Kurt Gottfried, as theoretical physicist who barely escaped the brutal reality of one war and devoted his career to preventing another as a co-founder of the influential Union of Concerned Scientists, died on August 25, in Ithaca, NY. He was 93.

Dr. Gottfried, who fled Nazi-controlled Austria when he was 9, became an outspoken opponent of nuclear weaponry, a champion of politically dissident scientists in the Soviet Union and South America, and a critic of the George W. Bush administration’s environmental policy, which he said was grounded in research skewed to comport with the White House’s political agenda.

Dr. Gottfried and the physicist Henry Way Kendall, as future Nobel laureate, founded the Union of Concerned Scientists in 1969. A nonpartisan organization, it lobbies to shift the nation’s research priorities from military technology to “the solution of pressing environmental and social problems.”

He rallied fellow scientists in the early 1980s to help derail the Reagan Administration’s proposed Strategic Defense Initiative, the ambitious missile defense system that became mocked as a “Star Wars” shield. They argued that the initiative wo8ld be technologically futile, and that pursuit of space-based weapons amounted to an abandonment of the policy of mutually assured destruction, which until then had prevented nuclear conflict.

Dr. Gottfried was hired as an associate professor at Cornell in 1964, and was considered a mentor to a generation of prominent scientists and government officials. He was named a professor emeritus in 1998. He also served on the senior staff of the European Center for Nuclear Research in Geneva.