SALT talks

On summer days, I sit in my study with more pleasure than I do in winter, maybe because I get more exercise in summer and, therefore, exude wellbeing indoors. That's my doctor's thesis and I think he's wrong.

What makes the summer time easier for me to think and work in is the fact that, in summer, my study is cooler and quieter than it is in winter. In winter, the heat blasts from the radiators and you forget to turn it off and so I open the window and hear the city's distant roar. Whereas, in summer, while it's sizzling outside, I barricade myself against the heat with double windows closed fast and inside the air-conditioning keeps the room at a controlled 70 degrees, while all the other boys are out there – I can see them – tossing balls and lolling under trees with girls and gobbling ice-cream cones, and jogging. Ah ha! That is my salvation! I don't have to jog. 

Every morning, winter and summer, no matter what the weather, and from dawn on – I imagine, I doubt I've ever seen a dawn except from a transatlantic plane, but – anyway from breakfast time till twilight, there are always these earnest, panting, slanting figures, dressed in shorts and t-shirts, jogging, jogging. Jogging around the one and a half miles that trace the circumference of the reservoir of Central Park. 

These fellows used to make me feel guilty but no more! Because I'm more grateful than I can say to a gentleman who has written in to the London Times a short letter which, as far as I'm concerned, disposes once and for all of the sanity of jogging. Now, I don't know what is the consensus of the medical profession about jogging. I incline myself to the wisdom of three doctor friends of mine: one in San Francisco, one in Baltimore, one in New York. The San Franciscan says that to jog over the age of 50 is madness and too much of a strain on the heart. The Baltimorean, who keeps his windows shut night and day, winter and summer, says more people have died of what they call 'fresh air' than any other noxious gas. And the New Yorker, a man of great experience in some important, original research says, 'Two martinis will cure anything!' 

Well, and however that may be – and these are medical findings we should by no means dismiss without exhaustive testing – I can only say that the gentleman who wrote to The Times this week made a simple point about people who walk miles in order to lengthen their lives. He made a point worthy of Aristotle or Sir Isaac Newton. That's to say, he discovered a simple, obvious thing, which many people may have been dimly moving towards but which nobody, before him, had said. Let's not be coy about the identity of this great man. I had never heard of him and it's possible that not many people outside Blackheath have ever heard of him. That's where he writes from. But, from now on, I put his letter in the file of human wisdom which contains such gems as Aristotle's 'A play has a beginning, a middle and an end.' Dr Johnson’s,’ Much maybe made of a Scotsman if he be caught young.' Mark Twain's, 'The human being is the only animal that blushes or needs to'. And H. L. Mencken's definition of self-respect, 'The secure feeling that no one, as yet, is suspicious'. 

Well, the great man's name is Mark Godding and this is his admirable, brief chronicle: 'Sir, regarding the current enthusiasm for walking to extend one's life, may I point out that if one walked ten miles a day, then, having lived to the ripe old age of 80, one would have walked for approximately nine years. Is it worth it?' 

Well, here in a nutshell is revealed the absurdity of a man who seeks to extend his life and live to be 80 and in the process loses nine years, during which time he could be reading, playing, flirting, shutting windows or drinking martinis. And, even at that, living maybe beyond 71. This makes me feel a whole lot better and I can now pity the poor joggers and get down to this letter. 

Stimulated possibly by the piercing intelligence of Mr Godding of Blackheath, I made an obvious discovery of my own. It's not quite in the class of Newton discovering gravity or Fleming looking at a coating of mould and thinking up penicillin, but it explains, to me anyway, why the world of politics seems so heavy and cumbersome and fruitless in the summertime. 

What has just occurred to me, sitting here and weighing several leaden statements of the world's rulers, from Mr Brezhnev to Mr Carter and Mr Sadat, is that all the people I've ever known who were able to maintain an absorption with politics in the summertime don't watch or play games. Their only game is ideology. Of course, they can't give up their jobs for the summer. They have to go on ruling, governing, politicking, but because they're unfamiliar with games and with such simple truths as that you win one, lose one, and begin again, this makes them fail to realise that politics, government itself, is a game. It may be deadly serious but it's something you must not expect to win all the time. 

I remember in the bitter presidential campaign of 1932, when President Hoover, in the pit of the Great Depression, was saying that prosperity was just around the corner. And Governor Roosevelt of New York, his opponent, was saying that Hoover and his kind had betrayed America and the rhetoric got so sharp and malicious that Will Rogers, the rope-twirling, cowboy philosopher, wrote one of this three-sentence newspaper columns, which went this way: 'Who do these fellows think they are, telling us who owns the Republic and who is ruining the people? If we lost both of them, we'd get along. Why don't they shut their traps for a while and go fishing!' And, such was the popular prestige of Will Rogers that within days the news agencies received two photographs and printed them. One was of Governor Roosevelt hauling in a swordfish from the stern of a yacht and the other was of President Hoover fly-fishing in a creek. 

Well, we've just had a particularly depressing example of what happens to idealists, ideologists if you like, when their ideology is reinforced by fear. Let's try and state as simply and truly as possible the gist of the immense problem of trying to limit the manufacture and stockpiling of strategic arms, the problem of what we call the SALT talks. 

You may remember that one powerful speech of Mr Carter when he was running for the presidency was his insistence that we must begin by limiting nuclear arms and then we must work with the Russians to scrap them all. The Russians responded to this by saying, when the election campaign was on, 'But Mr Carter was saying just what they'd been saying all along.' 

At the same time, to show us, simply, the wickedness of Mr Carter's opponents, the Republican administration, which was always equated with, quote, 'the imperialist, warmongering, ruling classes,' the Russians remarked that, I think it was then, 30 cents in every American's tax dollar went for arms. What they didn't say was that was a drastic reduction from the old tax burden for arms. In Kennedy's day, it was closer to 60 cents in the dollar, with no great outcry of complaint on the expenditure until some of those weapons were spent in Vietnam. What the Russians, also, don't tell their own people is the comparatively enormous proportion of their own national budget they spend on arms. 

So, since all the Russians know about America – it's what their government tells them – the Americans, from the beginning of the SALT talks, have laboured under the harrowing difficulty of a Democratic press which lays out all the facts and all sorts of benign and malign interpretations of them. 

The Democrats, way back there last October, were quite willing to let the Russians' description of the Republicans stand, as warmongers and profiteering munitions makers. Along comes Mr Carter. To the Russians' delight, he'd promised in the campaign that he would not go ahead with making the B-1 bomber, which is superior to anything the Russians have. Then a couple of weeks ago the word got out that Mr Carter, after all, was going to go ahead with the B-1. The Russians said they knew it was only a campaign promise. But then he did ban it. Now the Russians say this only shows how foxy he is and probably he'll go ahead with it in secret. 

But he is going ahead with the air-launched Cruise missile, which is years ahead of the Russian missile. Now this had been agreed upon, but now the Russians are howling that America is being betrayed by an even more war-like, imperialist leader than Nixon. 

And then, the other day, the administration revealed that it had successfully tested a neutron bomb. Why they did it and said so now, I don't know. All that we know and the Russians will be sure to say is that the Americans are going to make a bomb that kills thousands of human beings by radiation but leaves the buildings standing. 

The administration says the new bomb greatly reduces the extent of contamination and can effectively kill a military force inside a circumscribed area. But what the Russians are going to say is what many Americans themselves are saying, a point that is overwhelmingly attractive to ideologists, that at long last we have a clean bomb, which protects the real estate but murders the inmates. In the months ahead, it's going to be a very tough ideological game to win.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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