Michael Quinlan (civil servant)
British civil servant
Sir Michael Edward Quinlan, GCB (11 August 1930 – 26 February 2009) was a former British defence strategist and former Permanent Under-Secretary of State for Defence, who wrote and lectured on defence and matters of international security, especially nuclear weapon policies and doctrine, and also on concepts of 'Just War' and related ethical issues.
Early life
Quinlan was born on 11 August 1930 in Hampton, Middlesex, England to Gerald and Roseanne Quinlan. He was educated at Wimbledon College, the Jesuit boys' high school. From 1948 to 1952 he attended Merton College, Oxford, graduating with a double first in Classics. He completed his national service in the RAF between 1952 and 1954.
Civil Service career
In 1954, Quinlan joined the Air Ministry as a civil servant. He was Private Secretary to two Chiefs of the Air Staff: Sir Thomas Pike from 1962 to 1963, and Sir Charles Elworthy from 1963 to 1965. From 1968 to 1970 he became Director of Defence Policy dealing with arms control issues from where he moved to become the Defence Counsellor in the UK Delegation to NATO until 73. He was Deputy Secretary (policy and programmes) at the Ministry of Defence (MoD) from 1977 to 1981. He was Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Defence from 1988 to 1992.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 29, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6833666. VIAF identifies the subject as 19817545. The Library of Congress control number is n2005007117. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1930, 2009, 1948 and 1952.
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This entry incorporates text from “Michael Quinlan (civil servant)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.