NSC68

National Security Council Report 68 (NSC-68) was a 58-page top secret policy paper by the United States National Security Council presented to President Harry S. Truman on April 14, 1950. It was one of the most important statements of American policy that launched the Cold War. 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." NSC-68 and its subsequent amplifications advocated a large expansion in the military budget of the United States, the development of a hydrogen bomb, and increased military aid to allies of the United States. It made the containment of global Communist expansion a high priority. NSC-68 rejected the alternative policies of friendly détente and rollback against the Soviet Union.

By 1950, events dictated the need to examine U.S. national security policies: 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 ails by 1952, the Plan's scheduled end year, with the prospect that Western Europe would have no choice but to pursue autarchy, 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. Similar problems were also plaguing Japan. With these threats to the U.S. and its allies expanding, on 31 January 1950 President Truman directed the Department of State and Department of Defense "to undertake a reexamination of our objectives in peace and war and of the effect of these objectives on our strategic plans." A State-Defense Policy Review Group was set up under the chairmanship of Paul Nitze of the State Department.

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