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McCarthy concluded, somewhat satirically, that it might be better if we forsook disarmament talks altogether because then we would deploy far fewer missiles. “I’ve never known a bargaining chip that was thrown away after the conference.”
When lecturing at LSU McCarthy responded as follows to a woman who insisted that bargaining chips were needed: “No, the Russians don’t even play poker, they don’t know what a bargaining chip is. We have to talk chess with them.”
In his essay Of Arms, Chess and Poker McCarthy elaborates on this theme. “The difficulty in all of these negotiations is one of language, of metaphor. The Russians are not heavy into poker. In fact, I know of no Russian poker players. Their game is chess. Their images in international negotiations must certainly be drawn from their game.” »
Two paragraphs later he advises that “Russians and Americans should, before undertaking further disarmament discussions, agree on common imagery. Possibly one meeting could be held in which all figures of speech had to be drawn from poker and another from chess. There would still be room for negotiation and misunderstanding, but some of the difficulties might be overcome. The vulnerable MX, instead of a ‘bargaining chip’ could be considered as a “pawn’ in chess.”
McCarthy commented on the absurdity of trying to assess the impact of nuclear bombs. “In the Senate they used to imagine them in terms of Hiroshimas, a given bomb would do, say, 10 times as much as Hiroshima.”
Then the kiloton was introduced to gauge the strength of a bomb because the number of Hiroshimas became too large. Soon after, however, “the kiloton number got so big that they switched to the megaton—so you had one megaton instead of 1000 kilotons,” McCarthy said. “You didn’t want to say 1000 kilotons, so you just had one megaton. The first number didn’t have to be so high.”
He referred jokingly to the embarrassment of measuring a bomb’s strength to be 10 million Hiroshimas. “You have to switch into the ludicrous just to talk about it.”
What about the probability of nuclear war? “You have to accept that it could happen, the potential is there,” McCarthy said. “I think we’ll get through the next century—you might get caught.”
The former Senator said he never believed the concept of deterrence was valid. “It’s just something you talked about, nobody knew whether it would work or not.”
McCarthy explained: “first they
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