Gottfried has served on the senior staff of the European Center for Nuclear Research in Geneva and is a former chair of the Division of Particles and Fields of the American Physical Society. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Council on Foreign Relations.

He has served on the board of the Union of Concerned Scientists(UCS) since its inception and led the UCS critique of the "Star Wars" program. He is the author of Quantum Mechanics and Concepts of Particle Physics, and senior author of The Fallacy of Star Wars and Crisis Stability and Nuclear War.