At once Brezhnev cables President Nixon, urging that he send Kissinger to Moscow to negotiate the cease-fire terms, and Air Force One leaves Washington at 2 A.M. with the Secretary and his entourage. Now unfolds a rapid-fire international comedy-drama such as the world has never seen, nor indeed is likely to see again. For it takes place in the shuddery Cold War era of Mutually Assured Deterrence, or MAD, the quite serious acronym of the time for the nuclear stalemate, when people are living with the half-buried awareness that if one superpower leader makes an imbecilic mis-judgment, or a supposed fail-safe military control mechanism malfunctions, much of the world can be cremated or fatally irradiated in a few hours. It is in this frame of reality that Dr. Kissinger, who has just received the Nobel Peace Prize for his Vietnam War negotiations, wings off to Moscow. Once he gets there, cables, telephone calls, letters, despatches, threats, pleas, cajoleries, snarls and counter-snarls spark at all hours of the day and night among five points on the globe: Washington, Moscow, Cairo, Jerusalem, and New York, where the Security Council keeps convening at very short notice and very odd times.
