The Preponderance of Power: Paul Nitze and the Cold War

James Graham Wilson. America’s Cold Warrior: Paul Nitze & National Security from Roosevelt to Reagan (Ithaca, Cornell University Press) 336 pp., $32.95.

Ten years ago, James Graham Wilson, a historian at the U.S. State Department, wrote The Triumph of Improvisation, an insightful account of Reagan, Gorbachev, and the end of the Cold War. Mr. Wilson’s America’s Cold Warrior, a biography of Paul Nitze, now reaches back to the Cold War’s origins and the long years of nuclear negotiations that followed. Wilson portrays Nitze, who died in 2004 at age ninety-seven, as the forerunner of the post-World War II generations of American national security professionals.

Nitze may be best known for guiding the preparation in 1950 of NSC-68, allegedly America’s strategic plan for prevailing in the Cold War. By the time the U.S. government declassified NSC-68 in 1975, the seventy-page document had achieved near-mythical status. As Wilson explains, later policy planners—including Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, a protege of Nitze—looked to NSC-68 as a model for rallying Americans to wage long struggles against formidable foes. No doubt today, Washington teems with aspirants who dream of drafting a new NSC-68 strategy to overcome China.

Nitze’s NSC-68 reflected the fearful era of the early Cold War, including the hot Korean conflict, threats to Berlin and Europe, and the new nuclear rivalry. Nitze had visited Hiroshima in 1945 and led surveys of strategic bombing. All his life, he worried about a nuclear showdown. His consistent solution was for the United States to secure a “preponderance of power,” both nuclear and conventional.

Nitze recognized, however, that policy plans had to be translated into actions, which he wanted to direct. Wilson recounts Nitze’s extraordinary experience on the front lines, often amid the risk of escalation to nuclear war: the Berlin and Cuban crises, the early nuclear negotiations, Vietnam, the Nixon- Kissinger treaties to limit strategic arms, and up to Reagan’s elimination of intermediate-range missiles, START negotiations, and strategic missile defense. Given all that experience, Colin Powell later reflected that working with Nitze “was like having Moses at the table.”

Moreover, Nitze was a sharp critic when out of power, so his biography targets the nuclear and arms control policies of Presidents Eisenhower, Carter, and George H.W. Bush, as well. By explaining Nitze’s views over fifty years, Wilson succinctly summarizes the nuclear debates of the Cold War.

The book also treats Nitze as a harbinger of a new technocratic cadre: the national security professional. Indeed, Nitze helped found and fund a new graduate school in Washington to train his successors, the School for Advanced International Studies (SAIS), now part of Johns Hopkins University. 

Nitze’s experience suggests some cautions for future security pros. He not only demonstrated his political independence by switching parties and working across administrations but also seemed dismissive of public attitudes, political constraints, and Congress. 

Even though Nitze began as a prodigy on Wall Street in the 1930s and later contributed to the Marshall Plan, his definition of strategic power narrowed to nuclear and conventional forces. He dismissed Eisenhower‘s balancing of economic prospects with burdens of defense spending and overlooked the USSR‘s economic weaknesses until the very end.

Nitze also failed to recognize the limits of his intellectual tenacity. According to one of his bosses, Secretary of Defense Clark Clifford, Nitze’s “peevishness“ and “unveiled contempt” for others doomed his appointment to the topmost rank. If Nitze did not receive deference, he could be vengeful.

Wilson’s biography acknowledges that Nitze’s service reflected his wealth, privilege, and formative early experience. After traveling in Europe as a boy in the summer of 1914, Nitze’s later outlook was always shaded by a sense that unexpected tragedy loomed. As a nuclear strategist, Nitze struggled to assure superior strength for the United States while maintaining stability and avoiding Armageddon. This conflict was one of the “tensions between opposites“ that fascinated him.

The author observes that today’s national security professionals still contend, as Nitze did, with issues of deterrence, nuclear threats, and confrontations among powers amidst newer dangers. In Nitze’s last years, he focused on the existential risks of climate change. Wilson has ably shown (in less than 300 pages) how State Department historians can extend their remit from publishing documentary records to enlivening the past—and educating those who seek to navigate the future.

Robert Zoellick served in national security and international economic posts during four U.S. administrations and is the author of America in the World.

Image: Rob Bogaerts / Anefo, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons