Paul Nitze

• 1. Introduction

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  Paul Henry Nitze was born on the 16th of January, 1907, in Amherst, Massachusetts, into a family with deep roots in German academic life. His father, William Albert Nitze, was a professor of Romance linguistics who built his career at the University of Chicago. The family's ancestral region was Magdeburg, in the state of Saxony-Anhalt. That European inheritance would prove strangely prophetic. As a young boy traveling in Germany with his parents and sister, Paul Nitze arrived in Munich just in time to witness crowds seizing on patriotic fever for an imminent conflict. He was watching the outbreak of World War I from the inside. That early brush with mobilized nationalism stayed with him. It planted questions about what nations do when they feel threatened, and how the machinery of power can accelerate toward catastrophe faster than anyone expects. Those questions would drive nearly six decades of government service, from the ruins of Hiroshima to the negotiating table of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty.

• 2. From Banking to Wartime Government

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  After graduating from Harvard in 1928, Nitze entered investment banking, joining the Chicago brokerage firm of Bacon, Whipple and Company, which sent him to Europe in 1928 and 1929. On returning, he heard financier Clarence Dillon predict the Great Depression and the declining importance of finance. That prediction shifted Nitze's path. He sold his interest in a French pharmaceutical laboratory to Revlon, achieving financial independence, then took a year of graduate study at Harvard in sociology, philosophy, and constitutional and international law. He joined the investment bank Dillon, Read and Co. in 1929, founded his own firm, P. H. Nitze and Co., in 1938, and then returned to Dillon, Read as Vice-President through 1941. His entry into government came through a Wall Street connection. James Forrestal, a colleague, brought Nitze in after Forrestal became an administrative assistant to President Franklin D. Roosevelt. By 1942, Nitze was serving as finance director of the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs under Nelson Rockefeller. The following year he moved to the Board of Economic Warfare, then to the Foreign Economic Administration. From 1944 to 1946, he directed and then served as Vice Chairman of the Strategic Bombing Survey, work for which President Harry S. Truman awarded him the Legion of Merit.

• 3. Walking Into Hiroshima

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  One of Nitze's early government assignments sent him to Allied-occupied Japan in the immediate aftermath of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He was there to assess the damage. What he saw shaped his thinking about nuclear weapons for the rest of his life. He became convinced that nuclear arms carried a power categorically different from conventional warfare, and that their existence created an obligation to pursue arms control. That conviction ran through his work as Director of Policy Planning for the State Department, a post he held from 1950 to 1953 under the Truman administration. In 1950, he served as the principal author of NSC 68, a secret National Security Council paper that laid out the strategic case for dramatically increased American defense spending to counter Soviet armament. The document was classified but became one of the most consequential policy papers of the Cold War era. During the Korean War, Nitze advised the Truman administration against blaming the Soviet Union too directly for the conflict, specifically to avoid any path that might escalate toward a third world war. The instinct he carried from Hiroshima never left his analysis.

• 4. Building Institutions

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  In 1943, Nitze co-founded the School of Advanced International Studies, known as SAIS, together with Christian Herter. The graduate school, based in Washington, D.C., is now named in his honor as the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies of the Johns Hopkins University. Between 1953 and 1961, while serving as president of the Foreign Service Educational Foundation, Nitze also worked as an associate of the Washington Center of Foreign Policy Research and contributed to SAIS. He published U.S. Foreign Policy: 1945-1955 during this period. In 1956 he attended the Project Nobska conference on anti-submarine warfare, where discussions ranged from oceanography to nuclear weapons policy. In 1961, President Kennedy appointed him Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs. Two years later, in 1963, Nitze became Secretary of the Navy, a position he held until 1967. During that tenure, according to the US Navy, he established the first Personnel Policy Board and retention task force, known as the Alford Board, lengthened commanding officer tours, and raised command responsibility pay.

• 5. Team B and the Window of Vulnerability

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  After serving as Deputy Secretary of Defense from 1967 to 1969, Nitze joined the US delegation to the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, serving from 1969 to 1973. By the late 1970s, he feared that Soviet rearmament was outpacing American estimates, and he opposed ratification of SALT II in 1979. His deepest skepticism of official intelligence produced a lasting institutional consequence. Nitze co-founded Team B, a 1970s intelligence panel set up to challenge the National Intelligence Estimates produced by the CIA. Team B concluded that the Soviets had developed new weapons of mass destruction and held aggressive strategies toward nuclear war. Those conclusions became the intellectual foundation for the idea of a "window of vulnerability" and fueled the arms buildup that gathered pace under President Carter and accelerated sharply under President Ronald Reagan. Later analysis cast doubt on Team B's specific technical findings. Anne Cahn of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, who served from 1977 to 1980, said that examining Team B's specific allegations about weapons systems one by one, they were all wrong. Some argued the group's broader assessment of Soviet strategic intentions held up, though that reading sits uneasily against the elevation of Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985.

• 6. Negotiating at the Edge

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  From 1981 to 1984, Nitze served as President Reagan's chief negotiator of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, a posting that put him at the center of the most consequential arms reduction effort of the Cold War's final decade. In 1984, Reagan named him Special Adviser to the President and Secretary of State on Arms Control, a role he held through 1989. He had by then shaped American policy toward the Soviet Union for more than forty years across numerous presidential administrations. In 1985, President Reagan awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his contributions to the freedom and security of the United States. The following year he received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement. In 1989 he received the US Senator John Heinz Award for Greatest Public Service by an Elected or Appointed Official, and in 1991 the United States Military Academy honored him with the Sylvanus Thayer Award for his commitment to the ideals of Duty, Honor, Country. Nitze died in Washington, D.C., on the 19th of October, 2004, at age 97. His memoir carried the title From Hiroshima to Glasnost, a span that traced the arc from his first confrontation with nuclear destruction to the diplomatic opening that brought the Cold War toward its close. The ship named in his honor was one he visited himself for ceremonial occasions before his death.