“Introduction” in “America’s Cold Warrior”
Introduction
In the summer of 1914, when Paul Nitze was a young boy, his family vacationed in Tyrol, a bucolic region inside what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire. As the Nitzes climbed a mountain, a villager gave Paul and his sister glasses of milk straight from her cow. While passing her house on the descent, the family discovered the woman in tears. Her husband had just been summoned for duty in the Austro-Hungarian Army. Emperor Franz Joseph—who had succeeded to the throne in 1848—mobilized the country a few weeks after an assassin gunned down his nephew and presumptive heir, Archduke Franz Ferdinand.1 On July 28, 1914, Austria declared war on Serbia, commencing World War I.
When Paul Nitze was an older man, he was set to meet with the national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, on a late fall afternoon at the Paul Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) in Washington, DC. Rice intended to deliver a speech extolling the merits of ballistic missile defense to protect the US homeland from attack.2 Neither event happened. On the morning of that Tuesday, September 11, 2001, terrorists flew two planes into the World Trade Center in downtown Manhattan and another one into the Pentagon. Passengers on United Airlines Flight 93—believed to be headed to Washington, DC—overcame the hijackers, and the plane crashed into a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania.
Between Europe’s last summer and the United States’ darkest day, Nitze attended the nation’s most elite academic institutions, prospered on Wall Street, and devoted himself to the practice of US national security from 1940 onward. He worked for the White House, Department of State, Department of Defense, and the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. He was detailed to the US Air Force and Department of Treasury and consulted for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Even outside his service to eight presidential administrations, as President Jimmy Carter learned the hard way, Nitze remained vital in framing and influencing debates about US nuclear policies.
This book is a political biography of Paul Henry Nitze. A good part of his story will be told in his own words. No other American in the twentieth century contributed to high policy as much as he did for as long as he did in both Democratic and Republican administrations. The diplomat and writer George Kennan has garnered more fame, yet from 1950 onward Kennan played no role in shaping high policy. In contrast, Paul Nitze commanded presidential attention and catalyzed action from 1940 to 1989. His career connects the Cold War to the post-9/11 era and the challenges of the 2020s, where the United States finds itself locked in geopolitical competition with the People’s Republic of China and the Russian Federation.
Nitze crafted a new type of career: national security professional. Unlike his mentors and near-peers, he never returned to his pre-World War II occupation as an investment banker. The early days of the Cold War demanded generalists with competence in multiple areas—economics, military strategy, intelligence, diplomacy—and the know-how to achieve results, whether in the private sector, academia, or government bureaucracies. Nitze met that demand. Supremely confident in his abilities, he devoted himself to protecting the American way of life. Financial comfort afforded him the opportunity to take risks. Getting fired from a political appointment in government—or simply running afoul of the powers that be—would not imperil his ability to provide for his family.
Paul Nitze remained relevant for so long because he was independent enough to make career decisions on the basis of expected policy impact, not partisan or financial upside. Financial and political independence allowed him to focus on the concept of “tension between opposites.” He subscribed to democracy. And the document with which he is most closely associated, NSC-68, recapitulated America’s foundational texts—the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution—using the vocabulary of Cold War threats. Yet he distrusted party politics. He was convinced that the American people could pay much more in taxes to guarantee their survival against communism. He believed the two- and four-year election cycles were unhelpful to the cause of preserving US nuclear and conventional superiority. He regarded himself as a nonpartisan expert. “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” Nitze enjoyed repeating this quote from F. Scott Fitzgerald.3 When it came to democracy versus elitism in the crafting of national security policy, Nitze passed Fitzgerald’s test. He did not get bogged down in hesitation.
Nitze’s longevity also allowed him to gather comprehensive knowledge about nuclear weapons from 1949 onward. He became a leading authority in the emerging field of strategic studies, even though he never published a book-length work. He divined the political implications of weapons of mass destruction short of their actual use. And he was as qualified as anyone else to weigh in on how the nuclear-armed United States and the nuclear-armed Soviet Union would interact in a nuclear crisis—especially since he had been in the room with the president during the Berlin Crisis of 1961 and the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, which were the only two genuine nuclear crises of the Cold War. When the United States and Soviet Union finally commenced serious negotiations to limit and reduce existing nuclear weapons in 1969, Nitze was outspoken in arguing for those approaches he thought might work. Employing logic chains and a forceful demeanor, he drew upon all his knowledge of atomic matters to overwhelm anyone with whom he disagreed. Nitze’s view of the world—that the United States needed to achieve and sustain strategic superiority—remained constant as the country lost that strategic superiority following the Cuban Missile Crisis. He did not predict or expect the end of the Cold War in 1989–91, convinced as he was that the Soviets retained strategic superiority. Nevertheless, he played a critical role in the Ronald Reagan administration in establishing a concept for integrating strategic defenses and reducing strategic offensive arms.
Furthermore, Nitze’s career and ideas about national security directly influenced the George W. Bush administration. Nitze developed a theory of strategic superiority that made sense to decision makers throughout the Cold War and after. In his “Nitze Scenario” from the 1970s, the Soviets might preemptively take out US land-based nuclear forces while leaving US cities intact. The president could then order US nuclear submarines to retaliate against Soviet cities—however, Soviet missiles kept in reserve would then rain on US cities. In this scenario, the president would be forced to choose between surrender and tens of millions of US lives. In this scenario, an adversary’s capabilities could neutralize the anticipated value of the US deterrent. A democratically elected president would not choose to sacrifice even one US city. US leaders could be forced to be deterred from projecting the power needed to sustain critical geopolitical commitments. After the Cold War ended, the prospect of an unconventional attack from a “rogue regime” replaced the threat of Soviet strategic forces. The terrible events of September 11 hammered home the message that Iraq, Iran, Libya, and North Korea could all blackmail the United States.
The Life of Paul Nitze
Memory shapes history, and Paul Nitze never forgot the summer of 1914 and being with his family in Austria-Hungary—and then Germany—during the outbreak of World War I. Likewise, he always remembered the high-minded but futile debates among his father’s colleagues on the faculty at the University of Chicago during the Paris Peace Conference of 1919. After that, he resolved to become a man of action who could shape world events.
After graduating from Harvard in 1928 and flourishing on Wall Street in the 1930s, Nitze arrived in Washington, DC, in 1940 to assist the Franklin Roosevelt administration in preparing for the United States’ potential entry into World War II. He stayed in government from Imperial Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, on December 7, 1941, to the collapse of the wartime alliance between the United States and the Soviet Union in 1946 and the subsequent formulation of the Marshall Plan to rebuild Western Europe as well as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to defend it. In early 1950, after taking a lead role in the study that prompted the decision to build the hydrogen bomb, he oversaw the completion of NSC-68. This US national security strategy called for tripling annual defense spending and placed the country on a war footing. In November 1957, he drafted the Gaither Report, which warned of dire consequences if the Soviets launched a nuclear attack on the US homeland. He called on the Eisenhower administration to take drastic actions to reduce US strategic vulnerabilities.
Following the 1960 presidential campaign in which the candidates sparred over a purported “missile gap” favoring the Soviets, Nitze served on the John F. Kennedy administration’s Executive Committee of the National Security Council (ExComm) during the October 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis when the United States and Soviet Union very nearly went to nuclear war. He was the Pentagon’s number two official during the tumultuous year of 1968, when the Vietnam War led President Lyndon B. Johnson to decline to seek reelection. Finally, he found himself in the Richard Nixon administration advising the delegation that crafted the SALT I (Strategic Arms Limitation Talks) agreement and Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty in May 1972. He later participated in the Team B alternative National Intelligence Estimate, the findings of which excoriated the US intelligence community for misunderstating Soviet capabilities.
Still later, during a June 1982 “walk in the woods” with a Soviet counterpart outside Geneva, Nitze attempted to craft a grand compromise on the numbers and types of intermediate-range nuclear forces. In January 1985, he presented an even more ambitious approach to President Ronald Reagan—a phased plan, over fifteen years, to reduce substantially the number of long-range ballistic missiles while pursuing research on defenses against them—that became the US position at the Reykjavik Summit with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in October 1986. Finally, in Washington in December 1987, Nitze led the US team in negotiations that finalized the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, which eliminated intermediate-range nuclear weapons and established the formula for the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START), which the US and Soviet leaders would ultimately sign in the summer of 1991. That treaty was the precursor for the 2011 New START agreement between the United States and Russia that President Joseph Biden and Russian leader Vladimir Putin extended in January 2021. As of January 2024, the START agreement that Nitze helped craft is the only remaining arms control regime currently in force from the end of the Cold War.
Whether he testified before Congress, spoke at the Council on Foreign Relations, or wrote an opinion piece in the Washington Post, Nitze formulated his words to precipitate action. Behind them was the constant refrain: the United States needed to restore its strength. He retained the cachet of the Truman administration and stayed in Washington long enough for a Republican administration—Ronald Reagan—to embrace Truman and him. Paul Nitze will always be most closely associated with NSC-68, which Truman signed in 1950. His most significant contribution to US peace and security came in the painstaking work during the period 1982–88 to negotiate successful treaties with the Soviets to reduce nuclear weapons while simultaneously deflecting skeptics within the most conservative US presidential administration of the second half of the twentieth century.
In and out of government, Paul Nitze remained an influential figure in US foreign policy from 1945 until the early months of 1989. Even after Secretary of State James Baker dismissed him at that point, Nitze refused to relocate from Washington, DC. Instead, he returned to Massachusetts Avenue and set up shop in an office in a building with his name on it. There he hosted former Cold War interlocuters and kept tabs on the George H. W. Bush administration’s efforts to establish a new world order. Spite against Baker animated him. In 1991, at age eighty-four years, he nearly came out against ratification of START I, the agreement he had helped formulate and negotiate with his Soviet counterpart, Marshal Sergei Akhromeyev, while in the Reagan administration.
Nitze never retired. In September 1993, he delivered an address to the National War College titled “The Grand Strategy of NSC-68,” in which he sketched out a blueprint based on the successful waging of the Cold War, which he thought could help the United States overcome fundamental security questions.4 Subsequently, he called for eliminating nuclear weapons, a significant reversal from his professional days of helping build up the United States’ nuclear arsenal. He did so not because of regretting past decisions, but because he thought that weaponry did not mitigate the threats of the post-Cold War era; conventional “smart weapons” did. He also advocated mobilizing US economic might and political will to combat what he regarded as the most severe national security threat following the end of the Cold War: global climate change.
When Paul Nitze died in 2004 at ninety-seven years old, friends and associates gathered at the National Cathedral to pay tribute. They included Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who had once attempted to torpedo his nomination to be secretary of the navy, and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, who had once worked for him and later served as dean of the rechristened Paul Nitze School of Advanced International Studies. Following the attacks of September 11, 2001, and the US invasion of Iraq in March 2003, US foreign policy since the end of the Cold War had gone in a much different direction than Nitze had wanted.
National Security as a Profession
In establishing his own professional trajectory, Nitze acted on his ideas. He did not serve in military uniform and was not a lawyer, professor, captain of industry, scientist, or foreign service officer. Rather, he formulated his theories about history and relations between states while pursuing professional opportunities on his own terms. Along with his wartime District of Columbia (DC) roommate, future secretary of state Christian Herter, he cofounded a university, the School of Advanced International Studies, originally intended to train business executives in foreign affairs. While working for the US Strategic Bombing Survey, assisting with the Marshall Plan and broader postwar economic recovery of Europe, and then leading the State Department’s Office of Policy Planning, Nitze interacted with the world’s leading physical and social scientists. Both inside and outside government, he absorbed as much knowledge as possible and “emerged as perhaps the most important intellectual middleman of the Cold War period,” as one scholar noted.5
“Intellectual middleman” minimizes Nitze’s contributions. There is no question that he would have balked at the depiction. It aggravated Nitze not to be taken seriously as a scholar in his own right, and he regarded most scholars as ignorant of how the world actually worked. Nor did he tolerate any criticism of the policies he crafted. He was indignant, in later years, at “revisionists” who took an interest in such matters as the origins of the Cold War yet did not accept his recollections as gospel. In later years, he published Tension between Opposites, a book he hoped would achieve his longtime ambition to articulate a unifying theory about international politics.6 It has not found a place in the political science canon.
Many aspiring national security professionals, however, follow in Paul Nitze’s footsteps. “National security policy encompasses the decisions and actions deemed imperative to protect domestic core values from external threats,” as defined by the preeminent scholar of this concept.7 For Nitze, working on national security policy meant identifying a threat, proposing a solution, and advocating for it over alternative ones. Unlike a “merit-based” civil servant, whose profession was formalized in the 1883 Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act, Nitze chose the terms of his employment. Onward assignments depended on his cultivating relationships and demonstrating utility to employers. While he was loathe to admit it, Nitze served at the whim of politicians. This allowed him to gain insight into how the world worked through observing powerful men such as Clarence Dillon, James Forrestal, George Marshall, Will Clayton, and Dean Acheson. He sometimes disappointed these older figures, yet he never fell out with them. He always felt at home at Harvard, on Wall Street, and in the elite corridors of power and social clubs of Washington, DC.8
Nitze was wealthy—but not ostentatiously so. Yet his financial security was a key component to his career. His wife’s grandfather had helped John D. Rockefeller establish the Standard Oil company, and her inheritance included the farm in Maryland where Nitze entertained friends, colleagues, and foreign diplomats. He drew income from a propitious real estate investment with his wealthy brother-in-law in Aspen, Colorado. He wrote reports for the government through SAIS and later a contracting firm, the System Planning Corporation. After 1966, when Revlon purchased a pharmaceutical company in which he was a significant shareholder, Nitze became wealthy enough not to depend on a government salary (though he still drew one).9 In 1977, he made a very brief foray into the world of corporate raiders when 20th Century Fox used the profits from Star Wars to acquire the Aspen Corporation. From a seat on the board of directors, Nitze participated in a failed effort to take the movie studio private; this was a momentary diversion, and Nitze was soon back at the fore of national security debates. “In and Outer” is a term for someone who alternates between the public and private sector, usually at an executive level. After World War II, Paul Nitze never went out.
Demands imposed on the foreign policy establishment from 1945 onward required generalists who knew something about economics and military strategy, intelligence and diplomacy, metallurgy and supply chains, and how to get things done, whether in the private sector, academia, or government. Nitze fit the bill. His life is an index to the establishment of institutions and means of power that have long outlasted the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union in December 1991.
Tension between Opposites
In his embrace of “tension between opposites,” Nitze sought to delineate a theory of everything. While books about history, economics, and sociology inspired him, he believed that political science and international relations distorted reality. So when it seemed in the 1970s that his government career might end, he embarked upon an elaborate book project that would fuse his personal story with broader ideas about statecraft—along the lines of Henry Kissinger’s multivolume memoirs. Ultimately, he published a single memoir in 1989 and then the shorter, Tension between Opposites, in 1993. The latter summed up his pursuit of harmony based on tensions and his observations about how men he admired had taught him to do so.
“No one can act on the complex and important policy issues at the forward edge of emerging history without having formed some rough simplifying approaches to such issues,” Nitze wrote.10 To do so required a set of guidelines. Policy makers seldom articulated these guidelines, and so could not understand why they failed or succeeded. Nitze hoped that identifying procedures based on his experiences would enhance the prospects for better outcomes. He was entranced by a passage from the great German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who defined duty: “What the day demands.”11 Duty required action. “It is by action—in my terms, by the practice of politics—that theory … can be kept in touch with reality,” Nitze summed up. Only through action could one ascertain “the opportunities and risks of the future.”12 Theory and practice, to Nitze, “constituted harmonic aspects of one whole.”13
Here and elsewhere, Nitze zeroed in on the assertion attributed to the Greek philosopher Heraclitus that “truth and beauty were to be found in the tension between opposites.” He loved recounting Heraclitus’s examples of the bow and the lyre. “The power of the bow comes from the tension between the two arms of the bow and its directed release,” Nitze wrote. “[T]he harmony and beauty of the tones of the lyre come from the varying tensions of its strings.”14
When he delivered the commencement address to his son’s class at the Groton School in 1953, Nitze applied “tension between opposites” to the challenges of the atomic age and the Cold War struggle between East and West. “In each case, the answer is to be found not in the elimination of one of the opposites or any basic compromise between them but in striving for a harmony in the tension between opposites.”15 Forty years later, Nitze looked back on the speech with pride. He went on to elaborate on four principal elements for building a theory of politics: (1) political structure; (2) value system; (3) situation; and (4) viewpoint.16
The key takeaway was that more than theory was needed. Theory could sharpen the mind and lead to a more robust set of guidelines that would simplify the myriad information that confronted a policy maker. By Nitze’s terms, it could reinforce concepts of values and ethics. However, theory needed to be accompanied by a set of actions leading to material change—no amount of pure reasoning would ever suffice, most especially to one serving in government.
Consequently, people who merely wrote about power underwhelmed him. “It is my view that most of what has been written and taught under the heading of ‘political science’ by Americans since World War II has been contrary to experience and common sense,” Nitze asserted.17 Political science had been “of limited value”—and at times “counterproductive, as a guide to the actual conduct of policy.”18 Every situation was different, and no single independent variable stood out. Good policy making required modest expectations. “The best that we can strive for is a judgment that is more apt to be right than wrong; it can rarely produce certainties.”19
In Nitze’s terms, true learning required persistent action. That meant staying involved in political debates in government and being able to set the terms of those political debates or shift their focus. It meant focusing on matters of war and peace. During the Cold War, that meant preventing nuclear war and configuring the strategic (i.e., nuclear) and conventional (i.e., nonnuclear) balance between the United States and the Soviet Union so that the US side would retain its freedom of action. There was no greater tension between opposites than preparation to wage nuclear war and the aspiration that adequate preparation would prevent it from happening.
Expertise on Nuclear Weapons in World Politics
As George Kennan’s successor as director of the Policy Planning Staff, as of January 1, 1950, Nitze took on the burden of rebuilding Western Europe, East Asia, and nearly everywhere else in the world following the destruction brought on by World War II. Then there was the improved manner by which the United States responded to Soviet actions. While he was intimately involved in the Truman administration’s decision to pursue the hydrogen bomb, nuclear matters were only one of several key areas in his purview. Over the course of the 1950s and 1960s, Nitze’s attention narrowed to focus nearly exclusively on how to stabilize the nuclear balance. By 1969, when he joined the US delegation to the SALT, it had absorbed all of his attention and, for twenty-five years, that remained the case.
During the Nixon administration, when Nitze was flying to Helsinki and Geneva for SALT, Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger tasked the director of the Office of Net Assessment Andrew Marshall with producing a history of the strategic arms competition since 1945, a project that Marshall outsourced to Harvard Professor Ernest May, Brookings Institution scholar John Steinbruner, and the RAND Corporation’s Thomas Wolfe. The purpose of that project was to understand better why policy makers in Washington and Moscow built their force structures and then to derive lessons from history to create a more stable nuclear balance. Unfortunately, when this highly classified project was completed in 1981, few policy makers read it.
Paul Nitze did not need to. He had been involved in nearly every US decision about nuclear weapons in the study and had seen all of the Soviet intelligence. A select few people enjoyed his level of access to the technical information—whether ingested by reading classified material or meeting with the scientists—in addition to briefing policy makers and engaging with outside academics. Nitze retained privileged access and fully grasped as many policies and theories as anyone. He may not have captured them better or more imaginatively; he got them well enough to answer the president’s most difficult questions confidently. During the 1960s, the commander-in-chief called on him—far more so than nuclear theorists—to figure out how to reduce the prospects of nuclear war.
During the 1970s and 1980s, Nitze strove for a blockbuster agreement to restrain offensive and defensive capabilities to stabilize the strategic arms competition between the United States and the Soviet Union. After a decade and a half working on SALT I, SALT II (and then becoming its chief critic), and on INF, Nitze’s aspirations dovetailed with those of an idealistic US leader. In early 1985, President Ronald Reagan adopted Nitze’s “Monday Package,” which laid out phases by which Washington and Moscow could incrementally achieve dramatic reductions in nuclear arsenals while shifting the emphasis from assured destruction to assured protection. Nitze’s ambitious package fit together nuclear weapons, strategic defense, and arms control in a way that appealed to the president’s predilections. This was no paper for the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association; it was official US policy by the time of the Reykjavik Summit in October 1986. In crafting it, Nitze drew upon a careful study of the literature on security studies and practical experience in and out of government. He advocated for his positions without the protection of tenure.
As with other scholars in strategic studies, Nitze’s beliefs were grounded partially in nuclear “theology”—a set of untestable predictions about how leaders in Moscow and Washington would behave in the event of a crisis leading one side to use nuclear weapons and how the other side would respond. There has only ever been one example of the use of nuclear weapons in wartime—Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Nitze visited both cities after the war while working for the Strategic Bombing Survey Commission and had encountered, firsthand, burn victims from the atomic attacks. And, from the theory perspective, that was against a nonnuclear power—Japan.
Moreover, there were only two genuine crises between two nuclear powers during the Cold War—the Berlin Crisis of 1961 and the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. And, very significantly, US strategic forces vastly outnumbered those of the Soviet Union during both of them—a ratio that would rapidly evaporate, complicating any models of what would happen should another crisis emerge. In coming up with contingency plans for what to do in the summer of 1961 and fall of 1962, Nitze was more helpful than academics such as Thomas Schelling, who advocated for signaling US intentions to Moscow through limited nuclear strikes. Such purported expertise delved too far into the world of nuclear theology with little emphasis on what happens in rooms in the White House, State Department, and Pentagon during periods of crisis.
Nitze opposed limited nuclear war. He was also against total nuclear war—though in both instances, he believed that Soviet (and some US) policy makers did not share his position. The overriding policy objective, from his perspective, was to avoid scenarios where maintaining vital US interests required a president to face the choice of whether or not to launch a nuclear attack. Paradoxically, the credibility of the US nuclear deterrent relied on minimizing the likelihood of those moments in which a US president likely would not give the order to launch because the consequences would be too devastating.
The answer was simple: only the projection of decisive US strength could avert that scenario. The Soviets had backed down over Cuba in October 1962. Nitze attributed their acquiescence to a US margin of superiority that was in fact fleeting. For much of Nitze’s career, US credibility was premised on restoring nuclear supremacy and extending to Western European allies its ability to deter. The value being protected was US freedom to act in regional conflicts, and there was little daylight, in his mind, between US sufficiency and clear superiority.
In the 1970s and 1980s, while Nitze lamented the loss of such superiority, he wrote about strategic stability—wherein both sides had smaller, mobile, and invulnerable land-based nuclear forces—that did not necessarily require a US advantage. The logic of strategic stability dictated that neither side ought to have any incentive to strike first. Among its elusive qualities were the assumptions that the American people could understand why they needed thousands of small missiles and that the Soviets would never give up their biggest ones.
In the aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis, while Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and most Americans accepted mutual assured destruction (MAD), Nitze rejected that concept. The arms race continued, even after the United States capped its production of Minuteman missiles at one thousand. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union overcame the United States’ numerical advantage by the 1970s. It continued to build more significant stockpiles of huge, land-based nuclear missiles and very accurate missiles that could hit all of the capitals of NATO allies. Catching up with the West in strategic capabilities did not moderate the behavior of the Soviets abroad. Nor did it stop them from building up a quantitative advantage. From Nitze’s perspective, the strategic balance was less stable after that moment because Soviet leaders figured that their US counterparts would back down in a crisis.
As the eminent political scientist Robert Jervis later articulated, the theory of the nuclear revolution held that so long as one side possessed a “secure second-strike capability,” it did not matter how many warheads the other side deployed. Nitze had little regard for such a theory, which he saw as having no practical advice for the challenges that policy makers encountered. In Jervis’s account, MAD was a “fact of life,” not a policy.20 Nitze dismissed that. More importantly, it was not a “fact of life” to inhabitants of the White House during the Cold War. No US president could expect to be reelected on accepting Soviet nuclear superiority simply because academics had devised a theory that rendered nuclear war impossible.
Nitze’s lesson of history, again based on his personal experiences and readings, was that preparedness mattered. The United States had been provocatively weak in the late 1930s, leading Germany and Japan to have their way with the free world. Twenty years later, the Soviet nuclear arms buildup had commenced under Nikita Khrushchev even before the Cuban Missile Crisis, Nitze was sure of this. And, very importantly, it did not stop with the advent of perestroika and glasnost in 1985. When Mikhail Gorbachev ascended to power that year, two new systems of Soviet missiles—SS-24s and SS-25s (i.e., surface-to-surface)—were coming online. Nitze distrusted Gorbachev and contended that the Soviets maintained nuclear superiority even as the new leader in the Kremlin spoke of new thinking at home and abroad. Nitze had long warned of the scenario in which the US leadership would have to choose between surrender or destruction. During the 1970s, that vulnerability became real, and at least several critical officials within the US government knew it. Presidential Directive 58, which President Carter signed on June 30, 1980, fit with a series of initiatives intended to shore up US “Doomsday” capabilities. It established a program by which the president could “survive a nuclear attack, even one which involves repeated attacks over a long period.”21
Strategic vulnerability meant that during a crisis, the Soviets would press their advantage so that a US leader would back down, retreat from strained commitments, and perhaps even abandon its allies. Confidence in that prospect emboldened the Soviets to take risks. In the mid-1970s, Nitze laid out an even more dire scenario. Amid a crisis, the Soviets would launch a “counterforce” nuclear first strike that could take out the entire US Minuteman fleet while minimizing civilian casualties. The US president would then face ordering “second-strike” forces to retaliate against the Soviet Union or spare one hundred million lives by surrendering.
Nitze pursued two main policy objectives during the second half of the Cold War: first, for the United States to restore the situations of strength that had allowed it to prevail during the Cuban Missile Crisis; and, second, to make sure that the restoration of power did not provoke Moscow to build other systems that the United States, a democracy, could not easily match. But, unfortunately, strategic stability was fiendishly difficult to achieve, and Paul Nitze did not believe that the country had done so—even as the Cold War ended in 1989–91.
America’s Cold Warrior
“Despite the United States’ preponderance of power throughout the Cold War,” two very distinguished scholars have written, “the proverbial Martian, if it had landed in Washington at any time between 1945 and the early 1980s and had tuned in to US political debate, would have concluded that America was in a life-and-death struggle with an implacable, ruthless, and fundamentally evil force and that it was on the verge of losing this epic struggle—or, at best, that the two titans were evenly matched.”22
When it came to the nuclear and conventional military balance, the United States did not possess a “preponderance of power throughout the Cold War.” The outcome of the Cuban Missile Crisis ensured that the Soviet Union would never again tolerate such a US advantage. Nitze—who employed the term “preponderance of power”—remained in Washington nearly the entire time between 1945 and the 1980s. His analysis of the Soviet threat was not motivated by party politics. Once they had caught up with the West, Soviets leaders knew that US counterparts would back down in a crisis, Nitze was sure. Confidence in that knowledge meant they could afford to take more significant risks. While it ultimately turned out to be a strategic disaster, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 crystallized fears that perceived US weakness increased such appetites for risk. In his gloomy assessments in the 1970s and 1980s, Nitze erred in lacking sufficient confidence that the inherent economic advantages of the US system would eventually prevail—in contrast to his boss during the second Reagan administration, Secretary of State George Shultz, who remained optimistic.
Throughout the Cold War, Nitze’s objective was to not go to war with the Soviet Union. Instead, he shared Kennan’s lifelong view that the US objective should be to reach an accord through measures short of war while never jettisoning his early opinion that Soviet counters were virtually impervious to reason. “Only under the most extraordinary circumstances can one expect to cause Soviet negotiators to change their position by fact or logic,” as Nitze put it after the Reykjavik Summit.23 However, he never stopped fighting for a grand bargain. When Kennan spoke in Iowa on February 1, 1984, he lamented the “extreme militarization not only of our thought but of our lives,” citing the growing power of the military–industrial complex and US disdain for diplomacy with adversaries, and said that the US statesman was “more concerned for the domestic political effects of what he is saying or doing than about their actual effects on our relations with countries.”24
Throughout that month and year, three decades after George Kennan last participated in the crafting of US foreign policy or grand strategy, Nitze, a registered Democrat in a conservative Republican administration, strove to revive nuclear arms negotiations with Soviet negotiators, even after they had stormed out of the INF negotiations in Geneva the previous fall. At the end of his last government assignment, Nitze believed he had failed to achieve that to which he aspired. Yet he stayed at it. He was America’s Cold Warrior. Thirty years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Nitze’s legacy continues to shape the practice of national security, even though the priorities he embraced in the post-Cold War era—above all, eliminating nuclear weapons and combating global climate change—were not those priorities of post-Cold War presidents.
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