Paul Nitze

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Image:Paul Nitze.jpeg Paul Henry Nitze (January 16, 1907 – October 19, 2004) was a high-ranking United States government official who helped shape Cold War defense policy over the course of numerous presidential administrations.

Paul Nitze's father was a professor of Romance Linguistics who concluded his career at the University of Chicago.

Nitze was born in Amherst, Massachusetts. In his memoir From Hiroshima to Glasnost, he describes how as a young boy he witnessed the outbreak of World War I while 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.

Nitze attended the Hotchkiss School and graduated from Harvard University in 1928 and entered the field of investment banking. In 1928-1929 the Chicago brokerage firm of Bacon, Whipple and Company sent Nitze to Europe. Upon his return, he heard Clarence Dillon predict the depression and the decline of the importance of finance. Having attained financial independence through the sale to Revlon of his interest in a French laboratory producing pharmaceutical products in the U.S., Nitze took an intellectual sabbatical that included a year of graduate study at Harvard in sociology, philosophy, and constitutional and international law.

Nitze entered government service during World War II, serving first on the staff of James Forrestal when Forrestal became an administrative assistant to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. In 1942, he was chief of the Metals and Minerals Branch of the Board of Economic Warfare, until named director, Foreign Procurement and Development Branch of the Foreign Economic Administration in 1943. During the period 1944-1946, Nitze served as director and then as vice chairman of the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey for which President Truman awarded him the Legion of Merit.

In the early post-war era, he served in the Truman Administration as Director of Policy Planning for the State Department (1950-1953). He was also principal author in 1950 of a highly influential secret National Security Council document (NSC-68), which provided the strategic outline for increased U.S. expenditures to counter the perceived threat of Soviet armament.

From 1953 to 1961, Nitze served as president of the Foreign Service Educational Foundation while concurrently serving as associate of the Washington Center of Foreign Policy Research and the School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) of the Johns Hopkins University. Nitze co-founded SAIS with Christian Herter in 1943 and the world renowned graduate school, based in Washington, D.C., is currently named in his honor. His publications during this period include U.S. Foreign Policy: 1945-1955. In 1961 President Kennedy appointed Nitze assistant secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs and in 1963 he became the Secretary of the Navy, serving until 1967.

Following his term as secretary of the Navy, he served as deputy secretary of Defense (1967-1969), as a member of the U.S. delegation to the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) (1969-1973), and assistant secretary of Defense for International Affairs (1973-1976). Later, fearing Soviet rearmament, he opposed the ratification of SALT II (1979).

Paul Nitze was co-founder of the 1970's Team B, created by conservative cold warriors determined to stop détente and the SALT process. Panel members were all hard-liners. 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 Reagan. Team B came to the conclusion that the Soviets had developed several terrifying new weapons of mass destruction, featuring a nuclear-armed submarine fleet that used a sonar system that didn't depend on sound and was, thus, undetectable with U.S. technology of the time. This information was later proven to be false. According to Dr. Anne Cahn (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."

Nitze was President Ronald Reagan's chief negotiator of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (1981-1984). In 1984, Nitze was named special advisor to the president and secretary of State on Arms Control. For more than forty years, Nitze was one of the chief architects of U.S. policy toward the Soviet Union. President Reagan awarded Nitze the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1985 for his contributions to the freedom and security of the United States.

Nitze died in the Georgetown area of Washington, DC.

The Arleigh Burke-class destroyer USS Nitze is named in his honor.

St. Mary's College of Maryland, where he served as a trustee, has an honors program named in his honor.

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List of Offices and Positions Held

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This article incorporates public domain text from the U.S. Navy.de:Paul Nitze pl:Paul Nitze

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