NSC-68

We should worry about affairs here and not go to, um, lengths to go fight communism.

And then in 1950, uh, NSC-68 comes out by Nitze that's basically like, "Hey, Soviets are gonna be a problem.

Our army is, and Marine Corps, all our s- forces are vastly undermanned.

Uh, we have this belief that if we go into a war, we'll just build it up with, like, Ford Motor Company, like we did with, you know, the previous world wars, and we'll just build it up.

Yeah.

And so it's like, oh, now Russia has an atomic bomb.

So I actually think, like, the X article's great, but now that you know that Russia also has nuclear power, hey, the Nitze, uh, NSC-68 also makes a lot of sense.

So in any event, it's kind of like what you've probably seen, 'cause I know that concurrently you're learning, like, you know, post-modern war, what's coming.

This isn't some conspiracy.

Look up NSC 68.

It's a document from 1950 that lays out the permanent war economy.

That's the one written by a Wall Street banker, right?

But in those days, it would have been understood as God and man at Yale is the book that comes from it.

But we need to concentrate on a man who doesn't get a great deal of credit given that his genius is still with us, Paul Nitze, who was tasked with constructing NSC-68.

Nick, who was Paul Nitze and what was NSC-68 to his understanding? Thank you.

Well, Paul Nitsi was a former investment banker.

He'd been an investment banker in the 1930s, and then he'd gone into war service in Washington, where he was very involved in planning and logistics.

Now, it was marked top secret, but like a lot of things in Washington, it was marked top secret.

In fact, there were people outside the state at 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.

Exactly.

I would say it was maybe the modern, the post-Cold War equivalent of maybe NSC 68 or something of that type.

Yeah.

Paul

Precisely.

This is where we get all the CIA, the National Security Council, his famous memo, NSC 68.

Right.

And this is my point about presidents being, in a sense, forced into this.