Playing nuclear chess

Just about the time that a very weary Secretary Shultz was landing in Brussels after 20 hours of talks with Foreign Minister Shevardnaze, I was sitting down to lunch in New York with a man of venerable years and a great range of interests who was capable of talking, colourfully and sensibly, about cabbages and kings, politics and poetry, who is equally well acquainted with the works of Irving Berlin and Isaiah Berlin.

He's also, you might say, a professional talker. Not the sort of mind for an agile reporter to interview because the last thing he's going to give you is a direct answer to a direct question. We didn't know then what had been the outcome or the upshot or the downturn of the Shultz-Shevardnaze talks. Like everybody else in the Western world – everybody on the outside, like you and me – all we'd had to go on were innumerable and interminable newspaper pieces from Western correspondents, most of whom had their minds, their choice, of hero and villain pretty well made up before they got to Moscow.

I asked my companion how he felt about the general line or drift of the arms control talks so far and that meant after Reykjavik on into the latest strenuous bout. The old man looked at the slice of lime bobbing like a lifeboat amid the icebergs of his tomato juice. He swilled the drink around slowly and he shot me a sly smile. 'Did I ever tell you,' he asked, 'about my first encounter with the Canadian chess player?' The required answer is, 'Of course not, please do tell!' I gave it and he began.

'Well,' he said, 'I'd just arrived as a young American student at the London School of Economics and after I'd settled in and felt confident enough to socialise, I wandered into the common room or lounge, or whatever, and saw four or five couples playing chess. I soon discovered that there was a permanent group of maniacal chess players. One day a young middle-aged pleasant man came up to me. He was a Canadian. He asked me if I would like to play a game. I accepted at once.

'I suppose the first game lasted through 15, 20 moves. I beat him easily. Next day we played again. This time I beat him in a dozen moves. I was very indulgent, very kind to him. I said I enjoyed his company and was available at any time.

'I went off to drinks with some other students and they greeted me as if I'd been Alekhine, Capablanca, the reigning masters of the day. "Is it true,' they said, 'that you twice slaughtered the Canadian?" "Well, beat him, certainly." They were aghast and agog. Nobody in this place, they told me, 'ad ever beaten him. He was the Canadian chess champion. I saw no more of him for about a month – holidays, I imagine – when I ran into him again, again he offered me a game. From then on, we played certainly once a week for the next three years. Every time I was massacred. Those first two games were the only ones I ever had a prayer of winning.'

The old man neatly rescued the lime from the bobbing icebergs, squeezed it and looked at me sideways, expecting me to say, 'How come?'. I said, 'How come?'

'Well, the first two times, the Canadian assumed he was playing with, if not a champion, with somebody within hailing distance of his standard. So he was on his guard from the start. Within two or three moves, he noticed a rather startling move or two of mine and decided I was a bold but calculating player. He promptly shifted from his, I don't know, his first Rostenkowski attack to his Sicilian fallback defence or whatever it was, I didn't know any of these tactics. I was a simple chess player. Both times, because he was attributing to me this sophistication, his expertise was fatal. I walked in through doors he didn't even notice were open. Evidently he talked later with some of the boys and discovered he'd been beaten by a tyro. After that, the three-year blitz, he didn't tell till much later what had happened in the beginning.'

We ordered our lunch and the old man sat back and licked his lips. No need, he implied, to point a moral. I nodded to indicate I'd got the point. I said, 'You know, I wrote a piece years ago, it must have been the first summit Lyndon Johnson ever held, if I had a thesis it was that the Russians are the best chess players in the world and we always interpret their motives as if they were playing draughts.' 'That's it!' the old man said, 'You get it!'

At Reykjavik, Reagan was me and Gorbachev was the champion of all the Russias. He must have been totally thrown when Reagan blurted out, 'Why not abolish all nuclear weapons?' What was this coming move? It was beyond anything Gorbachev had anticipated. He jumped to the Star Wars gambit. Insist on the Star Wars move and I'll force a stalemate! Which is what happened.

Reagan, of course, had never dreamed of offering to abolish all nuclear weapons. He got carried away in the heat of the moment. Luckily his dogged insistence on Star Wars – let's talk later about how much research went to develop, went to deploy – his insistence cut short the game.

Next day, to his horror, Reagan heard that the Western allies were even more horrified. 'What happens', they cried, 'to the defence of Europe if all we have to offer is our conventional forces against the massive Russian superiority in men, arms, tanks?'

Well, I think it's fair to say, roughly speaking, that up to Reykjavik, the Americans were dealing with the Russians hand to hand or head to head, the main issue being the comparative deterrent strength of the Soviet and American nuclear arsenals. You'll recall it took some time before the Russians would allow the West European nuclear forces to be considered as a separate bit of arithmetic. The Americans always consulted the NATO allies, but usually on second thoughts.

The Reykjavik debacle, in retrospect, I believe was a blessing. Mr Reagan, even old supporters like Dr Kissinger maintain, was very badly, very hastily, prepared and – especially – on the vital alternatives for the defence of Europe. In the result, Mr Reagan's innocence puzzled Mr Gorbachev. Since then Mr Gorbachev, no doubt reassured by his two experts on American life and policy, Mr Arbatov and the long-time ambassador here, Mr Dobrynin, Mr Gorbachev has seen that Mr Reagan was carried away not by cunning, but by ideology. Mr Gorbachev has, accordingly, been able to go back to his own game. And the best comment that I can find here amounts to saying that Mr Gorbachev has now manoeuvred the United States into an awkward political corner by exploiting the West's ambivalence about arms control, he's gone forward from Reykjavik and by saying, yes, we'll abolish in Europe both the Soviet and American medium-range missiles, but we'll also get rid of our shorter-range missiles, which you don't have at all.

By doing this, he has left the United States with what one reporter calls 'three uncomfortable choices' – to persuade the NATO allies to accept an agreement that many of them are afraid would dangerously weaken their nuclear protection and leave them at the mercy of a mighty conventional force, or, they, the United States, can shake its head, feel sorry for the European anxiety, but sign an agreement anyway, or they can refuse the Gorbachev gambit, say, no, we daren't and won't leave Europe badly exposed, and then risk being portrayed as the culprit in the collapse of arms control.

Well, this gloomy prospect may be a correct guess at the American alternatives but this time there is, for some of us, a cheering note. This is the first time, I believe, that an American-Soviet meeting has stalled on the primary question of Europe's defences. It's the first time I can remember when a Soviet offer has been, if not turned down, then put on the shelf until the West European allies have been consulted. Previously – and alarmingly at Reykjavik – the protests of Western Europe were heard only after the Reagan-Gorbachev meeting.

This time Mr Shultz would not accept the tempting offer to ban the shorter-range missiles from Europe until the United States had consulted its allies and so, also, for the first time, a president or secretary of state, having finished his exhausting talks in Moscow or wherever, flew at once not to Washington, but to the NATO capital of Brussels.

One distinguished American commentator who, I believe, would be normally labelled as a liberal Democrat, said from Moscow, surprisingly, that there was one vital presence there which was there not in the flesh, but in the spirit. And that presence was Mrs Thatcher. He maintained that Mrs Thatcher's earlier two hours with Gorbachev had made crystal clear that the adequate defence of Western Europe must be guaranteed in any arms control agreement and that, by implication, the propaganda aim of separating the United States from its European allies was a lost cause.

Well, whoever made this point clear – whether it was Mrs Thatcher or Mr Shultz or Dr Kissinger or the travelling Mr Carter – has done, I think, a service in refocusing American policy and weakening the campaign to keep the people of Western Europe and the American people at loggerheads.

As for the point on which Mr Shultz stopped short, the elimination of the 130 Russian shorter-range missiles, the resolution of it will depend now on continuous talks between Washington and the NATO allies. However, there's a school of thought here that says that to accept the Gorbachev offer would not weaken America's protection of Europe. The New York Times put the argument concisely on Thursday morning: 'Anyone still worried about America's commitment to defend Europe need only look at the continued presence of over 200,000 American servicemen in Europe and at hundreds of nuclear-capable aircraft carrying several thousand bombs plus hundreds of nuclear artillery shells.'

In the next game of chess, Mr Gorbachev must know now he's facing not an American innocent, but an opponent equipped with the Washington defence, the Brussels attack, the New York gambit or one of any three in unpredictable order.

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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