Paul Nitze

Paul Henry Nitze (January 16, 1907 - October 19, 2004) was an American Cold War strategist and diplomat who authored NSC-68 in 1950, the foundational policy document that militarized American containment strategy, and who remained a central figure in U.S. nuclear strategy and arms control for more than five decades. Nitze represented the opposing pole to George Kennan in the defining debate about how to conduct the Cold War: where Kennan emphasized political and economic means, Nitze argued that Soviet military capabilities required a permanent, massive American military counter-mobilization.¹

Early Career

Nitze graduated from Harvard University and worked on Wall Street before entering government service during World War II. He served in the Strategic Bombing Survey after the war, analyzing the effects of Allied bombing on German and Japanese war production - experience that shaped his thinking about industrial capacity and military competition.

He joined the State Department and in 1949 succeeded George Kennan as Director of the Policy Planning Staff when Secretary of State Dean Acheson concluded that Kennan's political approach to containment was insufficient for the threat environment following the Soviet atomic bomb test and the Chinese communist victory.¹

NSC-68

Nitze led the drafting of NSC-68, submitted to President Harry Truman on April 14, 1950. The document argued that the Soviet Union's military capabilities, particularly its developing nuclear arsenal, required the United States to roughly quadruple its defense spending and build conventional and nuclear forces sufficient to deter Soviet aggression across all contingencies.

Kennan opposed the document directly, arguing that it misread Soviet motivations and would produce a militarized competition that could be avoided through political means. Nitze's assessment prevailed: Truman approved NSC-68 following the outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950, and American defense spending increased dramatically in subsequent years, establishing the baseline military establishment that persisted through the Cold War.¹

Psychological warfare and the Troy report, 1951

Nitze, then Director of the Policy Planning Staff, received two memoranda on the Project Troy report in the spring of 1951. On March 26 Robert J. Hooker of his staff wrote that the report "almost uniformly reflects a very high order of technical competence, political sophistication, and common sense," and that it "deserves the most serious consideration."² On April 9 Nitze wrote to Under Secretary of State James E. Webb, objecting to the use of the report as a frame of reference for the new Psychological Strategy Board. "The Troy group went vastly beyond its original terms of reference and explored a field for which it had no special competence and about which it had little information."³ He added that "In effect it proposed a new board to take over the jurisdiction of all the agencies operating in the foreign field, of the NSC, and in part of the President himself."³

Pentagon and Negotiations

Nitze served as Secretary of the Navy from 1963 to 1967 under Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, and as Deputy Secretary of Defense from 1967 to 1969. He participated in the SALT I negotiations under Nixon and SALT II discussions, developing expertise in the technical details of arms control that made him one of the most persistent voices in nuclear policy debates regardless of which party held power.

In 1982, during the Reagan administration's intermediate nuclear force negotiations in Geneva, Nitze proposed an informal compromise known as the "walk in the woods" - a private conversation with Soviet negotiator Yuli Kvitsinsky in which the two men outlined a framework for reducing intermediate-range nuclear forces in Europe. Both governments rejected the proposal; Reagan's administration was committed to deploying new missiles and did not want to foreclose that option.⁴

Reagan Era

Nitze was initially supportive of President Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) - the missile defense program announced in 1983 - but increasingly concerned that it was being sold as making nuclear weapons "impotent and obsolete" in ways that distorted the arms control framework. He served as arms control adviser in Reagan's second term and participated in the negotiations that produced the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty eliminating an entire class of nuclear weapons.

He died in Washington, D.C. on October 19, 2004, at age 97, having spanned U.S. nuclear policy from the atomic bomb to post-Cold War arms reduction.