Mutual Accusations

In the mid-1980s, I helped facilitate a series of conferences between top Soviet and American policy advisers on the question of how to prevent a nuclear war. The times were tense and the accusations were flying back and forth between the two superpowers. Each time we held a meeting, the first session began with a long laundry list of attacks and defensive arguments. It poisoned the atmosphere and took up a lot of valuable time. By the third or fourth such conference, my colleagues and I tried a different tack. On the printed agenda, we labeled the subject of the first meeting “Mutual…