NSC-68 and the 1950 Memo That Told America the Price of Staying Free

Washington has produced a few thousand strategy documents since the Second World War, and almost all of them have the shelf life of a banana. They are drafted, circulated, initialed, leaked, and forgotten. One of them, a sixty-odd page memo written in the spring of 1950, turned out to be the blueprint for a generation. It was classified for a quarter century. It was written by a handful of officials who knew that the first thing a democracy does with a bill is look for a reason not to pay it.

The document is called NSC-68, and the argument inside it is simple enough to put on a note card: a free country that announces a policy of resisting an enemy and then declines to buy the means of resisting him has not adopted a policy. It has adopted a hope. This post reads the memo the way a conservative should read any founding-era-of-the-Cold-War text, with the terms defined, the premises numbered, and the critics given a fair hearing before they are answered.

What NSC-68 was, and why it was written

Start with the definitions. The National Security Council was created by the National Security Act of 1947 to advise the President on integrating foreign, military and economic policy. "NSC-68" is simply the sixty-eighth numbered paper in its series, titled United States Objectives and Programs for National Security. It was completed on April 7, 1950, and sent up through the National Security Council to President Truman.

Three shocks produced it. In August 1949 the Soviet Union tested its first atomic bomb, years before American planners had expected it to. In October 1949 the Communists completed their conquest of mainland China. And in January 1950 the President, with the Soviet bomb in mind, directed the Secretaries of State and Defense to review the whole of American strategy in light of the new situation, including the question of the hydrogen bomb. On January 31, 1950, he ordered the study that became NSC-68.

The study was run out of the State Department's Policy Planning Staff, then headed by Paul Nitze, who had taken over from George Kennan at the start of 1950. Nitze worked with a joint State-Defense group. This matters because it was not a Pentagon wish list. The principal sponsor in the cabinet was Dean Acheson, the Secretary of State, and the paper's central claim was political before it was military: the Soviet leadership was not a normal great power with grievances to be traded away, and a policy that treated it as one would fail.

The argument, in the memo's own terms

The memo's picture of the Soviet design is blunt. It describes a regime animated by what it calls a new fanatic faith, antithetical to our own, which seeks to impose its absolute authority over the rest of the world. It treats the free world as the obstacle to that design, so that the conflict is not a series of border disputes but a contest between two ways of ordering human life. The memo is equally blunt about the stakes for the United States: the issue is whether a society founded on the dignity of the individual can survive in a world where a rival is organized to destroy it.

You can disagree with that framing. Many people at the time did. But notice what it does to the policy question. If the Soviet Union is a conventional rival, then diplomacy and limited deals can manage it. If the Soviet Union is a state whose legitimacy depends on the expansion of its system, then every gap in your defenses is an invitation, and the cost of a gap is paid by someone else first: Greeks, Czechs, Koreans, Berliners.

The memo's best-known sentence applies this to the word that was then the whole of American policy. Containment, it says, is a policy of bluff if it is not backed by superior aggregate military strength, in being and readily mobilizable. That is the line to remember. Everyone in Washington in 1950 favored containing communism. NSC-68 asked the awkward follow-up: with what?

The four courses of action

Here the memo does what good strategy papers do and lays out the options, and then eliminates them one by one. There are four.

1. Continue current policies. Keep the existing budgets, programs and tempo. The memo's verdict is that the gap between Soviet strength and the free world's would widen, because the Soviet Union was already devoting a much larger share of its economy to military power, and the end state would be a free world that could not defend itself.
2. Isolation. Pull back to the Western Hemisphere. The memo's verdict is that this would hand the Eurasian landmass to the Soviet Union and leave America alone and outflanked, a fortress that the rest of the world could eventually surround.
3. War. Strike first, before the Soviet Union matured its nuclear arsenal. The memo rejected this too, for reasons both moral and practical: the country would not support it, the allies would not support it, and the result of a war begun by America would hand the Soviet leadership the propaganda victory of a lifetime.
4. A rapid build-up of political, economic and military strength in the free world. The memo recommends this course, and it is the one that costs money.

Read in order, the four courses form a perfectly executed trap for the reader. Three are plainly bad, and the fourth is expensive. That is a well-known rhetorical device, and I will confess to admiring it. It is also, in this case, a fair summary of the real choices. The question was never whether to spend. The question was whether to spend now, on purpose, or later, in a panic.

What does the fourth course contain? The memo calls for a substantial increase in the military budget and in the strength of the armed forces, for larger air defenses and civil defense, for military assistance to allies, for the economic and political rebuilding of the free world, and for a more active information and covert program to contest Soviet influence. It also calls for hard thinking about the nuclear question. It does not offer a price tag in its text; the officials who wrote it were aware that a number would be the first thing the press, and the Budget Bureau, would attack. Later estimates of what the programme would require ran to several times the existing defense budget.

Truman hesitates

Here is the part that the highlight-reel version leaves out. Truman did not sign it.

He had reasons that a conservative should respect, even when we think he was wrong. The President wanted the government's peacetime commitments kept in line with its revenues. His Secretary of Defense, Louis Johnson, was an early critic of the paper who argued that America already held a substantial military advantage over the Soviet Union. The Budget Director and the economic advisers worried, correctly, that a rearmament programme on the scale the memo implied would mean higher taxes, controls on the economy, or both.

So the President did something that is easy to mock and, in a way, defensible. He sent the paper back for more work. He asked the National Security Council to examine the costs and the programmes in detail and to report. That sounds like a bureaucratic evasion, and in part it was. But a President who is told that his strategy requires a multiple of the current defense budget is entitled to ask what the multiple is. The paper had made the case for the ends. The case for the means had not yet been made to the person who would have to sign it and then defend it to Congress and to voters.

Think about what that sentence implies for how a democracy handles a threat. Authoritarian systems can commit to a long struggle by decree. A republic has to persuade, and persuasion takes either time or a shock. The memo's authors had the first and wanted the second to arrive on schedule. They did not get to choose.

June 25, 1950

On June 25, 1950, the North Korean army crossed the 38th parallel and invaded the South. The shock arrived on a Sunday, two and a half months after the memo reached the President's desk.

The invasion settled the argument faster than any memorandum could. Within days Truman committed American air and naval forces and then ground troops, and the United Nations Security Council, whose Soviet delegation was boycotting it over the question of Chinese representation, authorized a collective response. On September 30 the President approved NSC-68 as the policy of the government, and the rearmament it had called for began in earnest.

The scale of the change is easy to state, because defense outlays are a matter of record. Federal spending on national defense in fiscal 1950, the budget year before Korea, was about thirteen and a half billion dollars. By fiscal 1953 it had risen to about fifty-three billion, roughly four times as much, and the share of the whole economy devoted to defense rose from about 5 percent to about 14 percent. The armed forces grew, the allies were armed, and the NATO command structure that had been a treaty on paper became an organization with a headquarters and a supreme commander. In that sense, Korea did not prove NSC-68 correct; it supplied the political will that the memo could not.

There is a lesson here that conservatives should state plainly because the other side rarely does. A deterrent that is purchased after the invasion is not a deterrent. It is a rescue. Korea was the bill for a policy that had announced a commitment to resist communism in Asia, and then had not equipped the army in Japan to do it. The first American units sent to fight were underequipped and rushed, and their performance in the first weeks reflected the budgets that had come before. That is the strongest evidence in the record for the memo's claim, and it is not rhetorical. It is a matter of who was where, with what, in July 1950.

The critics, stated fairly

The strongest objections to NSC-68 are worth a fair hearing, because they come from serious people.

Objection one: it overstated the Soviet threat. The memo assumes that the Soviet leadership both intended world domination and possessed, or soon would possess, the means of imposing it. George Kennan, the author of the containment idea, spent much of his later life arguing that his concept had been militarized beyond recognition. He thought the Soviet Union was cautious, that its aims were largely political, and that the right response was economic and political reinforcement of Western Europe and Japan, not a general arms build-up.

Objection two: it was a rhetorical exercise built to win a bureaucratic fight. The paper is written in a deliberately stark register. Acheson himself later conceded, in his memoir, that if the authors made their points clearer than truth, they did not differ from most other educators and could hardly do otherwise. A critic can fairly say that a document designed to be vivid is a document that will exaggerate.

Objection three: it set the country on a path of permanent militarization. Eisenhower, who inherited the programme, would warn in his farewell address about the weight of a permanent armaments industry, a point explored in Eisenhower's Farewell Warned About More Than the Military-Industrial Complex. A fair reader can think the warning was warranted and still think the memo was right in 1950.

Objection four: it cost too much. This one deserves a conservative's respect. A government that commits to open-ended competition tends to find reasons to spend that outlast the competition, and the 1990s drawdown shows how quickly that conviction fades once the threat does, a story told in Peace Dividends Always Come Due, the 1990s Drawdown Reconsidered.

The answer

Number the replies.

1. On overstatement: the historical record gives the memo more credit than Kennan's later reading allows. The Soviet Union did support the North Korean invasion; the archives opened after 1991 show that Stalin approved it, a finding in line with the books discussed in Textbook Cold War Tales the Soviet Archives Quietly Overturned. A document that predicted aggressive probing and was followed within weeks by an invasion has a better record than most predictions.
2. On rhetoric: the memo was vivid, and vividness has a job. A free country has no standing army of persuasion. If you want a legislature to fund a long struggle, you have to make the case in sentences that a Congressman can read aloud at home. Clarity is not the same as distortion, and the decisive evidence is that the central claim, that military weakness invites aggression, was tested at the worst possible price, in Korea, and not refuted.
3. On permanent militarization: the warning is a reason to watch the programme, not a reason to refuse it. The remedy for waste is audit, oversight and sunset, and the Constitution gives Congress those tools. See The Pentagon Has Never Passed an Audit, and Conservatives Should Mind for what that looks like when it is neglected.
4. On cost: the cost was real. But compare it with the alternatives the memo itself described. The cost of the fourth course was a few years of higher defense budgets and a heavier tax load. The cost of the first or second would have been measured in territory and in people, and it would not have been optional. The honest way to put the matter is that the memo asked for insurance, and insurance always looks wasteful until the house burns.

I would add one more point, which the memo's critics tend to skip. The paper did not argue that America should fight everywhere. It argued that the country should build the capacity to choose. Weakness narrows your menu until the only items left are surrender and the last resort. Strength is what lets a President pick the middle options: the airlift, the blockade, the loan, the show of force, the treaty that means something.

What the memo got right, and what it did not settle

What it got right was the connection between purpose and power. The same insight runs through the best conservative thinking about foreign policy, from the Founders' insistence on a Navy to the Weinberger tests for the use of force, discussed in The Weinberger Doctrine Set Six Tests Before Sending Troops to Fight. Aims without means are speeches. The record of the 1930s, which the authors of NSC-68 remembered vividly, was a decade of aims without means.

What it did not settle is where the line falls between prudent insurance and permanent overreach. The memo is a call to build; it contains no principle of stopping. A reader in 2025 should ask of any programme the question Truman asked: what does it cost, and what will we stop paying for when the need has passed? That is a question for Congress, which under Article I holds the power to raise and support armies and to provide and maintain a navy. It is also a question for voters, who can find out what the Pentagon spends and on what.

There is a quieter lesson as well. The memo was written by officials who believed the Soviet Union was a systemic enemy, and who still insisted that the answer include the rebuilding of allies, the strengthening of free institutions, and a contest of ideas. The paper is not a plan for an empire. It is a plan for a coalition of free nations that would be strong enough to be left alone. Whatever one concludes about particular programmes, that is a more modest and more American ambition than its caricature suggests.

The last point is about candor. NSC-68 stayed secret until 1975, and the public of 1950 was told the conclusion without the argument. A republic cannot sustain a decades-long commitment on arguments that its citizens have not heard. The authors knew it, which is why the later presidents who succeeded in holding the line, Eisenhower and then Reagan, spent so much of their time explaining the line to the voters. The memo reads best as a first draft of a conversation that every generation has to have again with its own electorate.

The case in brief

1. NSC-68, delivered April 7, 1950, argued that containment without superior military strength was a bluff, and it set out four courses of action: continue as before, retreat, strike first, or build up the free world's strength.
2. Truman hesitated because the programme implied a large multiple of the defense budget, and a republic has to count the cost before it signs the check.
3. The invasion of South Korea on June 25, 1950, supplied the political will the memo could not, and the first weeks of that war showed the price of the gap it had warned about.
4. The critics, Kennan chief among them, were right that the document was vivid and open-ended; they were wrong that its central claim, that weakness invites aggression, was refuted by events.
5. The lesson for today is to fund strength on purpose, audit it constantly, and explain it to the voters, so that the bill is paid by choice and not by panic.

What you can do: look up your own member of Congress on the oversight page and read how that office voted on the most recent defense appropriations bill before you decide whether it is buying insurance or waste.