This document includes accounts of several conversations between Soviet officials and US diplomats, including Andrei Gromyko for the Soviets, and Dean Rusk and Arthur Goldberg for the Americans. The most pressing topic discussed during these meetings was figuring out mutually acceptable language to mollify Soviet demands that the NPT contain explicit prohibitions on the transfer of nuclear weapons to non-nuclear countries not just directly but through a military alliance, namely, NATO, remembering previous US attempts to nuclearize NATO through the Multilateral Force (MLF). Some attention is paid to fears not just of the Soviet Union but the US and other NATO allies as well about the FRG acquiring nuclear weapons. In addition to the focus on the semantic differences in the Soviet and American drafts of the NPT, the document emphasizes that one key area of common ground between the Soviets and Americans is the importance that an agreement be reached sooner rather than later before more countries acquire nuclear capabilities.

This conversation between Rusk and Baron Guttenberg, a top official on Kiesinger’s staff and the CDU foreign policy spokesperson, demonstrated that accepting Bonn’s suggestions for the NPT draft had not made it more acceptable to the West Germans. Guttenberg emphasized the importance of a limited duration clause and the need for the Soviet Union to make a “counter-concession” in exchange for a West German signature on an NPT.

During this meeting, Brandt and Rusk discussed the French attitude toward a West German signature on the NPT, thew problem of "duration", and suggestions for mitigating the West German concerns. Brandt said that De Gaulle “expected” Bonn to sign but if that de Gaulle was asked for advice, he would recommend that Germany not sign.

In this conversation, Ambassador Knappstein expressed concern over the draft of the NPT that Washington and Moscow had agreed on. Knappstein worried that the draft articles would foreclose “all of the available options for participation in nuclear defense."

In this message, Secretary Rusk reported to President Johnson that the Soviet non-transfer principle, which ruled out MLF-type arrangements but left open other alternatives, was a “good formulation” that would be “acceptable” to the incipient West German “Grand Coalition” government.

In the U.S. Ambassador to NATO Harlen Cleveland's notes on his meeting with Secretary Rusk, Cleveland details Rusk's thoughts about Soviet interest in the NPT. According to the Secretary, the “Soviets should have no real difficulty in finding a common interest with us in signing a treaty which enshrines [the] two self-denying provisions” of no-transfer to non-nuclear weapons states and “no relinquishment of control by the US over US warheads.”

In this memorandum, McNamara, Rusk, and Adrian Fisher discuss amendments and language of the NPT treaty that was in stalemate that summer. Fisher saw the 1954 Atomic Energy Act, with its prohibition of the “transfer of atomic weapons to any other country,” as providing model language for an NPT because it was compatible with the bilateral agreements.

This wide-ranging discussion between Rusk and Polish Deputy Foreign Minister Jozef Winiewicz on European security, nuclear weapons, and the problem of German reunification illuminated U.S. and Polish concerns about the future of Germany.

In this broad discussion, one of the topics was the report on nuclear proliferation by a presidentially-appointed committee chaired by former Deputy Secretary of Defense Roswell Gilpatric. The Gilpatric report left open a controversial issue: whether a nonproliferation policy agreement should include provisions for MLF-type arrangements or eschew them.

In this conversation, Erhard mentioned a briefing by McNamara that detailed U.S. nuclear weapons deployed in the Federal Republic. After Erhard wished that the numbers could be publicly disclosed, Ambassador George McGhee observed that it was “often overlooked that Germany was actually the third largest nuclear country in the world.”