This document remained classified until 1975, but is now available to the reading public. It shaped much of American strategic and geopolitical thought throughout the 1950s and 1960s. It addressed both strategy and ideology.
NSC-68 also included references to the nation’s founding texts from the 1700s, including the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the Federalist Papers.
The report’s authors were concerned to distinguish between, on the one hand, massive wars of annihilation on a global scale, and on the other hand, smaller regional conflicts:
The mischief may be a global war or it may be a Soviet campaign for limited objectives. In either case we should take no avoidable initiative which would cause it to become a war of annihilation, and if we have the forces to defeat a Soviet drive for limited objectives it may well be to our interest not to let it become a global war.
It was therefore incumbent upon the United States military establishment to be prepared for both types of conflict. But the U.S. military in 1950 was not ready, as author Russell Weigley writes:
NSC-68 suggested a danger of limited war, of Communist military adventures designed not to annihilate the West but merely to expand the periphery of the Communist domains, limited enough that an American riposte of atomic annihilation would be disproportionate in both morality and expediency. To retaliate against a Communist military initiative on any but an atomic scale, the American armed forces in 1950 were ill equipped. Ten understrength Army divisions and eleven regimental combat teams, 671 Navy ships, two understrength Marine Corps divisions, and forty-eight Air Force wings (the buildup not yet having reached the old figure of fifty-five) were stretched thinly around the world.
It would not be fitting to respond, e.g., to the Soviet blockade of Berlin by unleashing America’s nuclear arsenal. Although some military strategists in the late 1940s saw the atomic bomb as the answer to nearly any tactical question, it was now becoming clear that America should have a full conventional force as well.
The Air Force atomic striking force, embodied now in eighteen wings of the Strategic Air Command, was the only American military organization possessing a formidable instant readiness capacity. So much did Americans, including the government, succeed in convincing themselves that the atomic bomb was a sovereign remedy for all military ailments, so ingrained was the American habit of thinking of war in terms of annihilative victories, that occasional warnings of limited war went more than unheeded, and people, government, and much of the military could scarcely conceive of a Communist military thrust of lesser dimensions than World War III.
So it happened, then, that in June 1950, when North Korea attacked South Korea, the United States was in possession of large nuclear arsenal, but a barely serviceable - if at all serviceable - infantry. The United States was prepared for global atomic war, but the Soviet Socialists chose smaller proxy wars - Korea, Vietnam - and even smaller military maneuvers to quell uprisings - Berlin 1953, Hungary 1956, Prague 1968.
America’s brief romance with the atomic bomb was over. By the mid-1950s, it was clear that the United States needed a full conventional force alongside its nuclear arsenal.
This would require a bit of a scramble to make up for the years in the late 1940s during which the conventional forces were allowed to languish. The Korean War included a U.S. Army which was underfunded and undersized.
In the postwar decades, the United States needed to have both a strategic nuclear force as well as sufficient conventional forces in the traditional Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines.
