Ticktacktoe

By Strobe Talbott

DOUBLETALK by Gerard Smith Doubleday; 556 pages; $17.95

The title has a double meaning. Doubletalk refers first to the windy Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, now approaching their twelfth year and fourth American Administration. Gerard Smith recounts numerous instances of frustration in the course of his 2 1/2-year stint as the principal talker on the American side during the first Nixon Administration, but he also argues energetically that the negotiations have become a salutary fixture in the superpower relationship. For even when talks are stalled and not producing agreements, they serve as a safety valve for the pressures of intensifying competition and mutual misunderstanding; diplomats and generals are forced, by the very existence of the forum, to vent their mistrusts and probe their common interests.

But Doubletalk also refers to the role in SALT I of Henry Kissinger, who conducted his own, not always parallel, negotiations with Ambassador Anatoli Dobrynin in Washington. The first volume of Kissinger's own memoirs, White House Years, published in 1979, exuded contempt for the SALT bureaucracy headed by Smith; Doubletalk retaliates with an agenda of rebuttals and countercharges. Smith, for example, accuses Kissinger of attempting "a one-man stand, a presidential aide against the resources of the Soviet leadership.'

Fortunately, settling scores is secondary to Smith's principal task: lucidly explaining and defending the SALT process at a time when it and its future are in considerable jeopardy. Smith has his regrets. He argues that the U.S. made a tragic mistake in passing up the opportunity to behead the hydra of multiple warheads

(MIRVs). Ten years ago, the U.S. was ahead of the U.S.S.R. in the art of MIRVing and could probably have obtained a moratorium in SALT I. But the Pentagon, eager to preserve a U.S. advantage, blocked the idea. The Soviets soon mastered the technology and began putting MIRVS on their own monstrous rockets.

As a result, the U.S. ended up less secure than before.

Whenever possible, Smith, a veteran Washington lawyer, tempers his cold analysis with a human touch or an anecdote. He recalls how the Soviet negotiators once entertained their American counterparts with a World War II epic, considerately censoring a scene with an unflattering depiction of Allen Dulles.

When it came time for the Americans to return the hospitality, one of Smith's deputies arranged for a screening of MASH, but the military members of the U.S. delegation objected, insisting on The Longest Day instead.

Unlike some others who have spent much of their careers amidst the eerie abstractions of doomsday and deterrence, Smith has preserved a sense of irony, and he never quite loses sight of geopolitical absurdities. "The strategic competition was not unlike a game of ticktacktoe," he writes. "If one knows how to play it and makes no mistakes, one cannot lose. And if both sides know how to play it, and make no mistakes, neither can win. After a while, at least for adults, it becomes a boring game."

Better ennui than cataclysm, he concludes, and if the game must go on, better by the rules of SALT.

-- By Strobe Talbott

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