| Summary/Abstract |
This article examines the thoughts and plans of Dean Acheson and Paul Nitze that led them to the development of NSC 68, the National Security Council document of 1950 that called for rearmament of Europe and solidified the Cold War. It argues that neither the post-1952 European dollar shortage nor the danger of a land invasion of Western Europe were as important to the NSC 68/rearmament decision as the more immediate fear that Germany and/or other European allies were losing their desire to remain in the US-led world-system. The organizing logic of NSC 68 was one of hegemony, which, was neither merely military, economic nor political, but always all three at once. The world system envisaged by Acheson would simply not work, he feared, without the industrial core of central Europe firmly within it; and the principal aim of NSC 68 was to bind Germany to the “free world.”
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