to Doris Charter Goldman Van Doren ended in divorce.
He leaves his wife of 41 years, Regina Mary Ridder Van Doren of Washington; four children from his first marriage, Hal of Charles Town, W.Va., Catherine Harris Monnes of Charlottesville, Va., Rebecca Rizvi of Silver Spring, Md., and Margaret Hill of Pleasantville, N.Y.; a daughter from his second marriage, Marie Regina Mason of Charlottesville; a sister, Isabel Bulckens Van Doren of Manassas, Va.; 13 grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren. 