Paul Henry Nitze (January 16, 1907 – October 19, 2004) was a high-ranking United States government official who helped shape Cold War defense policy over the course of numerous presidential administrations.

Nitze was born in Amherst, Massachusetts. His German ancestors came from the region of Magdeburg. Paul Nitze's father, William Nitze was a professor of Romance Linguistics who concluded his career at the University of Chicago. In his memoir, From Hiroshima to Glasnost, Paul Nitze describes how as a young boy he witnessed the outbreak of World War I while traveling in Germany with his father, mother, and sister, arriving in Munich just in time to be struck by the city crowds' patriotic enthusiasm for the imminent conflict.

Nitze attended the Hotchkiss School and graduated from Harvard University in 1928 and entered the field of investment banking.

In 1928-1929 the Chicago brokerage firm of Bacon, Whipple and Company sent Nitze to Europe. Upon his return, he heard Clarence Dillon predict the depression and the decline of the importance of finance. Having attained financial independence through the sale to Revlon of his interest in a French laboratory producing pharmaceutical products in the U.S., Nitze took an intellectual sabbatical that included a year of graduate study at Harvard in sociology, philosophy, and constitutional and international law. In 1929 he joined investment bank Dillon, Read & Co. where he remained until founding his own firm, P. H. Nitze & Co, in 1938. He returned to Dillon, Read as Vice-President from 1939 through to 1941.

Cold warrior is a phrase used to describe the men and women involved in the shaping and executing of American and Soviet policy during the Cold War.

Since the end of the Cold War, the term has sometimes been used pejoratively to imply that a person's views are obsolete. For example, a politician who is unfriendly to a Communist state might be labeled a cold warrior and accused by his or her critics for viewing the world in terms of Communist and non-Communist states and treating a potential trading partner as an enemy. Alternatively, a general who advocates missile defense might be called a cold warrior and attacked by his critics for not focusing on anti-terrorist measures instead.

Cold warriors include both shapers of the Cold War and those who oversaw the decline of the Soviet Union. Notable figures include:

Paul Dundes Wolfowitz (born December 22, 1943) is a former United States Ambassador to Indonesia, U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense, President of the World Bank, and former dean of the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University. He is currently a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, working on issues of international economic development, Africa and public-private partnerships, and chairman of the US-Taiwan Business Council.

He is a leading neoconservative. As Deputy Secretary of Defense, he was "a major architect of President Bush's Iraq policy and ... its most hawkish advocate."Donald Rumsfeld in his interview with Fox News on February 8, 2011 said that Wolfowitz was the first to bring up Iraq after 9/11 attacks during a meeting at presidential retreat at Camp David. After serving two years, he resigned as president of the World Bank Group ending what a Reuters report called "a protracted battle over his stewardship, prompted by his involvement in a high-paying promotion for his companion."