A Cold War strategist who moved between nuclear buildup and arms control
During the 1982 Geneva talks, he took a “walk in the woods” with Yuli Kvitsinsky to explore a compromise.
Paul Nitze was an American diplomatic and defense official who shaped Cold War strategy and nuclear policy. As the principal author of NSC-68, he framed the long confrontation with the Soviet Union as a problem requiring military expansion, yet he also saw painstaking negotiation as necessary to manage the dangers of nuclear weapons. After participating in SALT, he led the Reagan administration’s INF negotiations and pursued a pragmatic line that treated credible deterrence and arms reduction as compatible rather than mutually exclusive. His legacy therefore joins the architecture of the arms race to the search for a negotiable order.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1944–1946Vice Chairman, U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey
- 1950–1953Director of Policy Planning, U.S. Department of State
- 1961–1963Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs
- 1963–1967Secretary of the Navy
- 1967–1969Deputy Secretary of Defense
- 1969–1973U.S. delegation to SALT I
- 1981–1984Chief U.S. negotiator for the INF talks
- 1984–1989Special Advisor to the President and Secretary of State on Arms Control
Related historical events
- 1969–1979Détente and the SALT NegotiationsU.S. delegate to SALT IHe served on the U.S. delegation to SALT I from 1969 to 1973.
- 1985–1989The New Thinking and the End of the Cold WarAttendee at the Geneva plenary sessionsAs special advisor to Reagan and Shultz on arms control, he attended the Geneva plenary sessions.
NSC-68 and the Cold War military buildup
In 1950, Nitze led the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff as it undertook a review of U.S. national security strategy at Secretary of State Dean Acheson’s request. Completed on April 7, NSC-68 portrayed Soviet intentions as a hostile threat to the United States and made a major U.S. military buildup, including conventional and nuclear weapons, the central means of deterrence. The report did not recommend war or a return to isolationism, and it did not rule out negotiation. But it argued that diplomacy would be effective only after the United States and its allies had established favorable political and economic conditions and sufficient deterrent strength. In this conception, diplomacy was not an alternative to military expansion but a means supported by it.\n\nThe recommendations did not command agreement from the outset. George Kennan and other critics argued that the United States already had sufficient superiority and could contain the Soviet Union through political and economic means. After the Korean War began in June 1950, however, the Truman administration adopted NSC-68’s recommendations as policy and sharply increased defense spending. Nitze’s role therefore went beyond drafting a document: he was a principal architect of a strategy that tied the long confrontation with the Soviet Union to military expansion, a conception that had a lasting effect on the militarization of U.S. policy during the Cold War.