[Deathwatch] Paul H. Nitze, cold war strategist, 97

[Deathwatch Central]

Paul H. Nitze, Missile Treaty Negotiator and Cold War Strategist, Dies
at 97
By MARILYN BERGER

Published: October 21, 2004

Paul H. Nitze, an expert on military power and strategic arms whose
roles as negotiator, diplomat and Washington insider spanned the era
from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Ronald Reagan and helped shape America's
cold war relationship with the Soviet Union, died Tuesday night at his
home in Washington. He was 97.

The cause was pneumonia, said his wife, Elisabeth Scott Porter.

>From the beginning of the nuclear age, whether in government or out,
Mr. Nitze urged successive American presidents to take measures against
what he saw as the Soviet drive to overwhelm the United States through
the force of arms. Yet he may be best remembered for his conciliatory
role in efforts to achieve two major arms agreements with the Soviet
Union.

In one, he was successful in negotiating an agreement that eliminated
intermediate-range missiles from Europe. In the other, he hoped to cap
his long career with a so-called grand compromise in 1988 that would
have severely circumscribed work on President Reagan's cherished
strategic missile defense initiative in exchange for deep cuts in the
nuclear arsenals of both superpowers. His efforts foundered when the
negotiators ran out of time as the Reagan administration came to an
end.

In a now legendary moment of the cold war, Mr. Nitze undertook a bold
but unsuccessful personal effort to achieve an earlier arms agreement
with the Russians. In 1982, acting on his own and, some say,
superseding his instructions, Mr. Nitze took a walk with his Soviet
counterpart in the Jura Mountains, where he tried to strike a bargain
on a package dealing with intermediate-range missiles in Europe.

In that episode - which later became the subject of the Broadway play
"A Walk in the Woods" by Lee Blessing - Mr. Nitze tried to cut through
the bureaucratic tangle but was thwarted when both Moscow and
Washington repudiated the agreement.

Mr. Nitze (pronounced NITS-uh) refused an appointment in the first Bush
administration as ambassador at large emeritus, saying it would leave
him with no clear responsibilities. He retired to an office at the Paul
H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies of the Johns Hopkins
University - a school that was named for him in 1989 - where he
continued to write articles in a continuing attempt to influence
policy.

With that, his long career in government came to an end, a career that
began in 1940 with a telegram that said, "Be in Washington Monday,
Forrestal."

The summons from James V. Forrestal, then a special assistant at the
White House, lured Mr. Nitze from the lucrative confines of Wall Street
to the first of many assignments in government that involved him in the
supply of the Allies for the war effort, a survey of the impact of the
Allied bombing of Germany and Japan, the feeding of the hungry of
war-ravaged Europe, the creation of the Marshall Plan and crises in
Iran and Berlin.

In the aftermath of World War II, Mr. Nitze became part of the
remarkable group of public servants - George F. Kennan, Charles E.
Bohlen, Robert A. Lovett, John J. McCloy - that coalesced around Dean
Acheson to develop foreign political and military policy as the United
States took its place as a major world power.

He was a senior State Department official in the Truman administration,
an assistant defense secretary in the Kennedy administration, and Navy
secretary and later deputy defense secretary in the Johnson
administration.

By the time he became one of the chief negotiators on strategic
weapons, Mr. Nitze had accumulated more experience in national security
affairs than anyone else of his time, to the point that his critics
began to think that he believed he had a monopoly on understanding the
political uses of nuclear weapons.

Postwar Policy Framework

Ever since 1950, when as head of the policy planning staff of the State
Department he was the principal author of a study on the Soviet threat,
Mr. Nitze took a dark view of Soviet intentions, seeing in the Kremlin
a drive for world hegemony.

The study, known as N.S.C.-68, conceived of deterrence in military
rather than diplomatic terms, warned against sole reliance on the
nuclear deterrent and urged a buildup of conventional forces.