President Obama’s trip to Moscow to hammer out nuclear arms reductions is the first concrete step towards the fulfilment of a long and passionately held vision: a nuclear-free world.

In a student magazine article written 26 years ago, at the height of the Cold War, the Columbia postgraduate weighed up how the United States and Russia might “dial down the danger humanity faces” in pursuit of total nuclear disarmament.

Mr Obama is the first US President to begin setting out a step-by-step agenda for eliminating nuclear weapons from the face of the Earth.

His stance has brought him as much condemnation as approval, with opponents denouncing him as naive and dangerous in a world where more and more rogue nations are joining the nuclear race.

But few people are aware of how far back his mulling of the issue goes, or how passionately it was held. The 1983 article in Sundial, Columbia University’s campus magazine, was thought lost until a classmate, Stephen Brockmann, found the issue while “rummaging through some old stuff”. He said: “I could hardly believe my eyes.”

Michael Baron, who taught the future President international relations and American policy at Columbia, recalled that Mr Obama wrote him a paper on the same subject, analysing how an American president might go about negotiating a nuclear arms reduction with the Russians — precisely the challenge that he faces today.

“His focus was the nature of strategic talks and what kind of negotiating positions might be put forward,” Dr Baron told The New York Times. “It was not a polemical paper — not arguing that the US should have this or that position. It was how to get from here to there and avoid misperception or conflict.”

It is unlikely that the President will be re-reading his paper on the flight to Moscow. As he acknowledges, the world today is a very different one. But Mr Obama never forgot the nuclear-free dream in the intervening years, even allying himself with reformed Cold War warriors such as Henry Kissinger to give him political cover for his cause during the presidential campaign.

His youthful musings may be out of date, Dr Baron concedes, but they were a good start for a president who is now facing his most daunting negotiations yet.

“He got an A,” Dr Baron recalled.

Times Recommends

• The flame that was snuffed out by freedom
• The liberation of Jackie O
• Jon Bon Jovi Inc