Jonathan Dean

Dean, Jonathan
89, of Mesa, AZ, formerly of Great Falls, Virginia, passed away on January 15, 2014. Former Ambassador Jonathan Dean joined the U. S. Foreign Service in 1949 after combat infantry service in Europe in World War II. In the Foreign Service, he worked mainly on issues of East-West relations, disarmament, and international peacekeeping. In the middle fifties, he helped establish the new Federal German armed forces and helped with German entry into NATO. In the early 1960's, he was Principal Officer in Elisabethville, Katanga during the Tshombe secession and the UN peacekeeping intervention in the Congo, and then Deputy Director of the Office of United Nations Political affairs, Department of State, where he worked on peacekeeping, economic sanctions, and Security Council affairs. He was deputy US negotiator for the 1971 quadripartite agreement on Berlin, which ended three decades of dangerous East-West wrangling over the city. From 1973 to 1981, he was deputy US Representative and then US Representative to the NATO-Warsaw Pact force reduction negotiations in Vienna (MBFR Talks). In 1982, Ambassador Dean joined the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace as resident associate for arms control and European security issues. From 1984 until his retirement in 2006, he was an advisor on arms control and international security issues to the Union of Concerned Scientists, one of the largest public interest organizations working on questions of environmental and international security. He was the author of several books on European security, including Ending Europe's Wars (Twentieth Century Fund Press, 1994), and co-author of the Nuclear Turning Point (Brookings Press, 1999). Ambassador Dean is a former president of the United Nations Association of the Washington, DC metropolitan region, a graduate of the National War College, and had a PhD in political science from George Washington University. He worked on a wide range of issues, including nuclear weapons, missile defense, space weapons, terrorism, and how to reduce the frequency of internal and interstate armed conflict until he moved to Arizona in 2011. The main focus of his work since leaving the Foreign Service was on prevention of armed conflict. Working with Randall Forsberg and Saul Mendlovitz, of Rutgers University Law School, he launched a program of conflict reduction called Global Action to Prevent War (globalactionpw.org) based on the idea that it was possible by combining conflict prevention, peacekeeping and disarmament into an integrated package step by step to lower the level or organized armed violence in the world. He believed that the desire of the people for peace would motivate professional peacekeepers to articulate new conflict control measures in a process of control over armed violence. He worked continually to that end. He loved his large family, especially his wife and his brother David, and also Vienna operetta, accordion playing, and rose growing. Services will be held on Saturday, January 18 at 10:00 a.m. at Living Faith Anglican Church of Mesa, Legacy Retirement House, 5625 E. McKellips, Mesa, Arizona.