To the members of the Gaither Committee, who had spent the past few months doing nothing but dwelling on every frightening scenario of a Soviet nuclear attack imaginable, Sputnik seemed to confirm the worst of their suspicions about Russian military might. A new sense of urgency, on top of one that was already quite intense, consumed the committee’s final efforts. The various staff groups had turned in their papers on civil defense, on missiles, on anti-missile missiles, on strategic calculations, on strategic policy generally. The steering panel knew that the final condensed report would have to pack a powerful enough wallop to galvanize the Eisenhower Administration—which many of them considered passive and complacent—into decisive and immediate action.
Robert Sprague and James Phinney Baxter took on the task of boiling down the staff papers and the panel’s own collective thoughts into a tight, logical draft, Sprague because he was the committee’s co-chairman since Gaither had been hospitalized, Baxter because he was an eloquent and skilled historian who wrote well. In the end, Sprague let the task of most of the writing fall into Baxter’s lap. Baxter felt the task was a bit beyond his own talents and so privately recruited the assistance of another member of the committee, one of the staffers subordinate to the steering panel, a former State Department official from the days of the Truman Administration, a good friend of Baxter’s, a controversial figure named Paul Nitze.
Paul Henry Nitze had kept a low profile on the Gaither Committee, at least to the outside world of the Eisenhower Administration. He might as well have been on the steering panel—he attended most of its meetings—but he wasn’t. He was a Democrat and was well known as a sharp critic and personal antagonist of Eisenhower’s bristly and domineering Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles. It would do the committee’s credibility no good to have his name formally signed on a report that was bound to be somewhat critical of the Administration’s defense efforts. So his name was entered as one of the committee’s staff members, but was given no highlight.
But Nitze contributed a great deal of energy to the project, coming up with dozens of ideas on how the West could wage the Cold War with greater enthusiasm and success. One of the most well considered and original was the need for a buildup of conventional, non-nuclear forces to meet Soviet aggression on the peripheries, the “gray areas,” that part of the globe that would later be called the “third world,” without having to escalate the conflict to a nuclear level. Among the more eccentric of his ideas was that we should develop a “love gas,” as he called it, some chemical substance that could be sprayed all over the Soviet Union, especially over the Kremlin, that could induce its inhabitants to become more peaceful, complacent, unaggressive, acquiescent… loving.
Nitze joined the Gaither Committee as an active Cold Warrior who had already done a great deal of thinking about how civil defense and the prospect of a Soviet nuclear attack fit into the broad scheme of foreign policy.
As Secretary of State Dean Acheson’s policy planning director in the previous Administration, Nitze—along with Assistant Secretary of Defense Frank Nash and Richard Bissell of the ECA—drafted a lengthy paper entitled Reexamination of United States Programs for National Security. Acheson and Defense Secretary Robert Lovett signed it and presented it to the National Security Council, as NSC-141, on January 19, 1953, one day before Harry Truman left office to make room for Dwight David Eisenhower.
The paper touched on virtually every topic that fell under the rubric “national security,” mainly on the need for a buildup of conventional, non-nuclear military forces. The Eisenhower Administration, upon entering office, had rejected its findings because the program would cost far more money than the President was willing to spend. Yet a major part of the paper also focused on the merits and functions of civil defense. The “willingness of the United States… to initiate an atomic attack in the event that the Soviet rulers take certain actions which we would regard as a casus belli will be significantly affected by the casualties and destruction which the Soviet system could inflict in retaliation. Even at the present time, these casualties and this destruction would be very high and the prospect, under a continuation of our present programs, will rapidly worsen. There is an increasing danger that unless a large-scale civil defense program and measures to improve greatly our own defense against air and sea attack are undertaken, the United States might find its freedom of action impaired in an emergency.”
If the Soviets developed their own hydrogen bomb, Nitze and his associates foretold, “this would present an extremely grave threat to the United States, notwithstanding our own thermonuclear capability. It would tend to impose greater caution in our cold war policies to the extent that these policies involve significant risks of general war.” Thus, an “adequate civil defense is of utmost importance because the freedom of the United States Government to take strong actions in the cold war, which may carry with them serious risk of violent Soviet reactions, will depend in increasing measure upon firm public morale in the United States.” Paul Nitze had the right temper for the times.
There was another reason why Phinney Baxter could hardly have chosen a more suitable man for the task at hand. When it came to writing official, top-secret reports that combined sophisticated analysis with a flair for scaring the daylights out of anyone reading them, Paul H. Nitze had no match.
Nitze had done yeoman’s work on this score seven and a half years earlier, in April 1950, with the composition of a report submitted to the National Security Council, under the signatures of Secretary of State Dean Acheson and Defense Secretary Louis Johnson, called United States Objectives and Programs for National Security—labeled, and known more widely ever since, as NSC-68.
The Cold War was mounting in those years. The previous half decade had witnessed a severe corrosion in the Western world and an expansion of the U.S.S.R., the political take-over of Eastern Europe, the Berlin blockade, the civil war in Greece. Yet President Harry Truman, bolstered by a cautious team of economic advisers, refused to raise the $15 billion ceiling that he had imposed on defense spending. George Kennan, the powerful director of the State Department’s policy planning staff, worried about the need to contain Soviet expansionism, but believed that a “containment” policy should emphasize political and economic bolstering of the West, rather than “war scare” hyperbole or a massive military buildup. And Defense Secretary Louis Johnson, a former campaign manager of Truman’s, loyally supported his commander in chief’s budget ceiling.
Dean Acheson became Secretary of State in 1949; he and Kennan continually clashed over the nature of the Soviet threat and how the U.S. should respond to it. In January 1950, Acheson fired Kennan from the policy planning office, made him counselor and sent him off on a month-long fact-finding mission to South America. Acheson believed that America’s attitude toward defense had to take a much harder line, and he appointed in Kennan’s place at policy planning one of Kennan’s assistants, Paul Nitze. Throughout his clashes with Kennan, Acheson had found a sympathetic ear in this young former Wall Street banker. Nitze, he recalled in his memoirs, was “a joy to work with because of his clear, incisive mind.”