In a 1976 article in Foreign Affairs, the Kennedy School's Albert Carnesale, Paul Doty and Michael Nacht argue that "As the nuclear age lengthens and the opportunity for viewing it in perspective grows, its essential features seem increasingly related to successive eight-year American presidential administrations. Measures to control nuclear weapons have been seriously considered in each of the first four postwar "octades," and there has been an acceleration in the number of agreements reached - most notably in limiting nuclear tests, slowing nuclear proliferation, restraining the quantitative growth of the Soviet and American nuclear arsenals, and restricting defenses against nuclear weapons."

In a 1975 paper in the journal Daedalus, Paul Doty, founder of the Belfer Center, writes that "If the Vladivostok Agreement of November, 1974, is transformed into a treaty, we will have reached a turning point in the long, tortuous, frustrating effort to bring strategic nuclear weapons under control. This turning point will not necessarily be a breakthrough, however; no substantial controls on existing or planned strategic weapons systems will have been accomplished. Still, some essential steps have been taken."

"Not since Franklin Roosevelt's draft law cleared the House of Representatives by one vote in the summer of 1941 had a President been put to so stern a challenge by Congress on a major question of national defense," Paul Doty writes. "Richard Nixon had staked his prestige on a no-compromise commitment to the view that a beginning on the Safeguard anti-ballistic-missile (ABM) system was " absolutely essential" to America's security. Precisely half the U.S. Senate said he was wrong. In the showdown last week, Mr. Nixon won . . . . But the hairbreadth margin of his victory--51 to 50 on the critical test vote—put the President and the military on notice that their will in defense matters, unchallenged for a generation, would no longer pass without question."

"To speak of the community of science and the search for peace at this moment of history may seem anachronistic, if not actually pretentious. To many people, external suspicions and internal doubts seem to have robbed science of the self-confidence and sense of purpose that have given it the coherence of a community. To all who have for years striven to end the Vietnam War, the suggestion that peace requires only a search may seem empty and superficial," writes Paul Doty, founder of the Belfer Center, a biological scientist and proponent of international peace and security, "To contest these points and give substance to this title requires our stepping back into a larger frame of time and freeing ourselves from some of these moods of the moment"

In analyzing the growing Vietnam protest movement at the time, Belfer Center founder Paul Doty writes that, "One person can at most add only a drop to the oceans of reporting and analysis of student protest.... It is neither valid nor useful to think only of the radicals and the rest. A recent survey of student attitudes (January 1969) makes this clear. This is the spectrum which emerged: revolutionaries, 3 percent; radical dissidents, 10 percent; reformers, 39 percent; moderates, 37 percent; conservatives, 11 percent. Thus only a quarter are at the extremes while three-quarters dominate the broad middle ground; it is these who will surely determine what is to become permanent from this cultural revolution."

"The decision which the [Harvard] Faculty faces on Tuesday with respect to the Vietnam War motion may be of such consequence that I should like to correct beforehand some misrepresentations of my own involvement in the issue," Paul Doty, founder of Harvard's Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Department, wrote in a letter in the Boston Globein defense of the Faculty's motion to officially oppose the Vietnam War.

"As France greeted the fifteenth year of the nuclear age with the explosion of her first atomic bomb, the nuclear club expanded for the first time in nearly eight years. Without international agreements or a display of national self-control uncommon to these times, admissions will come with much greater frequency. Today the smaller powers, the twenty-odd nations that by their own efforts could gain admittance to the club within another eight years, await their inevitable rendezvous with Mephistopheles," wrote Paul Doty, founder of the Belfer Center, about the prospects of the expansion of the worlds most exclusive club, that of the nuclear powers.