NSC 68 and the Political Economy of the Early Cold War

NSC 68 and the Political Economy of the Early Cold War re-examines the origins and implementation of NSC 68, the massive rearmament program that the United States embarked upon beginning in the summer of 1950. Curt Cardwell reinterprets the origins of NSC 68 to demonstrate that the aim of the program was less about containing communism than ensuring the survival of the nascent postwar global economy, upon which rested postwar US prosperity. The book challenges most studies on NSC 68 as a document of geostrategy and argues instead that it is more correctly understood as a document rooted in concerns for the US domestic political economy.

Introduction; 1. NSC 68 and the problem of origins; 2. Multilateralism, the Soviet threat, and the origins of the Cold War; 3. Multilateralism, the dollar gap, and the origins of the Cold War; 4. The dollar gap and its discontents; 5. The British sterling-dollar crisis of 1949–50; 6. The origins and development of NSC 68; 7. The political economy of rearmament; Conclusion.

Curt Cardwell is an Assistant Professor of US Foreign Relations history at Drake University. He received a Ph.D. in History at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, in 2006, and was recipient of the Harry S. Truman Library Dissertation Year Grant in 2003.