It is with sadness that we record the death of Simon Lunn, who dedicated over four decades to the cause of transatlantic security, arms control, and parliamentary diplomacy. He will be remembered for building bridges between the parliaments and peoples of the Euro-Atlantic community in pursuit of greater stability and mutual security.
Simon Lunn was a British Army officer turned defence analyst and international civil servant whose career spanned the Cold War and its aftermath. Over more than four decades, he moved from military service, through arms-control research in Washington and London, into the heart of NATO’s policy machinery, then to eighteen years at the NATO Parliamentary Assembly (NATO PA), of which he headed for a decade.
In retirement, he remained an active voice on European security as a Senior Associate Fellow at the European Leadership Network (ELN), a Senior Fellow at the Centre for the Democratic Control of the Armed Forces / Geneva Centre for Security Sector Governance (DCAF), and a Consultant to the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI).
Contribution and commitment to peace and security
Across sectors — military, legislative-research, NATO staff, and parliamentary diplomacy — Simon’s career followed a consistent thread: the belief that security in the Euro-Atlantic area depended on strong institutions, verified arms control, and the inclusion of democratic voices, especially those of newly democratic states, in shaping and ensuring the security order.
His work at the Congressional Research Service placed him at the centre of the 1979 NATO Double Track Decision, one of the most consequential and controversial arms control episodes of the Cold War, in which the Alliance paired the deployment of intermediate-range nuclear forces with an offer to negotiate their limitation. This framework eventually helped pave the way for the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty and the elimination of an entire class of nuclear missiles from both the American and Soviet arsenals.
As Head of Plans and Policy on NATO’s International Staff, Simon was directly engaged in laying the groundwork for the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (CFE), one of the most far-reaching conventional arms control agreements in Europe, which imposed verified limits on heavy military equipment for both NATO and the former Warsaw Pact, building trust and reducing deployments around the former line of conflict.
However, it was at the NATO Parliamentary Assembly that his contribution to defence and security took its most distinctive and lasting form. As the Cold War ended, Simon recognised early that the durability of the new European security order would depend not only on treaties between governments but also on building genuine institutional and democratic ties with the parliaments of Central and Eastern Europe.
The outreach and partnership programme he initiated as Deputy Secretary General, which he expanded and led as Secretary General for a decade, gave elected representatives from post-communist states a structured route into the Alliance’s political community, well before and alongside their countries’ formal NATO accession — a form of parliamentary diplomacy that he argued could open doors that official government channels sometimes could not. For his contributions to the post-Soviet States, he was awarded the Commander of the Order of Lithuanian Grand Duke Gediminas in 2001, the Georgian Medal of Honour in 2010, and the Baltic Assembly Medal in 2012.
In the final chapter of his career, at the European Leadership Network and beyond, he turned his decades of institutional experience towards the resurgent nuclear and conventional risks of the 2020s, co-authoring analysis on Russia’s missile posture and on NATO’s ability to make good on its collective-defence commitments — work that carried the same underlying conviction that had run through his career from the 1970s onward: that peace in Europe had to be actively built, verified, and defended through institutions, not simply assumed.
Biography
Early life and education
Simon was born in 1941 in Margate, Kent and educated at Chatham House Grammar School in Ramsgate, where he excelled at sport, to the detriment of his academic studies. He later played field hockey for Wales, earning his first senior international cap against Spain in March 1970.
Simon’s professional journey into defence and security began with his entry to the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, which he attended from 1960 to 1962, before he was commissioned as an officer in the British Army. He served as a Junior Officer in the Royal Artillery from 1962 to 1965.
He returned to academic study in 1967, earning a BA (Hons) in History from the University of Wales, Lampeter, followed by an MA in War Studies at King’s College London from 1970 to 1973, where he stayed to work on policy and research for a further year.
Early career: Research and policy analysis (1970s–1983)
Simon built a career as a defence and arms-control analyst on both sides of the Atlantic.
From 1974 to 1978, he was Director of the Military Committee of the North Atlantic Assembly – his first engagement with the Parliamentary Assembly.
From 1979 to 1981, he worked in the US Congressional Research Service (CRS), preparing reports for the US Congress on NATO strategy and on the 1979 “dual-track” decision on intermediate-range nuclear forces (INF) — one of the defining and most contested nuclear-policy debates of the late Cold War.
From 1981-1982, he worked as a Research Fellow at Chatham House, then moved to an advisory role in the Cabinet of the President of the European Parliament from 1982-83, before joining NATO’s International Staff.
NATO International Staff (1983–1988)
In 1983, Simon was appointed Head of the Plans and Policy Section of NATO’s International Staff, a post he held until 1988. In this role, he was involved in all aspects of Alliance defence and force planning, conventional arms control, and preparations for the negotiations leading to the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (CFE). This landmark agreement placed verified limits on conventional military equipment across the continent.
The NATO Parliamentary Assembly: Deputy Secretary General and Secretary General (1989–2007)
Simon moved to the NATO Parliamentary Assembly, the independent inter-parliamentary organisation founded in 1955 to give elected representatives of NATO member states a direct voice in Alliance affairs. He served for approximately eight years as Deputy Secretary General, during which he initiated and directed the Assembly’s outreach programme to the parliaments of Central and Eastern Europe— work that took on historic significance as the Cold War ended. Alongside this outreach, he also engaged with Russian experts and the Duma.
He was appointed Secretary General of the NATO Parliamentary Assembly in 1997, a post he held for a decade until 2007. He was one of only three UK nationals ever to hold the post, following Douglas Robinson (1955–1960) and his successor, David Hobbs (2007–2019).
As Secretary General, he continued and deepened the Assembly’s programme of partnership and assistance to the parliaments of Central and Eastern Europe, helping newly democratic legislatures build the institutional capacity to engage with, and eventually accede to, the Alliance. Describing the Assembly’s purpose in a 2005 interview, he explained that it existed to bring together a broad cross-section of parliamentarians from across the Alliance’s member states, reflecting the full spectrum of political opinion within NATO, and operated without any formal treaty basis — a body created by parliamentarians themselves, at the height of the Cold War, in the belief that questions of war and peace were too important to be left to governments alone.
Simon was a proponent of the unique value of parliamentary engagement in diplomacy, observing that parliamentarians could often open channels of contact with countries beyond NATO’s borders, including, at the time, the states of the South Caucasus, Central Asia, and the Mediterranean, more readily than official government engagement allowed.
Later career: Senior Associate Fellow, European Leadership Network (2007–2026); Senior Fellow, Centre for the Democratic Control of Armed Forces (DCAF) (2007-2016); Consultant, Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI) (2011)
Following his retirement from the NATO Parliamentary Assembly, Simon remained based in Brussels and continued to work on Euro-Atlantic security as a Senior Associate Fellow of the European Leadership Network (ELN), a think tank focused on reducing nuclear risk and strengthening European security cooperation.
In this capacity, he co-authored a series of policy briefs with fellow ELN Senior Associate Fellow Nicholas Williams OBE, a former long-serving member of NATO’s International Staff. He contributed to numerous events and analyses of nuclear and conventional arms control, NATO strategy, and next-generation mentorship.
Simon also worked closely with the Nuclear Threat Initiative in 2011, contributing to NTI’s report on Reducing Nuclear Risks in Europe. In this work, he brought his deep experience and uniquely sharp analysis to NATO’s 2010 Strategic Concept and the ongoing Deterrence and Defense Posture Review that was tasked from it. In 2016, he again joined forces with NTI, working with Isabelle Williams and Steve Andreasen on a new paper, “NATO’s Nuclear Future: Deter, Reassure, Engage?” The paper, looking ahead to the 2016 NATO summit during an increasingly tense moment in Euro-Atlantic security, argued that in defending its core interests, NATO should demonstrate a willingness to engage Russia on both differences and areas of potential cooperation, and seek to reduce tensions in a region that remains central to global security.