This is John Batchelor.

Conversation with Nick Bunker, the author of the new book In the Shadow of Fear, America and the World in 1950.

This is our second hour of conversation.

We come to the very famous, infamous NSC 68, which becomes the guideline for the Cold War.

This is 1950, and a man named Paul Nitzi took over planning at the State Department and

constructed this finding to guide the Truman administration away from the post-war letdown and the recession

and the disorder of foreign policy to confronting the Soviet Union after it was confirmed the Soviets now had the

atomic weapon. It exploded an atomic bomb over Siberia, the US had picked it up,

and now what do we do? Here's Nick Bunker explaining Paul NITES' role.

NSC 68, the guideline how it was not supposed to be secret, but in the shadow of fear Nick Bunker more of this later and by

1950 he was the head of policy and planning at the State Department he'd taken over

from his predecessor, the very famous

Sir George Kennan. And the two of them conducted a kind of debate about foreign policy

for the next 30 or 40 years. Now Paul Nessie, as head of the policy and planning department, the State Department,

had the job of creating a strategic document which came to be known as NS6-68.

It was, it was, Netsie was the principal author of that document, but it was also something that he worked on in conjunction with Dean Atchison.

So really it was a kind of a joint document between Nitzi and Dean Atterson.

Now it was Mark Top Secret, but I like a lot of things in Washington,

it was marked top secret. In fact there were people outside the state by the time and outside the Pentagon

who had some inkling that there was some big rethinking going on inside those two buildings.

Now the core of NSC 68 was this.

Now it really flowed first of all from something else which we haven't mentioned which is the fact that in

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