S8 Ep1118: NSC-68: The Blueprint for Cold War Rearmament GUEST: Nick Bunker Following the 1949 Soviet atomic test, Paul Nitze and Dean Acheson drafted NSC-68, a top-secret strategic document that defined the Cold War struggle. The document portrayed the Soviet threa
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 12 July 2026
⏱️ 12 minutes
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Summary
NSC-68: The Blueprint for Cold War Rearmament GUEST: Nick Bunker Following the 1949 Soviet atomic test, Paul Nitze and Dean Acheson drafted NSC-68, a top-secret strategic document that defined the Cold War struggle. The document portrayed the Soviet threat in the "starkest, grimmest possible terms," identifying 1954 as the "year of maximum danger." To counter Soviet military spending — estimated at 15% of their national output — NSC-68 proposed trebling the U.S. defense budget from $13 billion to $40 billion. Simultaneously, McCarthy targeted Owen Lattimore, an Asia expert, as a "master Soviet agent" to undermine the State Department's policy. While Lattimore was eventually cleared, the political pressure forced the administration into an awkward defensive position. Ultimately, the outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950 "overtook" the measured rollout of NSC-68, leading to the massive military build-up the document envisioned, but in a far more chaotic and urgent manner. (7)
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| 0:28.6 | This is CBSI in the world. I'm John Batchel. I'm with Nick Punker, the historian. |
| 0:36.6 | His new book is in the shadow |
| 0:38.8 | of fear, America and the world in 1950. There are future players present on the scene. We've |
| 0:47.9 | mentioned Eisenhower, who will be elected in 1952 and take office in 1953. |
| 0:57.6 | The governor of Illinois is important here. |
| 1:01.3 | Adley Stevenson, who's seen as a moderate Democrat, |
| 1:04.3 | a man who is part of the middle way that Professor Namich Schlesinger identifies as the success |
| 1:08.9 | that America needs to find, a middle way, not the right, not the left. |
| 1:12.6 | There's William F. Buckley, a young man just leaving Yale, who's been stifled momentarily by the leadership at Yale |
| 1:20.6 | from giving, forgiving a speech that if you read it today, you find it very, very even tempered. |
| 1:26.6 | But in those days, it would have been understood as God and man. If you read it today, you find it very even tempered. |
| 1:27.5 | But in those days, it would have been understood as God and man at Yale is the book that |
| 1:33.5 | comes from it. |
| 1:35.0 | But we need to concentrate on a man who doesn't get a great deal of credit, given that |
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