Short answers, pulled from the story.
Paul Henry Nitze was an American government official who served as US Deputy Secretary of Defense, Secretary of the Navy, and Director of Policy Planning for the State Department. He is best known as the principal author of NSC 68 and as a co-founder of Team B, and he helped shape US Cold War defense policy across numerous presidential administrations.
NSC 68 was a secret National Security Council policy paper written in 1950 that provided the strategic outline for increased US defense spending to counter the perceived threat of Soviet armament. Paul Nitze was its principal author and served as Director of Policy Planning for the State Department at the time.
Team B was a 1970s intelligence think tank co-founded by Nitze to challenge the National Intelligence Estimates produced by the CIA. It concluded that the Soviets had developed new weapons of mass destruction and harbored aggressive nuclear strategies, findings that became the intellectual basis for the concept of the window of vulnerability.
Nitze visited Allied-occupied Japan in the immediate aftermath of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as part of an early government assignment to assess the damage. The experience fundamentally shaped his later views on nuclear weapons and the necessity of arms control.
The Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies of the Johns Hopkins University, based in Washington, D.C., is named in his honor. Nitze co-founded the school in 1943 together with Christian Herter.
Nitze received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Reagan in 1985, the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement in 1986, the US Senator John Heinz Award for Greatest Public Service in 1989, and the United States Military Academy's Sylvanus Thayer Award in 1991.