In his memoir, From Hiroshima to Glasnost, Paul Nitze describes how as a young boy he witnessed the outbreak of World War I while he was traveling in Germany with his father, mother, and sister, arriving in Munich just in time to be struck by the city crowds' patriotic enthusiasm for the imminent conflict.

Having attained financial independence through the sale to Revlon of his interest in a French laboratory producing pharmaceutical products in the United States, Nitze took an intellectual sabbatical that included a year of graduate study at Harvard in sociology, philosophy, and constitutional and international law.

From 1944 to 1946, Nitze served as director and then as Vice Chairman of the Strategic Bombing Survey for which President Harry S. Truman awarded him the Legion of Merit.

One of his early government assignments was to visit Allied-occupied Japan in the immediate aftermath of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and assess the damage.

In the early postwar era and Cold War, he served in the Truman Administration as Director of Policy Planning for the State Department (1950–1953).

He was also the principal author in 1950 of the highly influential but secret National Security Council policy paper, NSC 68, which provided the strategic outline for increased US expenditures to counter the perceived threat of Soviet armament.

In 1956 he attended the Project Nobska anti-submarine warfare conference, where discussion ranged from oceanography to nuclear weapons.

The Team B reports became the intellectual foundation for the idea of "the window of vulnerability" and of the massive arms buildup that began toward the end of the Carter administration and accelerated under President Ronald Reagan.

Team B came to the conclusion that the Soviets had developed new weapons of mass destruction and had aggressive strategies with regard to a potential nuclear war.

According to Anne Cahn of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (1977–1980), "if you go through most of Team B's specific allegations about weapons systems, and you just examine them one by one, they were all wrong."

Nonetheless, some still claim that its conclusions about Soviet strategical aims were largely proven to be true, but this hardly squares with the elevation of Gorbachev in 1985.