In later years, NSC-68 would be held up by revisionist historians as the inevitable extension of the Truman Doctrine and a blueprint for disaster, responsible for the next two decades of East-West tension and the Vietnam War itself. —Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas in The Wise Men (1986)
NSC-68 was a secret policy paper adopted in 1950 during the Korean War that justified a massive expansion of military spending. It was the next step after the Truman Doctrine and NATO in the militarization of American foreign policy. A supposed worldwide threat from the Soviet Union was the justification for NSC-68.
NSC-68 was not declassified until 1975. Had the general public heard of it and Congress reviewed it, America’s post–World War II foreign policy might have been very different. Cold War critics would have had a much better case.
NSC-68 led to the tripling of the U.S. defense budget over a period of a few years, from some $12 billion to $50 billion during the Korean War. Like the Truman Doctrine, NSC-68 contained some questionable assertions about the strength and goals of the Soviets as well as their supposed allies. Semi-war, the concept of permanent war discussed earlier in this series, is a concept that is embodied in NSC-68.
Its primary author was a cold warrior, Paul Nitze. He would serve both Democratic and Republican presidents into the 1980s. He was unlike George Kennan, the foreign-policy star of the early Truman administration who later fell out of favor because of his doubts about interventionist policies: Kennan wanted a minimum of military force in U.S. foreign policy, while Nitze was a hawk.
Nitze had been a banker. And unlike others on Wall Street, he liked Franklin Roosevelt. Indeed, he became a supporter of Roosevelt’s defense buildup in the late 1930s. He believed that increased defense spending could pull the country out of the Depression that the New Deal never overcame.
Nitze was a Republican who was happy to serve Democratic administrations. He also thought the ideas of the national security state could be sold to labor unions as well as to the Right wing.
Possibly his most controversial idea was that thermonuclear war was winnable. He believed that the “best way to avoid a nuclear clash was to prepare to win one,” wrote Nicholas Thompson in The Hawk and the Dove.
A little-known document
NSC-68, the 68th policy paper of the National Security Council and formally entitled “United States Objectives for National Security,” is little known. Yet NSC-68 posited that the Soviets were madmen who led a worldwide movement dedicated to destroying America. Historian William Taubman called NSC-68’s tone “chilling.”
“The issues that face us are momentous, involving the fulfillment or destruction not only of this republic but of civilization itself,” stated NSC-68. The Soviet Union, it said, sought to “impose its absolute will over the rest of the world.”
If that were true, then the only choice for the United States after World War II was to prepare for World War III. Indeed, Charles “Chip” Bohlen, a veteran State Department official, said the paper’s logic “leads to the conclusion that war is inevitable.” War, at that time, would have meant a nuclear conflict because the Soviets had just developed the A-bomb.
This critical NSC paper was a continuation and expansion of the 1947 commitment to the Truman Doctrine. It called for supporting “free peoples who are resisting outside subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.”
Today Americans might ask how their nation became an empire. How did their country end up involved in almost every war or possible war on the planet?
The mindset of this controversial paper is one reason why. Its worldview is a rationale for how the United States could expand its interventionist policies around the world. “NSC-68 proved to be a blueprint for waging the Cold War,” wrote historian Walter LaFeber in The American Age.
It also represented a remarkable foreign-policy change. The United States, which had once spurned permanent military alliances and huge peacetime military establis