NSC 68
In the words of scholar Ernest R. May, NSC 68 "provided the blueprint for the militarization of the Cold War from 1950 to the collapse of the Soviet Union at the beginning of the 1990s."
It made the rollback of global Communist expansion a high priority and rejected the alternative policies of détente and containment of the Soviet Union.
[1] By 1950, U.S. national security policies required reexamination due to a series of events: the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was operational, military assistance for European allies had begun, the Soviet Union had detonated an atomic bomb and the communists had solidified their control of China.
In addition, a British sterling-dollar crisis in the summer of 1949 had brought home to U.S. officials that the Marshall Plan would not suffice to cure Western European economic ills by 1952, the Plan's scheduled end year, with the prospect that Western Europe would have no choice but to pursue autarky, as it had in the 1930s, with all the attendant difficulties that would pose for the world economy generally and the U.S. economy particularly.
The Kennan–Thompson–Bohlen group maintained that Stalin's principal goal was to secure tight control of the USSR and its satellites, but that he had no plan to seek global domination (an assessment shared by most historians today).
[8] The document outlined the de facto national security strategy of the United States for that time (although it was not an official National Security Strategy in the form known today) and analyzed the capabilities of the Soviet Union and of the United States of America from military, economic, political, and psychological standpoints.
[10] NSC 68 saw the goals and aims of the United States as sound, yet poorly implemented, calling "present programs and plans... dangerously inadequate".
It described containment as "a policy of calculated and gradual coercion" and called for significant peacetime military spending, in which the U.S. possessed "superior overall power ... in dependable combination with other like-minded nations."
In particular, it called for a military capable of NSC 68 itself did not contain any specific cost estimates at a time when the United States was committing six to seven percent of its GNP to defense.
However, several officials involved in the preparation of the study, including the future chairman of the president's Council of Economic Advisers Leon Keyserling, suggested that the massive increase in military spending could be afforded by deliberate acceptance of government deficits, which would have the added benefit of energising and stimulating parts of the American economy, as it did after 1930.
This assumption proved essential to the United States victory of military strength since the increase of government expenditure would place the nation at capacity.
[15] The argument is made that if the Soviet sphere of influence continues to grow, it may become such a powerful force, that no coalition of nations could band together and defeat it.
Willard Thorp questioned its contention that the "USSR is steadily reducing the discrepancy between its overall economic strength and that of the United States."
William Schaub of the Bureau of the Budget was particularly harsh, believing that "in every arena," the Air Force, the Army, the Navy, the stockpiling of atomic bombs, the economy, the US was far superior to the Soviet Union.
"[17] The Truman Administration began a nationwide public relations campaign to convince Congress and opinion-setters of the need for strategic rearmament and containment of Soviet communism.
It had to overcome isolationists, including Senator Robert A. Taft, who wanted less world involvement, as well as intense anti-Communists such as James Burnham who proposed an alternative strategy of rollback that would eliminate Communism or perhaps launch a preemptive war.
As Ken Young, a historian of the early Cold War period, has stated, "The report has been subject to continuous analysis and commentary.
Furthermore, it can be argued that NSC 68, as proposed by the council, addressed Truman's problem of being attacked from the right following the "red scare" and Alger Hiss case.
Although not made public, NSC 68 was manifested in subsequent increases in America's conventional and nuclear capabilities, thereby adding to the country's financial burden.
