“I often joke that I am a Sputnik baby,” Rose Gottemoeller said at the FAIR GAME: Women Leaders for Nuclear Security summit in Washington D.C.
When she was 4 years old, she remembers, the Sputnik satellite was launched by the Soviet Union. It was not just one of her first memories, it was a memory that would shape the rest of her life.
The assistant secretary of state for the Bureau of Arms Control, Verification and Compliance spoke about the moment she saw the Sputnik satellite:
“I so starkly remember my father taking me out into the front yard and pointing to this dot of light and saying ‘that’s a Soviet satellite, the Soviets are really good at science.’”
Today, Gottemoeller has become well known for her incredible work as the United States’ chief negotiator for the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) with Russia.
If ratified by the Senate, New START will significantly decrease the number of nuclear weapons in both Russia and the United States, and will become a major stepping stone toward a world without nuclear weapons.
Amid talks of weapons of mass destruction, one of the questions Gottemoeller said the Russian negotiators asked her pretty early on was:
“Why do you have so many women on your side of the table?”
Mary Beth Sheridan of The Washington Post wrote about this shift from predominately male to female leaders at the nuclear security negotiations table. She said:
The US delegation reflected a little-noticed shift in the tough-guy world of national security. Twenty-five years after White House aide Donald Regan famously opined that women were “not going to understand throw-weights,” American females clearly get nuclear policy. They also run it. Or a lot of it, anyway.
Not only is Gottemoeller a tough-as-nails negotiator and trailblazer for women in politics; she is also a wife and a mother. At the summit, she spoke to the group of women about juggling these very important aspects of her life.
In 1993, Madeleine Albright offered her a job on the National Security Council during the Clinton administration. She was asked to help bring about the denuclearization of Kazakhstan, Ukraine and Belarus.
Gottemoeller said, “When the Soviet Union fell apart, they were left with several thousand nuclear weapons on their territories.”
After she was asked to take on this important job, she said, “I sat down with my husband and said, ‘What do you think?’” Her kids were young at the time, and her husband said, “You know, you will never forgive yourself if you do not take advantage of this opportunity.”
She and her husband made a deal: Two years devoted to this work, and he would take charge of the parenting.
Gottemoeller kept to the deal and in that time she says, “We brought START into force in November of 1994 and we brought Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Belarus into the Non-Proliferation Treaty as non-nuclear weapon states at the Budapest Summit in 1994. I left the White House about three weeks later.”
Today Rose Gottemoeller is a role model to many. Because of women like her, more and more females are stepping into leadership roles and bringing their power and intellect from the back of the room to the front of the table.
This article was originally published on TakePart in October 2010 and was written by Jenny Inglee.
Photo by US Mission Geneva via Flickr.