The Master of the Game: Paul Nitze and the Nuclear Peace by Strobe Talbott (review)

130 Shorter Book Reviews Strobe Talbott. The Master of the Game: Paul Nitze and the Nuclear Peace. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988. xvii+ 416 pp. Strobe Talbott uses the career of Paul Nitze, a quintessential Cold Warrior, to examine the arms control process. Between 1940 and 1988,Nitze, always a secondary figure, served to make foreign and military policy under every president except Dwight D. Eisenhower. He brought to his work a Spenglerian sense of history and an abiding fear of the Soviet Union. Early in the Cold War, Nitze came to believe that the only reliable American policy to adopt was to assume that the Soviets might behave in the worst imaginable manner, and to plan accordingly. He incorporated this view in the famous NSC 68 policy statement, America's blueprint for the Cold War, which he helped write in 1950. The worst-case scenario has been particularly pertinent for the Cold War because American policymakers applied it most systematically to nuclear arms development. (We may assume the Soviets have done so as well.) Furthermore, Talbott shows that from the day the Soviet Union exploded its first nuclear bomb to the present, Paul Nitze and other policymakers saw American possession of the bomb as passive and defensive in nature, Soviet possession as malevolent and aggressive. "We" could be trusted with nuclear weapons, "they" could not. "It was as though the Soviets could be expected to base policy or conduct diplomacy on the assumption of their own essentially criminal nature," Talbott writes, "recognizing the United States as a restraining influence11 (200). This perspective made arms control negotiations, let alone agreements, difficult in the extreme. Talbott traces the tortuous, convoluted, usually frustrating, Soviet-American efforts at nuclear arms control from the Limited Test Ban Treaty of 1963 through the Reagan-Gorbachev talks of mid-1988. Paul Nitze played a central role in most of these talks, proving an adept negotiator with the Soviets, but a less effective counter to his critics in the United States. Through it all, driven by his desire to contain the Soviet Union and an unquenchable thirst to hold government assignments, Nitze labored until he was nearly eighty years old. Talbott looks at the central issue of public affairs since 1945, the advent of nuclear weapons. He is most effective in the first third of the book, sketching Nitze's rise to influence and the shaping of a Cold Warrior. The latter two~thirds deals with Ronald Reagan's presidency and the impact of his Strategic Defense Initiative on arms control--it was disruptive. Here the book becomes hard to follow; Paul Nitze is lost in a detailed, overly-drawnout tale of bureaucratic infighting in the United States and endless negotiations in Geneva. Talbott's research and writing style are journalistic, and most of his sources are not for attribution. He relies far too much on Shorter Book Reviews 131 Washington "shop talk" jargon and Pentagon acronyms, which confuse rather than elucidate. Admittedly, any account of the arcana of arms negotiations involving highly complex technology and the language that goes with it requires careful detail, but Talbott errs on the side of excess, leaving the reader lost and confused. Nonetheless, there is value in this book. Given the innate rivalry and long, mutually-shared suspicion between the United States and the Soviet Union, the negotiation of an agreement affecting national survival and the ever-changing technology of nuclear weapons was bound to be difficult, and Talbott helps us understand that process. He reveals as well an equally complicated struggle within the American national security bureaucracy. The greatest challenge to negotiators like Paul Nitze often lay in devising a single American viewpoint. As one American participant in the 1988 SovietAmerican talks wryly observed, 1 "Even if the Soviets didn't exist we might not get a ... treaty because of disagreements on our side"' (382). Despite some lack of clarity, Talbott helps us understand why it is difficult but essential to come to terms with nuclear arms control. Jerry Cooper Department of History University of Missouri-St. Louis Steven Weisenburger. A Gravity's Rainbow Companion: Sources and Contextsfor Pynchon's Novel. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1988. viii...