NSC 68 and the Soviet Threat Reconsidered

NSC 68 and the Soviet Threat Reconsidered John Lewis Gaddis Paul Nitze In the Fall 1979 issue of International Security, historian Samuel F. Wells, ]r. presented an especially provocative analysis of the landmark governmental study, NSC 68, completed on April 7 , 1950. Its principal author was Paul H. Nitze, then director of the State Department ’s Policy Planning Staff and head of the interdepartmental working group that drafted NSC 68, and currently serving as Director of Policy Studies on the Committee on the Present Danger. Wells contended that the document’s contemporary ring reflects the continuation over threedecades of both American anxiety about the Soviet threat, and the continuing role of Paul Nitze as a leading advocate of increased efforts to meet that challenge. Wells’ article, “Sounding the Tocsin,” concluded that a knowledge of ments of the 1950s can help sensitize us to some of the persisting requirementsof national security decisions in the coming decade. Nonetheless, controverises arising from different interpretations of Soviet intentions, as well as divergent assessments of U.S. defense needs, were at least as prevalent in 1950 as they are in 1980. In light of the debate generated by ”Sounding the Tocsin,” we have asked for the views of two unusually authoritative commentators. -The Editors Gaddis: NSC 68 and the Problem of Ends and Means. NSC 68 represented something new in the American political-military experience : It was nothing less than an attempt to set down in the unforgiving medium of cold type a comprehensive statement of what United States national security policy should be. Nothing this daring had ever been attempted before. Franklin Roosevelt would never have allowed it. Truman’s National Security Council had undertaken it only with reference to specific countries or issues. George Kennan, with his keen sensitivity to the limits of language in conveying complexities and anticipating contingencies, insisted that it should not be done. “I had no confidence,” he later recalled, ”in the john Lewis Gaddis is Professor of History at Ohio University. He is the author of The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 1941-1947. Paul Nitze is now associated with System Planning Corporation in Arlington, Virginia, and Director of Policy Studies, Committee on the Present Danger. From 2950-2953, he was Director of the Policy Planning Staff, U.S. State Department. 164 NSC 68 and the Soviet Threat I 165 ability of men to define hypothetically in any useful way, by means of general and legal phraseology, future situationswhich no one could really imagine or envisage.’’* NSC 68 was written, of course, in an effort to impart coherence to the process of formulating national security policy, a quality sorely lacking at a time when the Secretary of State was not speaking to the Secretary of Defense, when the Army, Navy, and Air Force were more concerned about the threat from each other than from the Russians, when Kennan, who did have a coherent view of what policy shouldbe, was for the most part keeping it to himself.2But NSC 68has not oftenbeen judged by the test of coherence. Like the famous “fifteen weeks” in 1947 that produced the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan, participants have recalled the drafting of NSC 68 as one of those rare moments in governmentwhen everythingwent right: when the bureaucracy acted quickly, efficiently, with vision and foresight. In this case, though, what has been remembered has been the process of producing the document, and not its substance. This is, of course, partly because until 1975 no one without top secret clearance could read it, but it is also, I think, the result of a sense of pride so strong over how the thing was done that it has tended to obscure what was done. I should like to focus here on the contents of NSC 68. I should like to examine it from the perspective of what would seem to be the most elementary test of coherence for any strategy: the precision with which ends are related to means. Finally, I should like to say something about where NSC 68 fits into the overall history of post-war United States national security One of the most striking things about...