Paul Nitze Interview (page: 5 / 9) Presidential Medal of Freedom	Print Interview

At the end of the war, you were in Germany, and you took a look at Hitler's bunker, didn't you?

Paul Nitze: It was shortly after the surrender.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. We were down at Flensburg during that period when the Dönitz government was still in command, but their area of jurisdiction was only Flensburg, and a little bit behind it. I had gone down there to interrogate Albert Speer and he was at a place called Glucksburg Castle. But, then we got word from General Rook, our commanding general then, he said, "We are going to arrest all these people two days from now, so you've got two days to finish your interrogation of Speer, and he will no longer be available to you." So on that last day we dropped everything else we were asking about and asked Speer to tell us about the last days in the bunker, and what happened and his attempts to influence Hitler in the last days. So, he described that all to us, and we had one whole day of testimony from him on the last days in the bunker. And, that was all stolen from us by a British man by the name of Trevor-Roper and I think he wrote some book about the last days in the Bunker, all based upon this transcript of our interrogation of Speer. I was furious at the British at that time. We'd also gotten out of Speer the combination to his safe in Munich. And, I sent a fellow, an intelligence officer down there to Munich with the combination and the key to these safes in a bank in Munich. He came back with all the things that we had asked for and they were Speer's private communications directly to Hitler, and Hitler's back to him, and some other reports of one kind or another, but also this trowel, with which Hitler had dedicated the West Wall, that protective wall that he created opposite the Maginot Line to keep the French from attacking into Germany from that area of the world. This engraved, silver trowel I'd proposed that we give to Harvard University, but this was abstracted by a British fellow, a British economist that I loathed. He somehow abstracted it and gave it to Oxford instead. And, there it is in Oxford.

After talking to Speer, you went and visited the bunker. It must have been a pretty eerie experience.

Paul Nitze: It had been pretty well looted by everyone else prior to our arrival, so there wasn't much left there. As I said, the only thing I could pick up was this mother's medal. (A medal which honors mothers with more than eight children).

You also went to see the results of the atomic weapons that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Could you tell us about that?

Paul Nitze: We got there very shortly after it happened. Those atomic weapons were dropped in August of 1945, and we got over there in September. There were three of us heading up this mission to investigate the effects of air power in the Pacific theater, but particularly to do a study of the effects of the atomic weapons dropped at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We finally had a team of some 500 scientists, physicists, weapons experts, damage measuring teams, doctors and psychologists with us.

I had an administrative aide who was working for me, and he was a very able man. I sent him to Hiroshima and Nagasaki to see where we were going to be able to put up these 500 scientists to do the investigation. He came back and said, "Mr. Nitze, this isn't the usual kind of place. There is nothing at either place to requisition. Buildings don't exist anymore." I said, "Colonel Strickland, what do you recommend?" He recommended he be sent to Yokosuka where the U.S. Navy headquarters were, where he could talk to the admirals to see what they have to recommend. Maybe they could make some ships available for us. So he came back from that and said, "They have offered you a list of 50 ships you can take your choice from, because there is no way of getting them back to the United States right away, and they are not doing anything, and they'd rather see them occupied than just loafing here. So you can have your choice of five battle ships, and three aircraft carriers, and 42 destroyer escorts, etc." So we selected various ships, putting one in the Nagasaki harbor and another in a harbor near Hiroshima, and we put our men on those ships. We had good communications equipment, a printing plant, and so forth. So the whole thing worked out very well.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. When we first got there to look at Hiroshima, literally there was very little standing. But, one was impressed with the fact that the trains were already running through Hiroshima. The railroad tracks weren't damaged. We interrogated the survivors, went to the hospitals and talked to those who had survived, found some very extraordinary things. For instance, a man sitting in a railroad car, with the window closed, the glass had been shattered by the explosion. He was cut badly by the glass, but the window had absorbed most of the radiation, and he survived. While the man sitting opposite him was next to an open window, and received -- he wasn't hit by the flying glass but he had the full radiation, instantaneous radiation, and he died right away. So that you found out all kinds of things from the just the people you talked to, the visual experience of seeing this, that and the other thing which gave you an impression of what these effects were at various distances from the point from which it had been dropped.

After what you saw there, did you think there could be a limited war with nuclear weapons?

Paul Nitze: We were asked, amongst other things, to recommend the organization of our defense forces in preparation for a world in which not only nuclear weapons, but thermonuclear weapons might be possible. We made these recommendations bearing in mind the following points. The first was that other nations would also master the art of making nuclear weapons. Secondly, that the USSR would be amongst those countries, and would be the principal threat to the United States and to its allies. And thirdly, that the power of an individual plane carrying a nuclear weapon was 100 to 250 times as destructive as one carrying the optimum mix of conventional weapons.

Another point was that those weapons were dropped with no warning of any kind. Those Japanese that had gotten into the aircraft shelters, which existed in both cities, they all survived pretty well. Very few of those people were killed. There weren't any defenses against incoming bombers. So you have to imagine a lot of different circumstances than those that actually existed there at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We thought it would be very hard to envisage a war restricted to limited engagements, but they might be necessary to give you the positions you needed to defend yourself against an enemy that had nuclear weapons themselves.

At the time, did you sense the atomic bomb and the H-bomb had changed the course of international politics and diplomacy and military competition? Was there a fundamental change in the way we approach those kinds of issues?

Paul Nitze: Both true and false. Certainly, there was a change. If you increase the destructiveness of weapons by hundreds of fold -- thousands of fold with thermonuclear weapons -- certainly you have an enormous change in what the Soviets would call "degree." But is it really a change in kind? It still was possible, we thought, for one side or the other to come out better than the opponent. If you looked at what would happen if you had a nuclear war and lost it, there was a difference. It was important to try to maintain such degree of superiority as you could over any potential enemy as might be possible. One of the analysts at the RAND Corporation came to the conclusion that the mere existence of nuclear weapons had so changed things that war had become an impossibility. We did not believe that to be true.

At some point people must have seen that there was no way to put the genie back in the bottle.

Paul Nitze: One could try, and that was tried. The Acheson-Lilienthal Report tried to think the problem through, and that was followed with the Baruch Plan. The Baruch Plan proposed that there be a subsidiary of the United Nations which would take title to all the deposits of uranium and thorium and other things which could possibly be used as the raw material for nuclear weapons, and of all the facilities that might be created for the separation of those raw materials into usable material for nuclear weapons. All the testing and development of weapons should be monopolized by this UN agency. The control of this agency was to be in the hands of a three-man group. One representing the USSR, one representing the U.S. and the third, appointed by the United Nations. We presented the Baruch Plan to the Soviets. The Soviets said "Nyet" in unmistakable terms.

They had been working on nuclear weapons themselves for a long period of time during the war. They had learned a great deal from their spies in the United States. We didn't at that time know how much they had learned, but we found out shortly thereafter. They were determined not to be second to us in the nuclear field. They were not going to negotiate with us until they were at least equal, and hopefully from their standpoint, superior to us. So they just had no interest in the Baruch Plan at all.

When people are involved in public life, and have great demands on their time, it's often difficult to balance the professional and the personal. Were you able to do that?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Paul Nitze: I found that the most difficult issues were those where there was a conflict between my family life and my professional government life. And, that became most clear right at the end of the war, when I'd finished my work with the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey and gotten the final report drafted and it had gone to the press and that was finished. Then should I return to Wall Street, or should I not? And, I was asked by J.H. Whitney whether I would come up and become a managing partner of a new firm that he was creating called J.H. Whitney and Company. He was going to put up all the money, $10 million, and I would have a big interest in the profits because I would be running this business. He and I discussed the various ventures we would go into and we had some very exciting ideas. Right at the end of the war there were lots of things that needed to be done. If somebody had some venture capital at that time, this was a great opportunity. So, we cooked up three or four ideas that we were going to go into right away. And, I came back here to Washington to tell my wife and my children that this was what we were going to do. We had four children; we had a German nurse who took care of the youngest one. I looked around the table, and everybody said, "Yes daddy, if that's what you intend to do, we'll all go with you," but tears were streaming down five faces. I decided maybe this wasn't such a good decision after all. Then a week later, Will Clayton, who was Undersecretary of State, asked me whether I would come and work for him in the State Department. I decided I would not go back to Wall Street because my family didn't want to do so, and I had done that business sort of thing, financially we didn't need to do that and so I followed the demands of family life rather than the demands of a business career, stayed here in Washington and have never regretted it.

That choice has placed you at the center of some fascinating issues and events.

Paul Nitze: That isn't why I did it, really. I did it because of the five weeping faces around the table.

What was it that upset them? The thought of changing schools, moving, neighborhoods?

Paul Nitze: That's right.

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