NSC-68

node

The US National Security Council review of 1950 that converted containment from a diplomatic posture into a budget. Drafted largely by Paul Nitze at the State Department Policy Planning Staff, it argued that the Soviet Union was pursuing unlimited aims, that the American defence establishment as then funded could not meet them, and that the answer was a very large and sustained peacetime military build-up together with the development of thermonuclear weapons. Its analytical style is worth noticing: it treats the confrontation as global and indivisible, so that a setback anywhere is a setback everywhere, which is the reasoning that later justified intervention in places of little intrinsic strategic weight. Delivered to Truman in April 1950, it was initially regarded as unaffordable; the outbreak of the Korean War in June made its recommendations politically possible, and defence spending rose steeply. The document remained classified until 1975.

A node is not a place. Drawing it on a map would assert something about the world that no stored fact supports.