In Memoriam: Paul H. Nitze (1907-2004)

He participated in some of the key decisions that lead to the nuclear arms race, from development of the hydrogen bomb to the construction of a massive U.S. force meant to withstand and respond to a Soviet nuclear attack. As détente blossomed between the United States and Russia, Nitze was a skillful arms control negotiator who saw such talks less as an opportunity for joint disarmament than a way to attain U.S. strategic goals. But after the Cold War’s end Nitze called for unilateral U.S. nuclear disarmament, challenging the need for maintaining a nuclear force that he had helped shape as a deterrent to potential Soviet aggression.

Perhaps because of his aggressive approach to political adversaries, Nitze never achieved the public recognition or title equivalent to his substantial influence on U.S. strategic policy: his highest post was deputy secretary of defense. Nevertheless, Nitze was respected by U.S. presidents who sought his advice for four decades and by the Soviet leadership who saw him as a trusted interlocutor. The policies he championed left a deep legacy still visible today in the U.S. nuclear arsenal, U.S.-Russian relations, and dozens of Nitze protégés from each party who have shaped and continue to shape U.S. strategic policy, such as Secretary of State Colin Powell and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz.

During the height of the Cold War, Nitze made no bones about the fact that he favored “arms control, not disarmament,” which he saw as a way of matching ambitious U.S. policy goals with limited budgetary and other means. More conservative than some of his arms control colleagues, Nitze helped to provide credibility for some agreements while helping to sink some others.

His fingerprints can be found on many of the high-water marks in U.S.-Soviet arms control, from the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT I) agreement and the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty to the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty. However, he also played a hand in delaying SALT II and opposing President John F. Kennedy’s effort to conclude a comprehensive test ban treaty, whose ratification he urged Congress to support once the Cold War had ended.

“When outside the government, he was part of the problem affecting arms control, an implacable obstructionist and sometimes even a character assassin of those who were trying to advance the process,” wrote Strobe Talbott in The Master of the Game, his 1988 portrait of Nitze. “When inside the government he tended to be part of the solution—a dogged negotiator, an innovative deal maker, a bold infighter, a trusted counselor.”

Nitze’s views on nuclear weapons were shaped by his post-World War II role as vice chairman of the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey in the Pacific. In that position, he traveled to Hiroshima and Nagasaki and came away with a different conclusion than others who had seen the devastation atomic bombs wreaked on those cities: he concluded that a nuclear war, although deadly, was both survivable and possible and that U.S. strategy should be aimed at making such a conflict unlikely but in prevailing if it occurred. From then on, Nitze’s strategic views were powered by two impulses: to make sure that the U.S. deterrent was credible and to provide an alternative if deterrence failed.

Moreover, although acknowledging U.S. reluctance to use such weapons, he was highly suspicious of Soviet motives and thought the Kremlin capable at the least of using nuclear blackmail. Nuclear weapons, he said, were a tool for the Soviet Union slowly to expand its influence and empire to the point where “in a unipolar world the United States would be forced to yield to Soviet influence.” Behind it all, he wrote in his 1989 autobiography, was “the Kremlin’s grand design to achieve patiently, over as much time as might be necessary, world domination without a single nuclear shot being fired.”

“The standard by which Nitze judged arms control agreements was whether they strengthened deterrence, particularly American deterrence of Soviet aggression—the only danger he considered real,” Talbott wrote.

These two streams of thought first came together in 1949 when Nitze, then deputy director of policy planning at the Department of State, supported development of the hydrogen bomb in opposition to the views of his direct superior, George Kennan, who favored international control of nuclear weapons. Nitze viewed Kennan’s scheme as a pipe dream and feared that the Russians might already be on track to building such a weapon, which, in the absence of a matching U.S. effort, would grant them strategic superiority. “We could not afford to run that risk,” Nitze later wrote.

Over the next decades, Nitze would employ similar logic to support efforts to vastly increase the size of the U.S. nuclear arsenal and associated delivery systems, particularly missiles, in order to close perceived gaps with the Soviets.

At the same time, Nitze would search for ways to contain potential Soviet expansionism without forcing U.S. policymakers to choose whether or not to pull the nuclear trigger.

One track, espoused in his landmark “NSC 68” document in 1950, was his constant call for bolstering the conventional forces of the United States and its allies in order to provide a non-nuclear counterweight to the massive Soviet conventional forces.

Another track was to fashion ways for the United States to demonstrate that it could mount a credible nuclear retaliatory strike after a Soviet surprise attack in order to discourage such an attack in the first place. Such thinking provided the intellectual underpinning for the development of a more survivable triad of nuclear weapons on bombers, in hardened silos, and in submarines.

Nitze began to play an active part in arms control measures in the late 1960s as deputy secretary of defense under President Lyndon B. Johnson. The impetus for these measures, he said, came from the perception that, although U.S. spending on strategic systems was limited because of budget pressures and the Vietnam War, Soviet deployments of ICBMs had increased at an unprecedented level and would soon be in a position to achieve “significant superiority.” As a result, Nitze advocated arms control measures that might forestall further Soviet ICBM expansion. Johnson, Nitze said, also feared Soviet deployment of ABM systems, fearing that they would force the United States to undertake a crash program to match them.

Under the administration of President Richard Nixon, those pressures and Nixon’s desire for a rapproachment with the Soviets led to the conclusion of the ABM Treaty and SALT I. Nitze saw the former, which he had a hand in fashioning, as a “definite step forward in arms control” that prevented a “potentially wide-open competition in strategic defenses.” He was less pleased with SALT I, which sought to limit offensive weapons, thinking the agreement favored the Soviets, but he still argued publicly for its ratification.

Nitze hoped that a SALT II agreement, which was supposed to succeed the so-called interim agreement of SALT I, might rectify the perceived imbalance. Left out of the Carter administration, however, Nitze became a bitter critic of the agreement, saying it gave too much to the Soviets who were just using it to “nail down strategic primacy.”

As chairman of policy studies for the advocacy group Committee on the Present Danger (CPD), Nitze led an unsuccessful but vituperative effort to derail the nomination of Paul Warnke as director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency that led to a quarter-century feud between the two men. He was more successful in shoring up congressional resistance to SALT II, resistance that ultimately forced President Jimmy Carter to suspend action on the treaty in the wake of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

One of CPD’s members was Ronald Reagan. After Reagan took office in 1981, Nitze was tapped to head the U.S. delegation aimed at eliminating intermediate-range nuclear missiles primarily intended for a war in Europe between the Soviet bloc and NATO. In 1982, Nitze, seeing the talks as stalemated, looked for ways to break out of the deadlock. Without explicit instructions, he decided to sound out his Soviet counterpart, Yuli Kvitsinskiy, informally.

“The eventual payoffs seemed immense and I was prepared to run the risk,” Nitze said of his famous “Walk in the Woods” with Kvitsinskiy in the Jura mountains not far from Geneva, which laid out a possible informal compromise and became the basis for a well-known play.

Their initial efforts failed to win approval in Moscow or Washington but set in motion the process that would eventually lead to the 1987 INF Treaty. That treaty required the United States and the Soviet Union to eliminate and permanently forswear all of their nuclear and conventional ground-launched ballistic and cruise missiles with ranges of 500-5,500 kilometers.

In 1986 at the Reykjavik summit between Reagan and Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev, Nitze and Marshal Sergei Akhromeyev, chief of the Soviet general staff, established some of the key basis for the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) reducing U.S. and Soviet strategic weapons.
Only a few years later, the Soviet collapse and the increasing sophistication of conventional weapons as demonstrated in the 1991 Persian Gulf War convinced Nitze that the U.S. nuclear arsenal was no longer needed to achieve U.S. strategic aims.

“I see no compelling reason why we should not unilaterally get rid of our nuclear weapons,” Nitze wrote in The New York Times in 1999. “To maintain them is costly and adds nothing to our security.… [I]n view of the fact that we can achieve our objectives with conventional weapons, there is nothing to be gained through the use of our nuclear arsenal.”

Nowhere was his change of heart more evident than in his views on the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT). In 1963, Nitze rejected the CTBT in favor of the weaker Limited Test Ban Treaty, which he said, unlike the CTBT, “could be adequately verified and made sense.” Nitze also sided with the military brass who feared the CTBT would blunt the U.S. technological edge needed to keep pace with the defense expenditures of the Soviet Union.

By 1999, Nitze was arguing in a letter to then-Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) that the CTBT could be verified “with great confidence.” He warned that “failure to ratify the CTBT would have to be regarded as the greatest disappointment of any Senate, of any time, of any party.”