Paul Nitze Interview (page: 7 / 9) Presidential Medal of Freedom	Print Interview

As far back as the 1940s you believed we would eventually prevail over the Soviets because of our economic power, that they just would not be able to keep up with us. That seems to be what in fact happened, though it took a little bit longer than you might have anticipated.

Paul Nitze: Oh much longer, yes. George Kennan and I, when we were cooking up the containment policy, the question arose, "How long do you have to continue containment to make it work?" My recollection was that he thought it would take ten to 15 years. And I thought it was one or two generations. But both of us were way off. It took 40 years.

And several periods of doubling and tripling our military expenditures to make the point.

Paul Nitze: Right. The amazing thing was that the American people kept supporting it.

Are you amazed by that?

Paul Nitze: I was at the time, and I am in retrospect.

Modesty aside, how do you feel about the contributions you have made in the areas you have been involved in, diplomacy, negotiations, U.S./Soviet relations?

Paul Nitze: I think I have been extremely lucky. I have been around at a time when important things needed to be done. I had that feeling of participation in great events. Dean Acheson called his book Present at the Creation, and in a way I was also present at the creation.

You often worked with Dean Acheson, during the war and in the post-war Truman administration, when he became Secretary of State. What was your opinion of him?

Paul Nitze: He was one of the most brilliant men that I have ever worked with. Sharp, witty, knowledgeable, great lawyer. But he had the defects of his virtues. He was apt to be sharp and witty even when it was not appropriate to the occasion. He would make fun of all of his friends at some time or another. He couldn't resist humiliating them with some bright, cutting remark. He certainly managed to humiliate me from time to time. Chris Herter was a great friend of his. He so humiliated Chris one day that Chris never forgave him for it. So he had immense brilliance but also a cockiness and a wit which could cut the other way as well.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. He (Dean Acheson) had come to the conclusion that I was not a deep thinker, that I was a pain in the neck as far as he was concerned during World War II because I was running a lot of the economic programs and wasn't paying much attention to guidance from the State Department and he thought I was the heart of the revolt by the working level in the other agencies to insist that if the State Department wanted to give us guidance, they had better put it in writing. I wasn't prepared just to by some verbal indication he would prefer to have it done this way, or that. So, he took a different view. He blackballed my becoming a deputy director of the Policy Planning Staff when George Kennan suggested I do that. But, then when Dean left the department and went back into the private practice of law, he was gone from the scene. So, George called me up and said, "The ogre had disappeared, so why don't you come and be my deputy?" So I did. When he (Acheson) came back to the department, I was already installed. It was an unusual relationship. But later, when that administration was over, and he was in retirement, I called him up one day and asked him to have lunch. He said, "You know, Paul, you're the first person that has invited me to have lunch since I was Secretary of State. So, from that point on we had lunch every week, once a week. And we then became the closest of friends. And, I think I ended up being his closest friend. But, it was only after this kind of rocky background of opposition. He once, when I decided to accept an offer to become a negotiator on arms control, he thoroughly disapproved of that. He thought I ought to stay in the main line of policy and not get myself diverted in this miserable business of arms control and he went around town telling everybody that "Paul has gone soft on communism." That was his report on me at that time, which I resented. I really deeply resented it.

After World War II, the scientific community, which had been fairly unanimous in the development of the atomic bomb, was divided over developing the hydrogen bomb. At the center of that controversy was the division between Edward Teller and Robert Oppenheimer. Looking back on that, what do you make of that whole dispute?

Paul Nitze: I had just taken over as director of the Policy Planning Staff at the State Department. The thing that got me interested was that I received a call from Robert LaBaron in the Pentagon, director of the liaison between the Pentagon and the Atomic Energy Commission. He asked whether I would meet with three colonels, who were called "the atomic colonels." Those colonels worked for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and they specialized in understanding nuclear weapons. They told me we were making a great mistake, that it was now technically possible to make a thermonuclear weapon, and that the people that were inhibiting the U.S. from going forward with this were the scientists, led by Robert Oppenheimer. They hoped that we would agree with the Pentagon that this be changed and the joint Atomic Energy Commission be overruled. They suggested I talk next to Edward Teller. He spent three hours at the blackboard describing to me how he thought it would be possible to make this thermonuclear reaction work. He had two different ways of getting at it, and he wasn't sure if either of them would work, but that the idea could be made to work somehow.

So I talked to Robert Oppenheimer, who was the technical advisor to the Policy Planning Staff of the State Department. He said that Teller's ideas were not correct. That (a) it was dubious if the reaction could be made to work at all, and (b) if it were technically feasible, it would be very expensive of nuclear material. You could produce more bang with a large number of fission weapons than you could with a small number of fusion weapons using the same amount of nuclear material. In any case, if you could make the thing work it would weigh so much that it wouldn't be transportable in any airplane and couldn't possibly be delivered as a weapon.

My argument was that if we don't develop it the Russians might. Oppenheimer said, "Impossible!" because they were behind us in nuclear physics and would continue to be so because they didn't permit their scientists to publish their works as our scientists do. They would only be able to do it if we demonstrate a reaction and therefore prove the principle. Unless we demonstrate it first, they won't be able to do it.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. So, I went back and talked this over with Teller, and he said, "Well, you ought to talk to Dr. Lawrence of Lawrence Radiation Laboratory because he's the one who's really done more work with young scientists in this field than anybody else3. So he'll tell you all about what makes those fellows work, how this business runs." So, I got hold of Lawrence and he came over, flew to Washington and saw me. He said, "One thing I will guarantee you and that is the - Oppenheimer's point - that because of the practice of the American scientists to publish, that this will make a difference." He said, "Nobody in this field today is worth a damn who's older than 27. Most of the people who are producing the new ideas in the field of nuclear reactions are 19, 20, 21, up to 27. But, I don't know of any new and brilliant person older than that in this field. All these people that are working for me and others, they're all working on classified projects. They can't publish in any case. What makes them tick? What makes them tick is the thrill of feeling that you are breaking through the frontiers of knowledge. The satisfaction of working on new things where you are really at the front end of exploration, and they do value the respect of your peers. But, you don't need to publish for your peers to know what you're doing. The same is undoubtedly true in the Soviet Union. Their scientist, just like our scientists don't publish. They are not permitted to publish. But, they don't need that. They work in the same way our scientists are."

[ Key to Success ] Passion

So Oppenheimer's obvious point on that was just wrong. After listening to all this, I came to the conclusion that it was safer for us to go forward on this thing, but I hoped that it wouldn't work, and that even if it was feasible, you couldn't do it usefully or economically. The thing that frightened me was the thought that the Soviets might do this and we would be blind-sided. I recommended to Mr. Acheson that we side with the Pentagon in this round.

But there was one difficulty involved. Lilienthal, director of the AEC, thought that we hadn't thought through the political consequences. We hadn't really done a national basic review of the national security policy, what we should be doing in the foreign defense policy field in the event this were feasible. What would our policy be? I thought Lilienthal had a point, so I drafted a decision paper for Mr. Acheson to take up with Mr. Truman which authorized the beginning of a deliberate program of developing thermonuclear weapons, seeing whether it was feasible or not. Concurrently, directing the Secretary of State and the Secretary of Defense to undertake a basic review of our national policy in light of the existence of nuclear weapons and the possible existence of thermonuclear weapons. The president signed that. That led to the review which ended up being NSC 68 (National Security Council Resolution 68).

You've faced setbacks and disappointments in your career as well. Are there instances you would point to that had a major impact, or taught you something?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Paul Nitze: I've gotten fired from the government for instance, which normally is a bad thing. But, I've resigned from the government a number of times. The New York Times once looked at all the people who had resigned in anger from the American government who were presidential appointees and made a big thing of their resignation. Did they ever come back to government in the United States? In England, the case has been that all the great men in English politics have resigned at one time or another on matters of principle. But, in the U.S. government, was that true? And, they looked and found perhaps 180 people who had resigned from presidential appointments and they could find only three that had ever been re-appointed after having resigned. One of them is Dean Acheson. I forget who the other two were. But, it just isn't the tradition in American politics that somebody who resigns from government is valued thereafter. Loyalty, we have so little loyalty in politics, that if you're trying to run a government, the one thing you want are people who are going to be loyal to you -- loyal to the party and loyal to whoever is president. So, loyalty is a very important asset in the politics of the United States, more so than it is in England. So, to resign from the government was a risky thing to do. To be fired from the government was -- but I managed to weave through those. I've developed some talent at being able to separate my career from party politics and from the short-range issues of policy, and concentrate upon the longer range issues. That came about in part from my having been fired so often, resigned so often.

[ Key to Success ] Integrity

How do you account for your frequent disagreements with the administrations you served? Were they always over defense issues, or sometimes over more domestic matters?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Paul Nitze: I guess my first difficulties were during the Korean War. That was earlier, in the '50s. And my plea then was that what we should do is to have a tax on automobiles over one hundred horsepower. It would be a higher tax for every excess horsepower that any car had. You could have one, but you had to pay, I don't know, one hundred dollars per horsepower for horsepower over one hundred. And, that would get the size of our cars down and save us rubber and save steel and save oil and gas, enable us to meet the raw material requirements and bring in a degree of revenue. And so, between bringing in some revenue and cutting the requirements for copper, rubber and so forth, we could get our raw materials into balance and our fiscal affairs into balance. And, that idea was pooh-poohed by everybody. I couldn't find a soul who thought that was worthwhile.

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