NSC-68 and the Korean War
Office of the Historian, Foreign Service Institute
United States Department of State
The events of 1949 made foreign policy the nation’s top priority. NATO became a working alliance, the United States provided military assistance to Europe, the Soviet Union detonated an atomic bomb, and the Mao Zedong’s communist party took control of mainland China.
The Department of State ordered a complete review of American strategic and military policy, and, in April 1950, the Department sent a paper calling for a broad-based and reinvigorated containment policy toward the Soviet Union, directly to the President, Harry Truman.
The paper later became known as NSC-68. After the outbreak of fighting on the Korean peninsula, NSC-68 was accepted throughout the government as the foundation of American foreign policy.
NSC-68, 1950
National Security Council Paper NSC-68 (entitled “United States Objectives and Programs for National Security” and frequently referred to as NSC-68) was a Top-Secret report completed by the U.S. Department of State’s Policy Planning Staff on April 7, 1950.
The 58-page memorandum is among the most influential documents composed by the U.S. Government during the Cold War and was not declassified until 1975. Its authors argued that one of the most pressing threats confronting the United States was the “hostile design” of the Soviet Union.
The authors concluded that the Soviet threat would soon be greatly augmented by the addition of more weapons, including nuclear weapons, to the Soviet arsenal. They argued that the best course of action was to respond in kind with a massive build-up of the U.S. military and its weaponry.
Reeling from the recent victory of Communist forces in the Chinese Civil War and the successful detonation of an atomic weapon by the Soviet Union, Secretary of State Dean Acheson asked the Policy Planning Staff, led by Paul Nitze (pronounced NITS-uh), to undertake a comprehensive review of U.S. national security strategy.
Building upon the conclusions of an earlier National Security Council paper (NSC-20/4), the authors of NSC-68 based their conclusions on the theory that the decline of the Western European powers and Japan following World War II had left the United States and the Soviet Union as the two dominant powers.
Nitze’s group argued that the Soviet Union was “animated by a new fanatic faith” antithetical to that of the United States and was driven “to impose its absolute authority over the rest of the world.” Furthermore, they concluded that “violent and non-violent” conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union had become “endemic.”
NSC-68 outlined a variety of possible courses of action, including a return to isolationism; war; continued diplomatic efforts to negotiate with the Soviets; or “the rapid building up of the political, economic, and military strength of the free world.”
This last approach would allow the United States to attain sufficient strength to deter Soviet aggression. In the event that an armed conflict with the Communist bloc did arise, the United States could then successfully defend its territory and overseas interests.
The authors of NSC-68 rejected a renewal of U.S. isolationism, fearing that this would lead to the Soviet domination of Europe and Asia, and leave the United States marooned on the Western Hemisphere, cut off from the allies and resources it needed to fend off further Soviet encroachments.
The report also ruled out a preventive strike against the Soviet Union, because its authors reckoned that such action would not destroy the Soviet military’s offensive capacities and would instead invite retaliatory strikes that would devastate Western Europe. Moreover, U.S. experts did not believe that American public opinion would support measures that might lead to a full-scale war.
NSC-68 did not rule out the prospect of negotiating with the Soviet Union when it suited the objectives of the United States and its allies; however, the report’s authors argued that such an approach would only succeed if the United States could create “political and economic conditions in the free world” sufficient to deter the Soviet Union from pursuing a military solution to the Cold War rivalry. This is what Trump was trying to do.
NSC-68 concluded that the only plausible way to deter the Soviet Union was for President Harry Truman to support a massive build-up of both conventional and nuclear arms.
More specifically, such a program should seek to protect the United States and its allies from Soviet land and air attacks, maintain lines of communications, and enhance the technical superiority of the United States through “an accelerated exploitation of [its] scientific potential.”
In order to fund the substantial increase in military spending this conclusion demanded, the report suggested that the Government increase taxes and reduce other expenditures.
Initially, a number of U.S. officials strongly opposed NSC-68’s recommendations. Critics such as Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson, and senior diplomats such as Soviet experts and former ambassadors to the Soviet Union George Kennan and Charles Bohlen, argued that the United States already had a substantial military advantage over the Soviet Union.
Kennan, in particular, disagreed with Nitze’s assertion that the Soviet Union was bent on achieving domination through force of arms, and argued that the United States could contain the Soviet Union through political and economic measures, rather than purely military ones.
However, the invasion of South Korea by Soviet and Chinese-backed North Korean forces in June 1950, and continuing charges by Congressional critics that the Administration was soft on Communism, quickly settled matters in favor of the report’s recommendations.
NSC 68’s recommendations thereby became policy, and the United States Government began a massive military build-up. While NSC-68 did not make any specific recommendations regarding the proposed increase in defense expenditures, the Truman Administration almost tripled defense spending between 1950 and 1953.
When North Korea invaded South Korea in June 1950, the United States sponsored a “police action”—a war in all but name—under the auspices of the United Nations.
The Department of State coordinated U.S. strategic decisions with the other 16 countries contributing troops to the fighting.
In addition, the Department worked closely with the government of Syngman Rhee, encouraging him to implement reform so that the UN claim of defending democracy in Korea would be accurate.
The Korean War was difficult to fight and unpopular domestically. In late 1951, the two sides bogged down on the 38th parallel, and the conflict seemed reminiscent of trench warfare in World War I.
The American public tired of a war without victory, especially when negotiation stalled as well. The stalemate eroded Truman’s public support and helped to elect the Republican presidential candidate, popular military hero General Dwight D. Eisenhower, as the next President.
This column by American studies professor Ben Railton explores the connections between America’s past and present.
As I stated earlier, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was formed in the aftermath of World War II, as an attempt to establish collective defenses against emerging Cold War threats from the Soviet Union and its allies.
Five Northern European nations (Belgium, France, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and the UK) began the process with the March 1948 Treaty of Brussels, and then brought their alliance to the United States and its Secretary of State George C. Marshall.
With Marshall’s guidance those six nations, joined by Canada, Portugal, Italy, Norway, Denmark, and Iceland, signed the April 1949 North Atlantic Treaty, officially forming NATO.
However, the Cold War extended far beyond the North Atlantic worlds, and NATO likewise was not limited to that sphere of influence. Indeed, it was in response to the Korean War, that NATO truly began to develop its international military forces and strategies, reflecting interconnections between these regions and issues that remain vital to this day.
When the Korean War broke out on June 25th, 1950, the United Nations Security Council unanimously condemned the invasion on that same day, and two days later President Truman ordered U.S. air and sea support for South Korean forces.
By July 5th U.S. armed forces were on the ground and taking part in the Battle of Osan alongside South Korean troops, a military alliance that would continue for the remaining three years of the war.
While Truman and new Secretary of State Dean Acheson focused their initial public statements on the specific need to defend South Korea from the North’s aggressions, Truman very much believed that the war was part of larger Cold War conflicts as well.
As he later argued in his memoir, Years of Trial and Hope (1956), “Communism was acting in Korea, just as Hitler, Mussolini and the Japanese had ten, fifteen, and twenty years earlier. I felt certain that if South Korea was allowed to fall, Communist leaders would be emboldened to override nations closer to our own shores. If the Communists were permitted to force their way into the Republic of Korea without opposition from the free world, no small nation would have the courage to resist threat and aggression by stronger Communist neighbors.”
NATO saw the Korean conflict and its ramifications in the same way and responded accordingly. In September 1950 the NATO Military Committee called for a buildup of military forces to counter potential Soviet and allied aggressions around the world, and shortly thereafter the organization formed the Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE), appointing Supreme Allied Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower as its first leader.
These efforts culminated in the February 1952 North Atlantic Council meeting in Lisbon, at which a number of key steps were taken: the creation of a Long-Term Defence Plan; the proposed expansion of combat-ready forces to 96 divisions (reduced to 35 the following year, which was still a significant increase); and the creation of a new Secretary General position, with the UK’s Lord Ismay appointed as the first NATO Secretary General.
NATO followed these efforts by undertaking its first major maritime exercise, Exercise Mainbrace, in September 1952.
Although Eisenhower had by then resigned his position to run for the presidency, two American military officers and NATO leaders coordinated the exercise: General Matthew B. Ridgway, who had succeeded Eisenhower as Supreme Allied Commander Europe after commanding all U.S. and United Nations troops in Korea from 1951 to 1952; and Admiral Lynde D. McCormick, the Supreme Allied Commander Atlantic and himself a veteran of World War II’s Pacific Theater.
Under their lead, more than 200 ships and 80,000 men participated in twelve days of military exercises, what New York Times reporter Hanson Baldwin called “the largest and most powerful fleet that has cruised in the North Sea since World War I.”
The headline of Baldwin’s article linked the exercises to NATO’s “Important Role in Defense of Europe.”
By the July 1953 final armistice that ended the Korean War, NATO had largely become the sizeable, vital international military and diplomatic organization it would remain for the Cold War’s subsequent decades, one that, while centered in the North Atlantic, reflects a world in which Russia, Southeast Asia, and every region and nation are interconnected in the era’s issues and conflicts.
This brings us to the present conflict in Ukraine.
The western alliance is sending extra troops to Eastern Europe, but they have no plans to get involved in the current conflict.
In 1955 Soviet Russia responded to NATO by creating its own military alliance of eastern European communist countries, called the Warsaw Pact.
Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, a number of former Warsaw Pact countries switched sides and became Nato members. The alliance now has 30 members.
Ukraine is not a member of Nato, so the alliance is not obliged to come to its defense. Ukraine has wanted to join for several years. However, one of Russia’s demands before the invasion was that Ukraine should never be allowed to join – something the alliance refused to agree to.
Russia fears NATO has been encroaching on its territory by taking on new members in eastern Europe and that admitting Ukraine would bring NATO forces into its backyard. NATO says it is a purely defensive alliance.
Nato already has troops stretching from the Baltic republics in the north to Romania in the south.They were stationed there in 2014 after Russia’s annexation of Crimea and are designed to act as a “tripwire” in case of a Russian attack.
NATO is now deploying elements of its 40,000-strong Response Force to Eastern European countries bordering Russia and Ukraine.
It has 100 fighter jets on high alert and has 120 ships, including three carrier groups, patrolling the seas from the far north to the eastern Mediterranean.
The US has also committed to sending more troops to Europe, but President Biden said they will not be fighting in Ukraine itself.
The extra troops will join the four multinational battlegroups NATO has in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland, and its multinational brigade in Romania.
So folks, there is your history of NATO and where the conflict currently stands. Should we go back to the original National Security Council Paper NSC-68 of 1950 and review our options?
Here they are:
- A return to isolationism
- Full scale war
- Continued diplomatic efforts to negotiate with the Soviets
- The rapid building up of the political, economic, and military strength of the free world