“4. NSC-68” in “America’s Cold Warrior”
CHAPTER 4 NSC-68
“United States Objectives and Programs for National Security,” or NSC-68, will forever be linked to Paul Nitze. He did not write all of it. Yet he oversaw drafting the seventy-page paper, which he hoped the president would declassify to stimulate domestic support for increased defense spending. Nitze vigorously fought for NSC-68 to become an official US strategy, something Harry Truman did not do on April 7, 1950, when he first received it. The outbreak of the Korean War that June—and Truman’s decision to intervene in that conflict—led the president finally to sign off on it. That decision was to triple the US defense budget for the next fiscal year.
NSC-68 drew upon the United States’ founding documents—the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution—and repurposed them as part of a global struggle between freedom and slavery. It proclaimed victory over communism as the nation’s objective and destiny. Left unanswered were fundamental questions about US war aims toward the Soviet Union should deterrence fail. Nitze grappled with these in an unfinished strategy paper, NSC-79. Only through sustained personal involvement in Cold War decision making could Nitze follow through on the objectives that NSC-68 laid out. Perceptions of threat were constantly changing. Inherent in them was a tension between the US public and those entrusted with preserving its national security. Nitze was one such individual. He served for six months under President Dwight Eisenhower and would otherwise have stayed on much longer had not partisan politics intervened. A diminution of perceived threats would give the appearance that strength was no longer needed. As Nitze conceived national security practice, the sustainment of US strength was essential.
The Drafting of NSC-68
On January 17, 1950, Director of Policy Planning Paul Nitze sent Secretary of State Dean Acheson a long memorandum stitching together his thoughts about the research and employment of atomic weapons and the potential implications of moving toward an era of thermonuclear weaponry. He advocated for “go[ing] into such a study [about the consequences of pursuing a hydrogen bomb] with a preliminary presumption in favor of such a revision of our strategic plans as would permit of a use policy restricted to retaliation against prior use by an enemy.”1 Two days after Nitze’s memorandum, Acheson spoke to Admiral Sidney Souers—no longer the NSC’s executive secretary yet still a consultant—and mentioned a paper in development that would revisit fundamental assumptions about the new era and reconcile its challenges with US values.2 That project became “United States Objectives and Programs for National Security,” with the designation NSC-68.3
On January 31, 1950, following their White House conversation, President Truman wrote Acheson affirming his support for pursuing the feasibility of a hydrogen bomb and stating his intention to announce this publicly. The president also called for a “reexamination of our objectives in peace and war and of the effect of these objectives on our strategic plans, in the light of the probable fission bomb capability and possible thermonuclear bomb capability of the Soviet Union.”4
As the nucleus of strategic planning during the early days of the Cold War, the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff took up this endeavor. NSC executive secretary James Lay had taken over from Admiral Souers in 1949 and retained only a skeletal staff. There was no influential national security adviser with a team of bright minds working directly for them. And the parameters of the assignment lay outside the traditional role of the State Department as the custodian of US diplomacy. With a free hand from Secretary of State George Marshall, whom no one challenged, George Kennan had turned the office into a policy clearinghouse. The absence of a “national security” cadre under the terms of the 1947 National Security Act meant that the portfolio was up for grabs. During the challenging fall of 1949, Acheson turned to Nitze. Unelected and accountable only to the secretary and the president, he fulfilled one of the central roles of the modern-day national security adviser: crafting a national security strategy.
From February through April 1950, when the final report went to the NSC, Nitze led a team that included John Paton Davies, a China specialist, and Louis Halle, an academic. Nitze commenced drafting NSC-68 when Acheson trusted him most and when the latter commanded Truman’s attention. This was no time for prolonged reflection. Nitze regarded the prospect of war as “considerably greater” than the previous fall, which saw the Soviets detonate an atomic device and the Chinese Communist Party prevail against the nationalists. Unstated in meetings—yet present—was the fraught domestic political context. Alger Hiss was convicted of perjury. On February 9, 1950, Senator Joseph McCarthy delivered a speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, where he alleged that 205 communists were working in the State Department.
The moment demanded action, and Nitze savored the challenge. NSC-68 allowed him to apply the full scope of his talents and persuade action men wielding the levers of influence. In addition, he benefited from the presence of a bureaucratic foil—Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson, a Democratic politician and aspirant to succeed Harry Truman. Johnson had elbowed out his predecessor, James Forrestal, whom Nitze revered. In short, he encapsulated everything Nitze despised.
As Nitze recounted to the Policy Planning Staff following a meeting with Acheson on February 2, 1950, “there are an increasing number of signs of toughness on the part of the Kremlin,” and “the informal opinion of the Joint Chiefs now is that the Soviet Union could begin a major attack from a standing start so that the usual signs of mobilization and preparation would be lacking.” Moreover, there were “increasing indications that some of the basic elements of Communist dogma no longer hold” and that the Kremlin, no longer patient to sit back and watch the capitalist world collapse, would take a more active role in achieving that objective.5 It is not entirely clear what those signals were. Nevertheless, the secretary and everyone on the policy planning team shared a sense of urgency.
On February 8, Nitze distributed to State Department principals a study titled “Recent Soviet Moves,” in which he made sure that they recalled Joseph Stalin’s February 1946 speech—“an open declaration of hostility”—and concluded that “since that time the USSR has given every sign that it neither intends to abandon the struggle, other than on its own terms, nor pause in its prosecution.” Instead, expediency guided the actions of Soviet leaders. “As the USSR has already committed itself to the defeat of the US,” Nitze continued, “Soviet policy is guided by the simple consideration of weakening the world power position of the US.”6
This did not mean that Moscow was plotting a surprise attack. Instead, Soviet leaders were demonstrating a greater tolerance of risk—bordering on recklessness—based on calculations that US power was evaporating and that the communist world could weaken it further. Its actions suggested “a greater willingness than in the past to undertake a course of action, including a possible use of force in local areas, which might lead to an accidental outbreak of general military conflict.” The “chance of war through miscalculation” had thus gone up at the same time that both sides in the Cold War had added atomic bombs to their stockpiles. Soviet acquisition of atomic technology had increased the chances of accidental war by emboldening the Kremlin to take more significant risks.
“In assuming the risks involved in exploiting its present opportunities and in dealing with its imperial problems,” Nitze went on to say, “Moscow appears to be animated by a general sense of confidence.” He considered that confidence to be justified. “[Moscow] has developed an A-bomb; it has achieved the prewar level of production and other solid economic successes; it has made progress in consolidating its control over the European satellites; and it has apparently effected an increase in the prestige of the Communist Party among the Russian people.” Moreover, leaders in the Kremlin interpreted the economic travails of Western Europe through the lens of Marxist–Leninist ideology, which predicted a coming crisis within the capitalist world, one in which nations would turn on each other. “Moscow’s faith in the inevitable disintegration of capitalism is not a passive faith in automatic historical evolution,” according to Nitze. “Instead, it is a messianic faith that not only spurs the USSR to assist the transformation of the Marxist blueprint into a reality, but also gives the Soviet leaders a sense of confidence that in whatever particular course they follow they are riding the wave of the future.”7 It was entirely plausible that Kremlin leaders would decide that “the wave of the future” meant jettisoning patience that capitalism would collapse on its own.
The best way to counter Soviet leaders’ expectations to capitalize on divisions within the Western world, according to Nitze, was to convince them to weigh the relative gains as a result of their actions against the relative costs. In the near term, US policy makers could expect that Soviet leaders would test US resolve in areas such as Indochina, Berlin, Austria, the UN, and the Korean peninsula—this last being outside the US defensive perimeter, as Secretary Acheson had publicly stated on January 12.8 Intent on establishing and maintaining effective Soviet control in China, Kremlin leaders looked to focus on Southeast Asia and tighten rules over indigenous communist parties everywhere. And Nitze was confident that US leaders could demonstrate that the costs of Soviet aggression would outweigh the gains.
Nitze summed up his response to Truman’s January 31 directive: the United States needed to restore its strength. Preparedness lay at the heart of deterring Soviet aggression. Deterrence in peacetime necessitated acquiring the means to prevail in wartime. Nitze had arrived at similar conclusions in the Summary Report (Pacific War). Pearl Harbor was the great negative example in the leadup to US involvement in World War II—never again could something like that be allowed to occur. In overseeing NSC-68, a collective enterprise in which Nitze claimed no sole authorship, the central theme was restoring US strength to preserve the core values on which the nation was founded. No constitutional scholar, Nitze based his understanding on the words of the founding documents and his conclusion that in 1941 US weakness had provoked the Japanese attack.
How would the Soviets respond to the restoration of US strength? According to the model of the “security dilemma” in the academic field of international relations, a state can sometimes take actions to enhance its security such that a rival state perceives those seemingly defensive measures as threatening. Nitze rejected the notion that the United States and the Soviet Union shared culpability for the outbreak of the Cold War. In his view, Soviet probing and risk-taking had commenced when the United States had rapidly demobilized after Japan’s surrender in the summer of 1945. In February and March 1950, he brought distinguished consultants who entertained variations of the security dilemma (though they did not call it such) in meetings at the State Department. These included Oppenheimer, Harvard University president James Conant, former under secretary of state (and future secretary of defense) Robert Lovett, and nuclear physicist Ernest Lawrence. Nevertheless, no one could assuage Nitze’s conviction that the prudent way forward could be anything less than to build US and allied military capabilities to a level previously unprecedented in peacetime.9
Nitze gathered support from key allies to co-opt or neutralize potential critics of increased defense spending. He did so in the same way as brokering a Wall Street deal: this required discretion, tact, and guile.10 The drafting of NSC-68 culminated with a contentious interagency meeting held in the Policy Planning Staff’s conference room on March 22. In a memorandum to Acheson earlier that day, Nitze choreographed the anticipated showdown between the secretaries of state and defense. He encouraged Acheson to lead off by stressing that the White House had initiated the study. He would then turn the meeting over to Nitze and air force general, and former commander of US Air Forces in Europe, Truman Landon, who would present NSC-68 to the assembled group as a unified front on behalf of the president.11 In preparation, Nitze had worked assiduously with representatives of the military services to isolate Secretary of Defense Johnson from the call to increase military spending. Johnson had pledged to Truman that he would keep costs down. As he had displayed in corporate board rooms and during briefings to the strategic targeting committee in the summer of 1945, Nitze possessed supreme confidence in his ability to advocate for his cause. And the prospect of confrontation did not faze him.
As might have been expected, the meeting went poorly. Johnson said that neither he nor the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Omar Bradley, had read the draft of NSC-68. The secretary of defense had become aware of it only that morning and would sign off on no part of it. “Mr. Nitze started to outline the working group’s tentative conclusions,” according to the meeting minutes, “but was interrupted by Mr. Johnson, who said that he did not want to hear what the conclusions were.”12 Secretary of State Acheson purportedly replied to Johnson: “You and I are supposed to deliver this report and these are the people we’ve appointed to do the staff work for us. I can’t understand why you won’t let yourself be briefed on what they’ve done. After all, the report is going to be yours and mine, not theirs. We’re the ones who are going to have to sign this document.”13 Secretary of Defense Johnson stormed out of the room.
The Content of NSC-68
“The objectives of a free society are determined by its fundamental values and by the necessity for maintaining the material environment in which they flourish,” stated the finished version of NSC-68. “Thus we must make ourselves strong, both in the way in which we affirm our values in the conduct of our national life, and in the development of our military and economic strength,” was the first objective Nitze and his team put forward. “We must lead in building a successfully functioning political and economic system in the free world,” was the second objective. “It is only by practical affirmation, abroad as well as at home, of our essential values, that we can preserve our own integrity, in which lies the real frustration of the Kremlin design.”14 “But beyond thus affirming our values our policy and actions must be such as to foster a fundamental change in the nature of the Soviet system, a change toward which the frustration of the design is the first and perhaps the most important step,” according to the third objective. “Clearly it will not only be less costly but more effective if this change occurs to a maximum extent as a result of internal forces in Soviet society.”15 Restoring US strength and revitalizing its values were necessary but not sufficient factors in waging the Cold War; winning it meant achieving a fundamental change in the nature of the Soviet system without fighting a war. There was nothing especially controversial about this part, which accorded with Kennan’s NSC 20/4.
NSC-68 drew distinctions between “Soviet” and “Russian” (as well as US short-term versus long-term objectives). Unlike Kennan, Nitze took no particular interest in Russia’s history or what drove its people. “By practically demonstrating the integrity and vitality of our system the free world widens the area of possible agreement and thus can hope gradually to bring about a Soviet acknowledgement of realities which in sum will eventually constitute a frustration of the Soviet design.” Short of that, “it might be possible to create a situation which will induce the Soviet Union to accommodate itself, with or without the conscious abandonment of its design, to coexistence on tolerable terms with the non-Soviet world.” That outcome would constitute “a triumph for the idea of freedom and democracy, [and] must be an immediate objective of United States policy.”16 Short of precipitating a short-term Soviet collapse, the immediate restoration of US strength would compel Moscow to accept long-term “coexistence” with the West.
NSC-68 acknowledged the prospect that World War III might happen. However, in the ghastly event of war with the Soviet Union—with both sides in possession of atomic weapons—there was no reason “to alter our overall objectives … [which] do not include unconditional surrender, the subjugation of the Russian peoples or a Russia shorn of its economic potential. Such a course would irrevocably unite the Russian people behind the regime which enslaves them.” Instead, US strategic aims would focus on “Soviet acceptance of the specific and limited conditions requisite to an international environment in which free institutions can flourish, and in which the Russian peoples will have a new chance to work out their own destiny. If we can make the Russian people our allies in the enterprise we will obviously have made our task easier and victory more certain.”17
Here and elsewhere, NSC-68 contained ideas that Nitze had previously proposed but still needed to get traction for. For example, he had earlier failed to achieve an increase in spending to build up regional powers’ defenses and shift US attention’s focus from Kennan’s five centers of power to a global orientation. Emboldened by his successful staff work on the H-bomb decision, Nitze seized the opportunity that NSC-68 afforded him to revive previous recommendations. His work led to a general increase in perception of threats versus pre-1945.
Much about NSC-68 has been shrouded in mythology. The basic premise—acknowledging an existential campaign between capitalism and communism—hardly constituted a revolution. NSC-68 prescribed no secret formula for winning the Cold War and revealed no sensitive military secrets. While Nitze classified it as top secret and made portions of it “Restricted Data”—particularly the handling of sensitive material about the design of atomic weapons—he did so to limit distribution during its drafting; and, above all, keep it away from the desk of the secretary of defense. NSC-68’s attitude toward the possible use of atomic weapons did not differ from what was already a well-established part of US war plans to repel any potential Soviet invasion of Western Europe. Nor did NSC-68 take the line that the United States needed to build a vast nuclear arsenal to cow the Soviets into submission. Truman’s writ set two premises: pursue hydrogen bomb research and prepare for a scenario where the Soviets had expanded their atomic arsenal and made headway on their hydrogen bomb. This is what Nitze did.
“When we were going through NSC 68 we came to the conclusion that the order of magnitude of the—not only of the defense, but the general security effort which was necessary, was of the order of magnitude of fifty billion dollars a year for the United States, and that this should be adopted right off the bat, and should be continued for a number of years,” Nitze acknowledged in one of Dean Acheson’s Princeton Seminars in 1953.18 No such actual figures appeared in NSC-68 itself. “If we had put this kind of figure in the paper, we never would have gotten the concurrences that we did get on the paper.”
Nitze’s objective for NSC-68, as he acknowledged in that seminar (after he and Acheson had left office), was to commence a political campaign to get increased funding for defense. The grandiose language in NSC-68—the appeals to democratic traditions and freedom versus slavery—was intended to convince Congress and the American people to go along with higher defense budgets. “Only one percent of the information in NSC 68 was secure information,” Nitze admitted in 1953. That was on purpose. It did no good for the cause of getting to $50 billion if broad swaths of NSC-68 could not be released to the public.
Moreover, Nitze did not believe that the Joint Chiefs of Staff could make their own judgments about how much money they needed. Just as he dismissed Dag Hammarskjöld’s effort to redress Sweden’s trade imbalance after World War II, Nitze had complete confidence that he alone could figure out the sum. Offer the military services a number, he reasoned, and they could figure out what forces they needed.
NSC-68 was simultaneously a strategy statement and a political document. It remained closely held and would not be declassified until 1975; yet the contents were not particularly sensitive. While it did not constitute a revolution in US foreign policy, it accentuated the fact that the Cold War needed to be waged globally and that the long-term US objective in that conflict should be victory. In the December 16, 1949, meeting Soviet expert Tommy Thompson had stated: “we have two objectives, a short-term and a long-term, the first being to win the cold war and the second to prepare for a hot war.” As NSC-68 made clear a few months later, whatever the nature of the conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union, it could genuinely be over only with the victory of the United States—however long that took. It did not specify what success would look like in a hot war with the Soviets. Everyone who worked on it surely hoped that would never happen.
The Korean War
Events soon made unnecessary the political campaign that Nitze hoped NSC-68 would allow Truman to wage on behalf of higher defense spending. The Nitzes were camping in Canada in June 1950 when word came that North Korean forces had crossed the thirty-eighth parallel and were streaming into South Korea. Nitze quickly rushed to the airport to fly back to Washington. “Because I thought militarily that we did not have the assets to do it,” he initially deemed it a bad idea to intervene militarily. However, by the time he had arrived in the nation’s capital Truman had decided to do just that.19 For Nitze and everyone else in the Truman administration, the North Korean invasion conjured up memories of Nazi Germany’s invasion of Poland in 1939. Despite the creation of the CIA as part of the National Security Act of 1947, analysts provided little forewarning about what to expect. “The best our intelligence community could provide was an estimate saying that while the Soviets were likely to attack anywhere at any moment, such attacks might not necessarily take place,” as Nitze later recounted. “No doubt Mr. Truman found this assessment as unenlightening as we did in the Policy Planning Staff.”20
Neither Truman nor Acheson asked Nitze his opinion on how the United States ought to respond to Korea. Following the decision that the United States would lead a coalition of forces under the auspices of the UN to turn back the North Koreans, Nitze threw himself into the work of preparing for mobilizing US forces for war in Asia and potentially again in Europe. In July and August, he participated in meetings about whether to cross the thirty-eighth parallel should allied forces under General Douglas MacArthur’s command successfully reverse the tide of the war (as they ultimately would do after MacArthur’s daring Inchon landing in September).21
The Korean crisis led to a revision of timetables on military outlays—or future expenditures—a process that Nitze oversaw.22 Secretary of Defense Johnson approved increasing army personnel from 630,000 to 834,000. At the same time, President Truman asked Congress for an additional $10 billion to support that action while also boosting navy combatant ships from 238 to 282 and air force wings from 48 to 58. Truman requested an additional $4 billion in military assistance, most of which would go to NATO countries.23 Korea provided the political impetus finally to shore up European defenses.
On September 30, 1950, two weeks after the Inchon landing, Truman signed off on NSC-68. The previous day, Secretary of Defense George Marshall, who had succeeded Louis Johnson, gave MacArthur permission to go north of the thirty-eighth parallel. Even as the tide appeared to turn in Korea, none of the other Cold War challenges abated. Nitze redoubled his efforts to figure out a viable conventional defense of Europe in planning for a potential global conflagration stemming from the Korean War. This required economic and military planning as well as diplomatic finesse. On September 9, Truman committed to increased US strength in Europe yet dodged the thorny question of German rearmament. Along with Acheson and Marshall, Nitze participated in subsequent planning sessions for the defense of Europe.24
When, in October 1950, Chinese forces entered the war in Korea, Nitze expressed concerns about the intentions of General MacArthur, whom he had come to know (and turned down a job from) in Japan five years earlier. “I learned, from intercepts of cable traffic coming across my desk, that MacArthur’s real aim was to expand the war into China, overthrow Mao Tse-tung, and restore Chiang Kai-shek to power,” Nitze revealed later.25 Given the prospect of a wider campaign, on November 4, 1950, Nitze summoned General Herbert Loper, the Pentagon’s assistant for atomic energy, to discuss the potential use of atomic bombs in Korea.26 One year after Acheson handed him the atomic research portfolio, Nitze now found himself considering active employment plans in an actual war.
The consequences were predictable when it came to atomic weapons and the Korean War. The United States’ first use of atomic weapons in Korea would indeed cause opinion in East Asia to sour against Americans, who had already used the bomb against the Japanese in 1945.27 And the Soviets would be compelled to respond. Nevertheless, Nitze approached all this dispassionately. He did not consider with ashen horror the prospect of using atomic bombs, nor did he feel it inimical to the US way of war. Instead, he evaluated possible scenarios and options and ultimately concluded that the drawbacks of using atomic weapons in Korea outweighed any potential advantages. A key element in his thinking was that US troops in Korea were part of a UN force; UN authorization of an atomic attack would be a nonstarter.
NSC-79
On August 22, 1950, the Joint Chiefs of Staff sent a memorandum to the secretary of defense asking for “clear-cut United States objectives in the event of [global] war,” stating that neither NSC 20/4 nor NSC-68 had adequately laid these out.28 The tasking wound up on Nitze’s desk. The paper he oversaw, NSC-79, laid out three options for essential US aims in a global war with the Soviet Union: Pax Americana, world government, and a balance of power. After reworkings from Policy Planning staffers, John Paton Davis, Charles Burton Marshall, and Louis Halle, a draft went to Acheson, who shut down further work. Were the president to approve such a plan, according to the secretary of state, word of it would get out, and the results would be as catastrophic as Keynes’s Economic Consequences of the Peace had been for the settlement of World War I at Versailles.29
Acheson presumably meant that Keynes’s evisceration of Allied leaders in Paris in 1919 had sapped public confidence in the peace settlement of World War I. Similarly, the prospect of planning for a global war would come off as a precursor to waging war just as the United States was fighting a limited war in Korea to preserve a broader postwar peace in Europe and Asia. At home and abroad, critics could seize on NSC-79 eroding public confidence in that entire enterprise. Moreover, each of the three potential outcomes of a war with the Soviet Union diverged from President Truman’s declarations to support free people to select their form of government. Pax Americana, world government, and balance of power were all inimical to the objectives of his administration. A remarkable thing about Acheson’s statement is that it was okay to declare America’s intention to win the Cold War, but not okay to deliberate about what victory constituted.
By December 1950, a US Cold War victory was nowhere on the horizon. Gone were Truman’s aspirations to contain communism on the cheap. That month, the president asked for an additional $16.8 billion for the Department of Defense and a rough doubling of army troops, navy combatant ships, and air force wings, as compared to June 1950. “It would not be too much,” Acheson said at an NSC meeting on December 14, “if we had all the troops that the military wants. If we had all of the things that our European allies want it would not be too much. If we had the equipment to call out the reserves it would not be too much. If we had a system for full mobilization it would not be too much.”30 By the end of 1950, the spirit of “it would not be too much” was now guiding the Truman administration’s approach to the defense. On December 16, the president declared the existence of a national emergency.
Iran and NSC-141
Korea in 1950 did not turn out to be Poland in 1939. The conflict ground to a stalemate. Meanwhile, another crisis emerged. From 1951 to 1952, Nitze spent considerable time working on Iran, where the new prime minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh, sought better terms from the British, who held a controlling hand in the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (which would later become British Petroleum or BP). Nitze got to know Mosaddegh and, unlike many of his peers, considered him a wily and underestimated figure. Still, Nitze was involved in crafting a policy that would culminate in the overthrow of Mosaddegh’s government in 1953.
Nitze was also involved in US efforts to square the circle of US interests and ideals regarding South Africa. “As a practical matter, the intervention of the U.N. in such a question as the racial policy of the South African Government will not solve the problem,” he wrote in a memorandum of November 3, 1952. While NSC-68 had framed the contest between the Kremlin and Washington as one between slavery and freedom, the sovereignty of Iran and the enactment of apartheid in South Africa existed (at least then and to Nitze) outside of the basic Cold War paradigm. One day after this memo, Eisenhower defeated Adlai Stevenson.
Nitze appreciated Truman’s achievements with a proviso: despite tens of billions of dollars added to the defense budget, the level of preparedness that he hoped NSC-68 would instigate had not come about. As he made clear in a memorandum accompanying NSC-141, one of the last papers he drafted during the Truman administration, Nitze had misgivings about the administration’s national security policies. He was profoundly dissatisfied and disappointed with the status of the United States and allied conventional forces, the poor state of which would shorten the path of escalation toward nuclear war in the event of a crisis.31
“Our national security programs have never actually been consistent with our objectives as these objectives have been repeatedly stated in NSC papers (20/4, 68, 114, and most recently 135/3),” he wrote. “This became clear in the course of the work on this project when the Defense representatives stated time and again, in answer to the point that the defense program would not produce the situation of strength defined in NSC 135/3, that the defense program had never been designed to produce any such situation of strength.” The fundamental choice came down to whether the United States could feel secure as “a sort of hedge-hog, unattractive to attack,” or do “what is necessary to give us some chance of seeing these objectives attained.”32
On January 12, 1953, Nitze wrote Acheson a gloomy memorandum on the outstanding vulnerabilities that Truman was handing off to Eisenhower.33 Better conventional forces were needed to prevent overreliance on nuclear, even where nuclear remained an option. Nitze never viewed atomic bombs to be “ordinary” weapons. To his mind, the effects of their actual use were—indeed—measurable. But the psychological impact of their existence shaped the geopolitical landscape. Only sufficient US and allied strength could discourage Soviet risk-taking.
Unlike Kennan and Oppenheimer, Nitze did not agonize over whether to pursue “The Super.” That did not mean he took the matter lightly. The only prudent option was to pursue research on the hydrogen bomb. The consequences of the Soviets building one, after the United States had forgone it, would have been disastrous. As has been said, Nitze thought perceptions of strength and resolve determined geopolitics. That was the key takeaway from the Summary Report (Pacific War), in which Japan’s conception of US weakness had provoked the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941. A decade later, in Europe, Asia, Africa, Latin America—and pretty much everywhere else in the world—the prospect of a Soviet monopoly on the hydrogen bomb would broadcast the message that Washington would either surrender to Moscow’s demands or accept that World War III was inevitable. This was hardly an academic debate: men of action made decisions that shaped the free world’s future. In the nearly decade and a half that Nitze had resided in Washington, he had already proven himself to be one of them.
The Eisenhower Transition
On November 1, 1952, three days before a presidential election, the United States exploded a hydrogen bomb on the island of Elugelab in the Enewetak Atoll, far out in the Pacific Ocean. President Harry Truman resisted exploiting this development in support of Democratic candidate Adlai Stevenson. Meeting with Truman on December 30, Paul Nitze “expressed the view that the State of the Union Message would appear to be the most appropriate vehicle for any Presidential comment, for then such comment would appear in a suitable context.”34 “Since Alamogordo [where the United States tested the first atomic bomb, on July 16, 1945] we have developed atomic weapons with many times the explosive force of the early models, and we have produced them in substantial quantities,” Truman informed the American people on January 7, 1953: “And recently, in the thermonuclear tests at Eniwetok [sic], we have entered another stage in the world-shaking development of atomic energy.”35
Nitze presumed he would stay in government for this new stage. He saw much unfinished business from his tenure at the State Department including his sense that the Truman administration had not fully implemented the recommendations contained in NSC-68, or resolved the matters of NSC-79, “Basic War Aims.” It remained unclear how countries in Western Europe could contribute to their continued economic revival and, at the same time, assume their share of the burden of supporting NATO. Germany remained divided. The Cold War was heating up in the third world—especially in French Indochina. There was also considerable uncertainty about the future of oil-rich Iran, where Nitze remained in negotiations throughout the presidential transition from Truman to Eisenhower.
Still concerned about the strength of both US atomic and conventional forces, Nitze saw no resolution to the overall threat that Moscow posed to the American way of life. “It has been estimated that if the Soviet Union should drop 500 or more atomic bombs on targets in the United States, our ability to recover from the attack would be destroyed,” Nitze wrote (along with Carlton Savage, a colleague on the Policy Planning Staff) in a draft paper the week after Eisenhower defeated Stevenson. “In a few years the Soviet Union will have enough atomic bombs and the means to deliver them to launch such an attack,” they claimed without elaborating on the provenance of that estimate.36 Nor did they offer specificity to back up the phrase: “it has been estimated that.” Instead, in a proposal that led nowhere, Nitze and Savage called for constructing an early warning system and a civil defense network at an annual cost of some $250 million.
The transfer of power from Truman to Eisenhower had extraordinary features. It took place with the country at war on the Korean Peninsula. Republicans would now control the executive branch for the first time in twenty years. President-elect Eisenhower and secretary-of-state-designate John Foster Dulles pilloried their predecessors even though they had themselves served in substantive foreign policy roles during the Truman administration. Dulles had negotiated the peace treaty with Japan; Eisenhower served as NATO supreme commander and then, while president of Columbia University, commuted to Washington, DC, to serve as de facto chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Once in power, Dulles privately admitted to Acheson that he had supported most of the outgoing man’s policies. In this context, it was not outlandish for Nitze to presume that he could stay on.
There was also the matter of a scarcity of national security professionals. Dulles considered himself eminently prepared to be secretary of state—a position his uncle and grandfather had both held—yet he had few top advisers and no cadre from which to staff midlevel national security positions. Soviet specialists and Europeanists abounded in the State Department’s geographic bureaus and the CIA. Yet no team of advisers stood poised to help Dulles wage a global Cold War. As might be true in a later era, no cluster of DC think tanks set to work equipping the new administration with desired policy statements.
“Paul, you know, I have greatly admired the work that has been done by the Policy Planning Staff under your leadership, but you know it really doesn’t deal with foreign affairs,” Nitze remembered Dulles telling him just after he arrived as secretary of state. “It deals with security strategy or national security policy as much as it does just for the conduct of foreign affairs.” That charge was hard to rebut. Nitze and his predecessor George Kennan had carved out a niche for policy planning apart from traditional State Department activities. An evocative example was the March 1950 meeting when Nitze convened the secretary of defense, secretary of state, and Joint Chiefs of Staff to meet in his conference room. Instead, Dulles thought “that work ought to be done in the NSC, not in the State Department”—and he, Dulles, intended to spend 95 percent of his time in the Old Executive Office Building with the NSC staff and only 5 percent of his time at the State Department, leaving Deputy Secretary of State Walter Bedell Smith in charge of Foggy Bottom.37 Dulles would find another position for Nitze. He could not remain director of policy planning.
Nothing compelled Dulles to keep Nitze. The former must have seen value in the latter. A proud generalist not lacking in confidence, Nitze was becoming closely linked to the policy implications of nuclear weapons and the sustainment of US alliances. Whether at Policy Planning Staff or elsewhere, he kept working on these topics. Where Kennan had proven himself as a “Russia” specialist, given his study of the language and the country’s history as well his affinity for its people and culture, it was considerably easier for Nitze to proclaim expertise about nuclear policies. The subject was too new and untested. With his security clearances, proximity to the highest level of government, and self-assuredness in business, government, and academia, Nitze proceeded to teach himself about the intricacies of nuclear designs, production chains, and deployment prospects. He had debated towering figures such as Robert Oppenheimer from an equal standing (even without formal training). He weighed in on whether the United States could use nuclear weapons to win the Korean War. However, “Policy Planning”—unlike, say, “the Office of Soviet Affairs”—had no clearly understood meaning apart from whatever relations existed between the director of policy planning and the secretary of state.
Nitze got off to an inauspicious start with President Eisenhower. Summoned to the White House, he opened the wrong door and found Ike in his underwear. Notwithstanding this encounter—which amused the First Lady (who was also there, clothed) more than Eisenhower himself—Nitze participated in a substantive meeting with the president once it commenced in another room down the hall.
International Security Affairs (Briefly)
As this first meeting concluded, Dulles recommended that Nitze work on a speech taking up an idea from the incoming secretary of defense, Charles Wilson, who, in February 1953, urged Eisenhower to appeal for peace directly to the Soviet people. The urgency of such an appeal increased upon the death of Stalin on March 5, 1953. Eisenhower approved the participation of Nitze, who worked on it with his old Harvard friend, Charles Bohlen.38 As he and Bohlen were drafting Eisenhower’s “Chance for Peace” speech, Dulles offered Nitze the job of assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs (ISA). Even ahead of the required Senate confirmation, Nitze reported for work at the Pentagon.
Politics intervened. Because he needed an eminently qualified Soviet expert for the post, President Eisenhower nominated Bohlen as ambassador to the Soviet Union. Now in the majority for the first time in two decades, Senate Republicans declared Bohlen to be the last holdover from the Acheson State Department that they would confirm. Before a potential Nitze confirmation hearing, a newspaper supporting Senator Joseph McCarthy dredged up his uncle’s association with the notorious Black Tom explosion during World War I. (Here was the first time that Nitze’s familial connection to German sabotage became known outside the circle of his supporters.)
Dulles and Eisenhower withdrew Nitze’s nomination. Still occupying the position of director of policy planning, Nitze returned to the State Department where he continued his work on matters related to mutual security assistance planning, the continued prospect of whether to use the atomic bomb in the Korean War, what to do about the potential collapse of French Indochina, and whether to build a continental defense against Soviet bombers.39 These were hardly trivial matters. In a candid April memo to Dulles, he predicted unfavorable outcomes in East Asia should the administration follow through on Eisenhower’s campaign pledge to cut the defense budget.40
The United States was the wealthiest society in history, Nitze told Dulles. Americans could easily afford to pay more for security against the twin menaces of communism and nuclear peril. There was no good reason to cut defense spending and taxes. Higher taxes were needed to support more lavish defense spending. These were not things that Dulles wanted to hear. Neither Dulles nor anyone else at the highest level of the Republican ranks was about to jettison President Eisenhower’s commitment to lower taxes and a balanced budget. Although it would take a year before the new administration fully articulated its plans, Dulles and Eisenhower had already indicated their intent to take a “new look” when it came to nuclear weapons, a change in strategic posture that they believed would allow them to cut billions of dollars from the defense budget.
In 1952, Nitze had switched his registration from Republican back to Democrat. He later attributed this to the Eisenhower campaign’s nasty insinuations about the Truman administration. Yet the timing was puzzling, given that he had spent nearly a decade working for Democratic administrations and that Eisenhower was the clear favorite to win in the upcoming general election. After Ike won, Nitze tried to have it both ways. Just as he had been a registered Republican working in Democratic administrations, he saw no reason why he could not be a Democrat in a Republican administration.
Moreover, Nitze had unfinished business. He did not regard NSC-68 as sufficient for waging the Cold War. It was a living document to be amended, and the version that probably mattered more was NSC-68/4, the revised version of the original that Truman approved in December 1950. The Korean War had forced the president’s hand, and the fighting was ongoing. It had triggered internal demand for NSC-79—on US basic war aims in a global military conflict with the Soviet Union—and Nitze did not relish leaving that assignment unfinished.
The Cold War was already Nitze’s life’s work. As with the strategic bombing surveys, NSC-68 and follow-on papers were collective efforts in which Nitze may have drafted only parts yet exercised control over all their content. The main ideas were consistent with those he had expressed since his time in Japan. The difference was the shrinking proximity between Nitze’s pen and President Harry Truman’s. Nitze grew to admire Truman, about whom he had been dubious before 1945. The “guiding light” of Truman’s drive, according to Nitze, was “to recognize that he was a small, average American, but the whole theory of the United States was that a small, average American could be President and could be a good President and he was determined to be a good President.”41 Despite his personal admiration for this average American, Nitze remained disappointed at Truman’s failure to fund such conventional forces as he believed necessary to achieve victory in an enduring Cold War.
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