George Perkovich

George Perkovich is the Japan Chair for a World Without Nuclear Weapons and a senior fellow in the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s Nuclear Policy Program. He works primarily on nuclear deterrence, nonproliferation, and disarmament issues.

He is the author of India’s Nuclear Bomb (University of California Press, 1999) which won the American Historical Association’s Herbert Feis award and the Association for Asian Studies’ A. K. Coomaraswamy Prize. Perkovich is co-author of, Not War, Not Peace? Motivating Pakistan to Prevent Cross-Border Terrorism (Oxford University Press, 2016), Abolishing Nuclear Weapons (Adelphi Paper 396, 2008), and Rethinking A Political Approach to Nuclear Disarmament (Carnegie, 2025).

Perkovich’s short-form writing has appeared in leading international journals and newspapers. He has advised many agencies of the U.S. government and testified before both houses of Congress. From 2003 through 2024 he was a vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment. He has been a member of the National Academy of Science’s Committee on Arms Control and International Security, the Council on Foreign Relations Task Force on Nuclear Policy, and was a principal adviser to the International Commission on Nuclear Nonproliferation and Disarmament, a joint initiative of the governments of Japan and Australia.

From 1990 to 2002, Perkovich was director of the Secure World Program at the W. Alton Jones Foundation, in Charlottesville, Virginia. From 1989-90 he served as a speechwriter and foreign policy adviser to Senator Joe Biden (D-Del.).

Perkovich received a PhD in Foreign Affairs from the University of Virginia, a MA in Soviet Studies from Harvard University, and a BA in Politics from the University of California at Santa Cruz.