NSC 68

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  NSC 68 opened with a stark warning: the issues at stake were momentous. As the document itself put it, they involved "the fulfillment or destruction not only of this Republic but of civilization itself." Presented to President Harry S. Truman on the 7th of April 1950, the paper ran 66 pages and carried a top secret classification from the National Security Council.

  Scholar Ernest R. May summed up its legacy directly. He wrote that NSC 68 "provided the blueprint for the militarization of the Cold War from 1950 to the collapse of the Soviet Union at the beginning of the 1990s." The Department of State and the Department of Defense drafted it jointly. It stayed classified until 1975, long after its arguments had already reshaped how Washington approached the Soviet Union.

  What convinced a reluctant president to embrace a document he initially sent back for revision? Whose judgment on the Kremlin got left out of its pages, and why did that omission matter so much? And why does a paper written in 1950 still get invoked in arguments about American policy generations later?

• 2. A Nation Reassessing

  ›

  By 1950, a string of developments had already strained Washington's confidence in its own strategy. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization had become operational and military assistance to European allies was underway. The Soviet Union had detonated its first atomic bomb, and Chinese communists had consolidated control of the mainland. A sterling-dollar crisis in the summer of 1949 convinced American officials that the Marshall Plan, due to end in 1952, would not be enough to fix Western Europe's economic troubles. Officials feared Western Europe would fall back on autarky, the same kind of self-sufficient isolation it had tried in the 1930s, with damaging consequences for the world economy and for the United States. Japan faced comparable strain.

  On the 31st of January 1950, Truman directed the State and Defense departments to reexamine, in his words, "our objectives in peace and war and of the effect of these objectives on our strategic plans." A State-Defense Policy Review Group formed under Paul Nitze took on the task. Its members included Dean Acheson, Charles E. Bohlen, and Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert Lovett. Truman passed the finished report to the National Security Council on the 12th of April 1950 for further consideration. That forwarding set in motion a debate over the document that would take more than a year to resolve.

• 3. Whose Voices Counted

  ›

  Paul Nitze, an advocate of rollback rather than containment, made sure the document cited only the most severe claims about Soviet intentions. Analysis from top Kremlin experts George Kennan, Llewellyn Thompson, and Charles Bohlen was left out entirely. That excluded group believed Stalin's central goal was tight control over the USSR and its satellite states, not global domination, a reading most historians share today. Nitze argued instead that the Soviets meant to conquer all of Europe and most of Asia and Africa.

  Dean Acheson, another hawkish adviser to Truman, later explained the paper's purpose bluntly. It was meant, he said, to "bludgeon the mind of top government that not only could the president make a decision, but that the decision could be carried out." Inside the drafting committee, Defense Department representatives initially resisted any proposal that would exceed the existing $12.5 billion ceiling on defense spending.

  Truman himself was not won over right away. He felt the document failed to specify which programs would change, and that it clashed with the spending limits he had already set. He sent it back for further review, and did not give his approval until 1951.

• 4. The Price of Rearmament

  ›

  NSC 68 judged the country's existing goals sound but called the programs meant to achieve them "dangerously inadequate." George Kennan's original theory of containment had proposed a multifaceted mix of tools, but this report tilted the balance toward military rather than diplomatic action.

  Kennan's 1947 "X" article had called containment "a policy of calculated and gradual coercion." It also called for substantial peacetime military spending, giving the United States "superior overall power" in combination with allied nations. That vision called for a military able to defend the Western Hemisphere and allied areas while protecting a mobilization base. It also demanded forces that could strike at Soviet war-making capacity, defend supply lines, and back up allies carrying out the same mission.

  To pay for it, the report suggested cutting taxes and trimming federal spending outside defense and foreign aid, deferring "certain desirable programs" if needed. Leon Keyserling, who would later chair the president's Council of Economic Advisers, offered a different funding path. He argued the increase could be financed by accepting government deficits, which he believed would energize the American economy the way it had after 1930.

  The report added: "a higher gross national product might itself be aided by a build-up of the economic and military strength of the United States." Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert Lovett agreed, saying the economy "might benefit from the kind of build-up we are suggesting."

  The analysis rested on a comparison. Soviet output stood at roughly half of America's. A nation's output, the report reasoned, depended on four variables: consumption, investment, government expenditure, and exports. Forcing the Soviet Union to divert resources into its military would starve either investment, stalling its growth, or consumption, deepening civil unrest. American economists, by contrast, assumed the United States was normally operating below its production capacity. New government spending could therefore raise output rather than simply reallocate it. The resulting economic approach, later called Military Keynesianism, would go on to shape U.S. economic policy for most of the Cold War.

• 5. The Language of Threat

  ›

  The document argued that a continually growing Soviet sphere of influence could become too powerful for any coalition to defeat. That possibility, the reasoning went, made militarization a matter of American self-preservation. The report framed Soviet expansion as inherently aggressive, requiring a strong U.S. response to prevent the country's destruction. It invoked the military victories of World War I and World War II to justify that emphasis on military strength.

  Word choice mattered as much as argument. The report described the international situation, as provoked by the Soviet Union, using the word "endemic," a term more often applied to disease. That single adjective cast the Soviet Union as a sickness and the United States as the cure. Not every official inside the Truman administration accepted that diagnosis.

• 6. Dissent Inside the Building

  ›

  Willard Thorp directly challenged the report's claim that "the USSR is steadily reducing the discrepancy between its overall economic strength and that of the United States." He countered that the opposite was true: "The actual gap is widening in our favor." Thorp pointed to 1949, when the U.S. economy had grown to twice the size of the Soviet Union's. American steel production outpaced Soviet output by 2 million tons, and U.S. stockpiling and oil production both ran far ahead of Soviet levels. On Soviet military spending, Thorp doubted the figures, remarking, "I suspect a larger portion of Soviet investment went into housing."

  William Schaub of the Bureau of the Budget went further. He argued that the United States held the advantage "in every arena": the Air Force, the Army, the Navy, atomic bomb stockpiles, and the economy. Even George Kennan, the man credited as the father of containment, objected to the document, particularly its call for massive rearmament. The disagreements came from officials who had reviewed the draft before it ever reached Truman's desk.

• 7. Korea Changes Everything

  ›

  President Truman, even after the Soviet Union became a nuclear power, still wanted to hold down military spending. Rather than reject NSC 68 outright, he asked for more detail, including cost estimates for the plan. Two months passed with little movement on the report, and by June Paul Nitze had nearly given up on it.

  Then, on the 25th of June 1950, North Korean forces crossed the 38th parallel. The outbreak of the Korean War suddenly gave NSC 68 new weight. Dean Acheson later summarized the shift bluntly: "Korea... created the stimulus which made action."

  The Truman administration moved into a nationwide public relations campaign, working to convince Congress and opinion leaders of the need for rearmament and containment of Soviet communism. It faced resistance from isolationists such as Senator Robert A. Taft, who wanted less U.S. involvement abroad. It also faced pressure from hardline anti-communists such as James Burnham, who pushed instead for a rollback strategy that might even mean a preemptive war. Officials in the State Department and the White House pointed to the North Korean attack and the seesaw battles of the war's early months. They used those events to steer both Congress and the public toward rearmament, a middle path between isolationism and preventive war.

• 8. A Blueprint's Long Shadow

  ›

  Historian Ken Young has called NSC 68 a document that "has been subject to continuous analysis and commentary." He adds that although it appeared at the midpoint of the twentieth century, it "retains singular meaning in the 21st." In 1962, scholar Paul Y. Hammond published the first detailed, interview-based account of how the document came together.

  Later historians disagree sharply on its honesty. Michael Hogan concluded NSC 68 portrayed the Soviet threat "in the worst light possible." Other scholars, by contrast, have argued it captured a real and growing danger accurately. Cold War historian Melvyn Leffler calls the document's characterization of that threat "hyperbolic." He links its language to the rhetoric later used in the "war on terror." Leffler argues the phrasing "blurred important distinctions, distorted priorities and complicated threat perception."

  Its influence reaches past the Cold War itself, surfacing in President George W. Bush's "war on terror" announcement of September 2001. It also connects to the National Security Strategy documents of 2002 and of March 2005.

  By signing NSC 68, Truman gave the United States a coherent, clearly defined policy toward communist governments, one that had not existed before. The move also helped him counter political attacks from the right following the Red Scare and the Alger Hiss case. The paper stayed unpublished, yet its arguments still showed up in later increases to America's conventional and nuclear forces, adding to the country's financial burden. Between 1950 and 1953, the Truman administration nearly tripled defense spending as a share of gross domestic product, from 5 to 14.2 percent.