National Security Council Document #68

National Security Council Document #68 (1950), officially titled “U.S. Objectives and Programs for National Security,” the quintessential policy document of the Cold War.The final victory of the Chinese communists, the detonation of an atomic bomb by the Soviet Union in the Fall of 1949, and the prospect of developing a hydrogen bomb convinced President Harry S. Truman and Secretary of State Dean Acheson of the need for a reevaluation of U.S. national security objectives. In January 1950, Paul Nitze, director of the State Department's Policy Planning Staff, assembled a small group from the State and Defense Departments to formulate a policy paper for this evaluation. By the following April, a draft was handed to the president and other members of the National Security Council (NSC).

National Security Council Document #68 (NSC 68) constituted a clarion call for a concerted long‐term effort by the entire national security apparatus to fight the threat of Soviet communism. Along with the necessity of a total military, political, and economic commitment, the document proclaimed, the nation must also develop a balance between conventional and atomic capability and a program of psychological warfare.

Financing this total commitment to protect national security, NSC 68 warned, would require substantially higher budgets. Whether President Truman and his advisers would accept such a large national security budget remained uncertain until the Korean War began on 25 June 1950. This seemed to substantiate NSC 68's pessimistic prognosis and its call for a total Cold War commitment.

Together, the Korean War and NSC 68 marked a crucial turning point in the Cold War and in U.S. military spending. When the national security budget soared from $13.5 billion in 1950 to $50 billion in 1952, the modern defense budget was born.
See also Containment; Federal Government, Executive Branch: Department of Defense; Federal Government, Executive Branch: Department of State; Joint Chiefs of Staff; Military, The; Nuclear Strategy; Nuclear Weapons.

Bibliography

Ernest May, ed., American Cold War Strategy: Interpreting NSC 68, 1993.

Anna Kasten Nelson