Nitze, Paul Henry (1907–2004)

Policy Adviser

Paul Nitze's contribution to American Cold War strategy extended across seven presidential administrations. Nitze's steadfast belief in dealing with the Soviets from a position of strength to attain U.S. national security goals made him a dangerous hawk to his critics and the model cold-warrior to his admirers.

Born in Amherst, Massachusetts, in 1907, Nitze made a name for himself during the Depression as an investment banker with the firm of Dillon, Read and Company. In 1940 Nitze accompanied firm president James Forrestal to Washington, D.C., to serve as a special assistant to Pres. Franklin Roosevelt.

Nitze first worked on economic affairs, but in October 1944 he was assigned to the United States Strategic Bombing Survey, which was to assess the effectiveness of the strategic bombing campaigns against Germany. Nitze's work on the survey concluded that the bombing of basic industries had been more effective in retarding German industrial production than the efforts against more specific targets. In the summer of 1945, Pres. Harry S. Truman authorized a similar survey to investigate the effects of conventional and atomic bombs used against Japan. Nitze, now vice chairman of the survey in Japan, soon established himself as an expert on atomic weapons, their uses, and their relationship to conventional weapons.

Nitze believed that, although deadly, atomic weapons had made neither conventional forces nor war itself obsolete. Japan had suffered worse total casualties in firebomb raids during the war without surrendering. In short, the value of atomic weapons compared with conventional bombing was quantitative, not qualitative. Chillingly, the report recommended that the United States prepare against future atomic attacks by building bomb shelters. While Washington dismissed these recommendations, Nitze maintained his belief in the need for both conventional and nuclear forces.

After the war, Nitze became deputy director of the Office of International Trade Policy, contributing to the creation of the Marshall Plan (1947). In 1949 Sec. of State Dean Acheson appointed him deputy of the Policy Planning Staff, under George Kennan. After the Soviets detonated their first atomic device in 1949, Truman asked the Policy Planning Staff to reexamine U.S. security policy. After Kennan left the staff, Nitze was named its director. He led the Policy Planning Staff in producing National Security Council Memorandum-68 (NSC-68), the document that reshaped Kennan's “containment” theory to emphasize military force over economic, diplomatic, or psychological means to preserve U.S. national security in the face of an increasingly aggressive Soviet Union. The rationale: the Soviets respected only strength, thus a legitimate threat of force would guarantee security. The document reflected Nitze's aversion to relying solely on atomic weapons and called for massive rearmament. The outbreak of the Korean War convinced Truman (initially somewhat skeptical of Nitze's views) of the document's validity, and NSC-68 ushered in the age of U.S. peacetime rearmament during the Cold War.

With the 1953 inauguration of Dwight D. Eisenhower, Nitze was out of the government but contributed to the 1957 Gaither Report on the perceived “missile gap” between the United States and the Soviet Union. The missile gap reflected a fear on the part of many Americans that the Soviet Union was racing ahead of the United States in the development and production of intercontinental ballistic missiles. Again, Nitze argued for increased conventional rearmament and a nationwide program to build bomb shelters to convince the Soviets of the American will to survive a first strike, thus deterring aggression. Eisenhower rejected the report as alarmist and tried to bury it. Nitze argued publicly against Eisenhower's “massive retaliation” policy, by which the United States would deter Soviet aggression with the threat of massive nuclear exchange, calling Eisenhower's policy inflexible and dangerous.

...