New Theater of War

By KURT ANDERSEN

A docudrama gives a glimpse of "crisis management"

According to The Day After, the world ends with a ghastly nuclear bang. But according to another fictional program broadcast on ABC last week, the world does not end at all, thanks to the sober deliberations of U.S. and Soviet leaders. The Crisis Game, a docudrama produced by ABC News' Nightline and broadcast for four nights running, was an extraordinary TV hybrid. Ten former high Government officials, acting the unscripted parts of a President and his National Security Council, coped with an imaginary U.S.-Soviet crisis set in 1985: Ayatullah Khomeini's death, Iranian civil war and Red Army battalions pouring across the Soviet border to join local Communist forces.

The make-believe Administration managed to improvise a happy ending, but the value of the show did not lie in that optimistic outcome: The Crisis Game depicted as never before how Presidents and their advisers make policy. The particulars of the crisis smacked of reality, and the escalating tension felt authentic too. "It unfolded spontaneously," says Winston Lord, a veteran of four Administrations who played the part of National Security Adviser. "I was really impressed with how much it was like the real process."

When Anchorman Ted Koppel conceived the show, he did not intend it as a counterbalance to the visceral terrors of The Day After. The linkage was natural, however. Explains Koppel: "What The Day After makes no attempt to do is to show how a crisis evolves. One is left with the impression that everything happens very quickly--boom, boom, boom, there's the crisis and here come the missiles. There's no sense that leaders made any effort to resolve the crisis."

ABC hired New York Times National Security Correspondent Leslie Gelb to help shape the program. Gelb in turn recruited a panel of seven experts, called the "control group," who wrote a 100-page briefing book and picked the players. Their apt casting for President: former Secretary of State (and presidential candidate) Edmund Muskie. His nine advisers included two former Defense Secretaries: James Schlesinger, who had that title again, and Clark Clifford, who played the Secretary of State. Former Army Chief of Staff General Edward Meyer, who reluctantly wore his uniform, acted as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The group was well-balanced ideologically--improbably so--but a certain tilt existed: eight of the nine players served the Carter Administration.

Schlesinger says he and his fellow mandarins agreed to play their roles, without pay, "to demonstrate that U.S. Governments do not act in a harum-scarum manner." To that end they sat in ABC's Washington studios for 18 hours over a recent weekend. As they argued the twists and turns of the crisis before them, the controllers, watching on TV monitors, played the rest of the world--Moscow, NATO, Congress, the U.S. press.

The crisis as depicted is played out over 25 days in May, during which the Soviets send 250,000 soldiers toward the Persian Gulf. The players decide, quickly and early on, to dispatch 25,000 U.S. troops to bolster the pro-American faction in Iran. An informal U.S.-Soviet contact is opened, yet seems to accomplish nothing. As Soviet troops keep moving south, and U.S. troops are endangered, Muskie's aides appear anxious to discuss the nuclear option, but the President cuts off all such talk.

Dovish and hawkish tendencies are clear, but the players sometimes behave atypically. For instance, only Clifford, a moderate, suggests a formal declaration of war; Schlesinger, usually a hardliner, says that the Soviets' stepped-up submarine activity is just for "theatrical purposes."

The brink is reached. Less than 150 miles separate advancing U.S. and Soviet troops. U.S. strategic nuclear forces go on alert, but the NSC refuses their field commander's request for tactical nuclear weapons. In the end, a combination of resolve and restraint wins a kind of peace: after the NSC orders air strikes to sever the Soviet supply routes, Muskie and his U.S.S.R. counterpart exchange messages, and they agree to negotiate a pullback.

The outcome, of course, is realistic only to the extent that the controllers were able to mimic what really would have been the Kremlin's reactions. There were inevitable postgame quibbles. Chayes is skeptical about the size of the Soviet invasion. Richard Pipes, who resigned from the real NSC staff a year ago and played a senior adviser, thinks the game's denouement "was a little deus ex machina. The Russians backed down very fast."

The Crisis Game's rhythms seemed rough, and the discussions were some times rambling, desultory. But the program was compelling, even significant, because of its striking similarity to what the participants say is the real thing.

There was some stiltedness (does Schlesinger actually pontificate so?) and show boating (TV Journalist Hodding Carter, who played a senior adviser, may be too well-trained), but such behavior is not unknown at NSC meetings. In all, The Crisis Game, with its snare-drum theme, was just hokey enough to entertain and good enough to edify.

Indeed, the program was finally a potent and sophisticated civics lesson. Says Pipes: "It is very good for the world, including the Soviets, to know how crisis management works." Adds Lord: "It is important to understand that there are many choices between nuclear holocaust and abject surrender."World war will not start spontaneously, nor will it be avoided by chance. Real men and women, most of them anything but reckless, control the superpowers. Yet the program also made clear the unnerving flipside: for all their academic degrees and years of Government experience, the mock NSC facing the ersatz crisis showed flashes of anger, vast knowledge tinted by political bias, impatience and even occasional confusion. The Crisis Game demonstrated that for better and worse, the fate of the earth is in human hands--a useful reminder the week that a swath of Kansas and Missouri was incinerated. -- By Kurt Andersen. Reported by Christopher Redman/Washington and Raji Samghabadi/New York

With reporting by Christopher Redman, Raji Samghabadi This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.