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10/10/53 - Reel 3, track 1 - Page 1 MR. ACHESON: All right. Well, now, we have had a long digression here on. ? MR. HARRIMAN: I don't apologise at all for starting it. ? Mr. EARLE: Could we deal with Dr. Oppenheimer's question as to what would happen if it hadn't been Korea. I do think we. DR. OPPENHEIMER: My question was not was NSC 68 wrong, but would it have been possible to put something like it into effect. ? MR. FARLE: I wouldn't have thought that anything like the size of the military effort, both at home and through NATO, would have been possible. Even the size of the effort which was agfeed to in the summer of '50, let alone what was agreed to after the Chinese attack. MR. NITZE: On this point. I think this is relevant. When we were going through NSC 68 we came to the conclusion that the order of magnitude of the - not only of the defense, but the general security effort whi ch was necessary, was of the order of magnitude of fifty billion dollars a year for the United States, and that this should be adopted right off the bat, and should be continued for a number of years. TRUMAN "NATIONAL ? MR. HARLE: This was before Korea? ARCHIVES & ADMIN RECORDS Es MR. NITZE: This was before April 7th. Bob came down and consulted with us ROVERNMEN in connection with this, and so forth, and so on. Not necessarily on the figure, but on the general theory. When we tried to make up our own mind as to what the order of magnitude of the effort required was, we came to this conclusion of the order of magnitude of fifty billion a year. Now, we didn't dare put any such figure in the paper itself. There is no figure in the paper itself. This was impossible. We never could have gotten these concurrences. If we had put this kind of a figure in the paper, we never would