The publication of a new biography of Paul Nitze, who served in national security posts in Democrat and Republican administrations between 1940 and 1989, is a good moment to reflect on the need for knowledgeable, informed, and courageous experts to help guide and, at times, provide critical assessments of American national security policies. Nitze’s career is a testament to the invaluable contributions that such experts can make to help presidents and other policymakers navigate the often dangerous international political arena. In Nitze’s case, this meant thinking about the unthinkable — nuclear war — for more than 40 years.
Paul Nitze was seven years old and was vacationing in Austria with his family in August 1914, when the First World War began. Like his friend and colleague George Kennan, Nitze came to regard war as having a devastating impact, according to his autobiography From Hiroshima to Glasnost, “on the structure of civilization, the disillusionment and brutalization of man and his humanity . . . such that the civilized world was never again the same.” (READ MORE: Former Trump Defense Official Makes the Case for Prioritizing Asia Over Europe)
At the end of the Second World War, Nitze, after a successful career on Wall Street and service in several wartime agencies, traveled to Hiroshima and Nagasaki to assess the effects of the strategic bombing of Japan, the first and only use of atomic weapons in wartime. Thus began his intellectual and policy-making career of thinking about the unthinkable — a potential war between nuclear-armed powers.
In his autobiography, Nitze wrote that his experience in Hiroshima and Nagasaki “influenced my perception of how the postwar military establishment should be organized.” This included taking into account “the possibility that our enemies would have weapons as powerful and as destructive as our own.” This meant, Nitze wrote, that the United States’ defense establishment needed to carry out “a vigorous research and development program, to assure the optimum exploitation of science and technology for national defense,” including a much-improved intelligence gathering and intelligence analysis system “to avoid a repetition of the Pearl Harbor disaster.”
Nitze joined the State Department in 1946, where he helped Will Clayton devise the Marshall Plan to aid the devastated countries of Western Europe. When Secretary of State George Marshall established the Policy Planning Staff, Kennan became its director and later named Nitze deputy director. In July 1947, Kennan had anonymously written his famous “X” article in Foreign Affairs, which explained the Truman administration’s policy of containment. Nitze recalled that he found it “persuasive.” Three years later, after Nitze succeeded Kennan as head of the Policy Planning Staff, he oversaw the drafting of NSC-68, the classified national security document that, building on Kennan’s containment policy, set forth a long-term strategy for winning the Cold War. That strategy, which was inspired by James Burnham’s analysis and recommendations in The Coming Defeat of Communism, called for conventional military and nuclear weapons build-up, a tripling of the defense budget, and political/psychological/economic warfare to undermine the Soviet empire.
Nitze also weighed in on the debate within the Truman administration as to whether the United States should move forward with the development of the hydrogen bomb. He favored moving forward with the project (Kennan, J. Robert Oppenheimer, and David Lilienthal of the Atomic Energy Agency opposed it) after meeting with Edward Teller regarding its feasibility. He also guessed, correctly, that the Soviets might be working on a similar bomb. Indeed, as Nitze explains in his autobiography, Stalin had decided to develop a Soviet H-bomb three months before Truman made the final decision to move forward with the American H-bomb. “There can now be little doubt,” he wrote, “that had Mr. Truman not acted when he did, the Soviets would have achieved unchallengeable nuclear superiority by the late 1950s.” (READ MORE: Becoming a Moral Person Takes Work)
Throughout the 1950s, Nitze became more and more involved in a field that became known as “strategic studies.” That field attracted other experts, including Bernard Brodie, Herman Kahn, Albert Wohlstetter, Henry Kissinger, William Kaufmann, and later Raymond Aron, Edward Luttwak, Andrew Marshall, and Colin Gray. Nuclear weapons would eventually be fielded on intercontinental ballistic missiles, submarine-launched ballistic missiles, bombers, and intermediate and short-range tactical delivery systems. The nuclear strategists dealt with arcane issues such as missile “throw weight,” warhead accuracy (circular error probable), megatonnage, fixed and mobile launchers, anti-ballistic missile systems, multiple independent reentry vehicles (MIRVs), “first-strike” possibilities, counterforce and counter value weapons, civil defense, and anti-satellite and other space weapons.
In the 1950s, Nitze criticized the Eisenhower administration’s doctrine of “massive retaliation,” which he claimed relied too heavily on nuclear as opposed to conventional deterrence. In the 1960s, while serving in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations in the defense department, Nitze participated in the ExComm meetings during the Cuban Missile Crisis and later opposed Defense Secretary Robert McNamara’s commitment to Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) as a nuclear doctrine. Nitze believed that the only thing preventing a Soviet takeover of Western Europe was U.S. strategic nuclear superiority, and he argued that we should do whatever it takes to maintain that superiority.
Despite his Democratic Party credentials, President Richard Nixon appointed Nitze as our chief arms control negotiator in the SALT and ABM talks with the Soviets. Nitze later wrote that Nixon and Kissinger were too eager for an agreement to buttress Nixon’s reelection effort. Both the SALT I and ABM Treaties, he believed, were flawed because they failed to place sufficient limits on Soviet heavy missiles, such as the SS-18. He believed that the Soviets were using arms control to develop a “first-strike” capability. He feared that as nuclear weapons became more accurate, the Soviets could attain the theoretical capability of destroying most of our fixed, land-based missiles, many submarine-launched ballistic missile (SLBM) bases, and intercontinental bomber bases in a first strike, which would leave an American president with the unenviable choice of responding by targeting Soviet cities and thereby inviting Soviet retaliation (i.e, committing national suicide) or surrender. (READ MORE: Biden’s Awfully Bittersweet Deal For Hostages)
Nitze’s fears grew when Jimmy Carter, whom he voted for in 1976, became president. Carter’s approach to arms control and the negotiations of SALT II caused Nitze to join the Committee on the Present Danger. David Callahan in his biography of Nitze, Dangerous Capabilities: Paul Nitze and the Cold War, recounts a meeting between the Committee and Carter where Nitze and Eugene Rostow attempted to persuade the president to increase defense spending and change his approach to the SALT II talks. Carter dismissed their concerns, leading Rostow to later say that “the degree of ignorance and naivete by the President was appalling. We were just stunned . . . The notion that that fellow was President was just frightening.” In his memoirs, Nitze recalled that he found Carter’s “attitude towards politics grounded in a hortatory Wilsonian approach, which had been impractical even in Wilson’s day, and which seemed even more out of tune with the realities of the 1970s.” Nitze later wrote a lengthy critique of the SALT II agreement that Carter signed (but which was never ratified by the U.S. Senate after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan), which accused the administration of ignoring the “counterforce aspect of nuclear strategy” and creating a “perilous situation” for the United States.
Ronald Reagan was a member of the Committee on the Present Danger, and when he became president he appointed Nitze as his chief arms control negotiator in talks which initially dealt with intermediate-range nuclear missiles in Europe but later spread to strategic missiles. Reagan first engaged in a conventional military and nuclear weapons build-up. He also promoted the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). James Graham Wilson notes in the new biography that Nitze supported Reagan’s nuclear and conventional build-up but was initially a skeptic of SDI. He later viewed SDI as a useful bargaining chip in dealing with his Soviet counterparts. As the Cold War wound down, much to Nitze’s surprise, arms control became more feasible. The Soviet empire collapsed. The United States won the Cold War. Paul Nitze was present at both its beginning and its end, and his expertise and critical analyses helped the United States bring about a peaceful end to the U.S.-Soviet rivalry.
In the post-Cold War era, Nitze continued to comment on international relations. He opposed the first Gulf War and U.S. intervention in Somalia but supported U.S. air actions in Bosnia. He signed a letter with other experts urging President Bill Clinton to refrain from enlarging NATO, which he believed would revive Russian imperialism. And he bought into the theology of climate change, viewing it in his last years as an existential threat to the planet. Nitze died in 2004 at the age of 97.
In the second decade of the 21st century, the United States now faces a peer competitor in China, which is steadily growing its nuclear arsenal. Meanwhile, Russia, which has a “strategic partnership” with China, fields the largest deployment of nuclear weapons. North Korea has nuclear weapons, as do the countries of England, France, Israel, India, Pakistan, and probably soon Iran. We need to start thinking about the unthinkable again. We are going to need a Paul Nitze in the near future to help us navigate the dangerous nuclear developments of this century. Our very survival as a free nation may depend on it.
The post Paul Nitze: A Career of Thinking About the Unthinkable appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.
