NSC-68 was written chiefly as a memorandum to guide policy in light of the explosion of a Soviet atomic bomb the previous August. But it was used by Acheson and Nitze as a vehicle for pushing their own, more militaristic views into official parlance.
A special interagency committee was established to work on NSC-68, but Nitze drafted most of the paper in the early spring of 1950: It was a long-winded memorandum, melodramatic and spooky. It foretold that when the Kremlin “calculates that it has a sufficient atomic capability to make a surprise attack on us, nullifying our atomic superiority and creating a military situation decisively in its favor, the Kremlin might be tempted to strike swiftly and with stealth.” The year of maximum danger was 1954. By that time, the Soviets could amass 200 atomic bombs, enough to deliver a surprise attack “of such weight that the United States must have substantially increased… air, ground and sea strength, atomic capabilities, and air and civil defenses” if it is to survive.
Throughout, Nitze wrote of the “Kremlin’s design for world domination,” intrinsic to the Soviet system, fatal to the West. “The Kremlin is inescapably militant… because it possesses, and is possessed by, a worldwide revolutionary movement, because it is the inheritor of Russian imperialism, and because it is a totalitarian dictatorship….” Its system “requires a dynamic extension of authority and the ultimate elimination of any effective opposition.” Since the U.S. is “the principal center of power in the non-Soviet world,” it “is the principal enemy whose integrity and vitality must be subverted or destroyed… if the Kremlin is to achieve its fundamental design.”
Meanwhile, Nitze continued, the military strength of the West was “becoming dangerously inadequate.” In a hypothetical 1950 war, the U.S. could protect the Western hemisphere, Pacific bases and most essential supply lines—but now global power was necessary. The Kremlin’s “assault on free institutions is worldwide now, and in the context of the present polarization of power a defeat of free institutions anywhere is a defeat everywhere.”
Nitze’s prescription: a scheme for Pax Americana—“to foster a world environment in which the American system can survive and flourish.” The requirements: higher military spending, more military aid, improved internal-security measures, civil defense, a psychological-warfare campaign, more intelligence activity, reduced spending on nondefense programs, higher taxes.
The language of NSC-68 was deliberately hyped. Acheson explained in his memoirs: “The purpose of NSC-68 was to so bludgeon the mass mind of ‘top government’ that not only could the President make a decision but that the decision could be carried out.” The “task of a public officer seeking to explain and gain support for a major policy,” he wrote, “is not that of the writer of a doctoral thesis. Qualification must give way to simplicity of statement, nicety and nuance to bluntness, almost brutality, in carrying home a point.” He recalled of the NSC-68 paper, “If we made our points clearer than truth, we did not differ from most other educators and could hardly do otherwise.”
In making things “clearer than truth,” in “bludgeoning the mass mind of ‘top government,’” Paul Nitze found his calling. When Truman received NSC-68 on April 7, 1950, he gave a copy to his chief domestic adviser, Charles Murphy, who took it home that night to read. It scared him so much that he didn’t go to the office the next day, but just sat at home, reading the memorandum over and over. Two weeks later, Truman called Louis Johnson into his office and told him that the economy-in-defense policy was dead. Although some in the government opposed the massiveness of the effort proposed in NSC-68, criticism vanished on June 25, when the North Korean Army spilled over the border and the Korean War was on. Limited and localized, the Korean War was hardly the sort of war for which the NSC-68 programs were designed. But the war forced many to think about the need for long-range strategy; NSC-68 was there and, on the face of things, prophetic. On September 30, the NSC officially adopted it as a statement of policy. The defense budget climbed from $13.5 billion to $48.2 billion for fiscal year 1951. Prewar levels were never approached again.
Nitze’s memo helped determine the missions and assumptions shaping this higher spending and more active Cold War policy. Its most enduring legacy was the view of the world that it projected: the “underlying conflict” between the “free world” of the West and the “slave society” behind the Iron Curtain, the equation of “free world” with any regime that harbored anti-Communist sentiments, the reduction of the complexities of what would later be called the third world to a simple Manichean vision, the highly pessimistic image of Soviet military might, and the idea that the only real answer to the Soviet challenge lay in the construction of a gigantic, worldwide U.S. military machine. In NSC-68, Nitze systematized the uneasy feelings that many harbored about the Russians, gave them the ring of historical truth and political analysis, and provided a prism through which all Soviet activity could be viewed.
When James Phinney Baxter asked him to draft the report of the Gaither Committee in the fall of 1957, Paul Nitze faced another golden opportunity. Here again was an Administration that refused to sacrifice old-fashioned notions of balanced budgets for the needs of national security in the face of a menacing Soviet threat. Here again was a specially appointed committee that just might change things all around. It was time to write another hair-raiser.
The report was handed to President Eisenhower on November 7. It was entitled Deterrence and Survival in the Nuclear Age, a much shorter document than NSC-68, only twenty-nine pages of text, but nearly as gripping. “The evidence clearly indicates,” the first page proclaimed, “an increasing threat which may become critical in 1959 or early 1960.” The U.S.S.R.’s gross national product was growing, with particular emphasis on heavy industry, allowing the Kremlin “to finance both the rapid expansion of their impressive military capability and their politico-economic offensive by which, through diplomacy, propaganda and subversion, they seek to extend the Soviet orbit.
“The singleness of purpose with which they have pressed their military-centered industrial development,” the report continued, “has led to spectacular progress.” The Soviets had “produced fissionable material sufficient for at least 1,500 nuclear weapons,” along with a sizable long-range air force, intermediate-range missiles, a mighty air-defense system, the development of cruise missiles and intercontinental ballistic missiles, in which, the report asserted, they have “probably surpassed us.”
The report drew special attention to the “current vulnerability of SAC to surprise attack during a period of lessened world tension,” a situation that calls for “prompt remedial action… to secure and augment our deterrent power.” For by 1959, “the USSR may be able to launch an attack with ICBMs carrying megaton warheads, against which SAC will be almost completely vulnerable under present programs…. The next two years seem to us critical. If we fail to act at once, the risk, in our opinion, will be unacceptable.”
Nothing was said about those spy planes that gathered communications intelligence over the Soviet Union, the planes that LeMay told Sprague about, the planes that would allow the United States to know quite a while before the period of “tactical warning” that Soviet bombers would soon be on their way.
All in all, it was a stark, broad-brushed portrait of the Soviet threat, dauntingly unequivocal in nature and magnitude. Some of the staffers were a bit disturbed with the direction the final draft was heading. They agreed with the conclusions of the growing strength of Soviet military might and the vulnerability of SAC, but the papers they had written for the steering panel had been less firm. There were caveats, qualifications; the language was more guarded, the assumptions behind the assessments explicitly spelled out. But the leading voices on the Gaither Committee were adamant in sticking to the more aggressive line of argument. Jerry Wiesner of the steering panel and Herbert York of Livermore Labs and the Gaither staff had a constant line on the issue: “What’s important,” they would say, “is not what the Soviets might do; it’s what they could do.” And there was a very palpable sense, a sense of dread urgency, that once the Soviets obtained the ability to launch a first-strike, they might very well go ahead and launch.