Because Switzerland was the one place they didn't need to have visas. And these meetings are deniable so that governments can walk away from them if they come out and they're embarrassed by them. It's not just John Major who did that.
So prime ministers and governments do go out of their way to deny that these things are happening. And governments use deniable people to conduct them. The Oslo negotiations on the Middle East, one of the most successful of these sort of negotiations, was conducted by an Israeli academic, Yair Hirschfeld,
And one of the interesting things that's happened in diplomacy over the last 10, 15 years is the NGOs, like my NGO, play this role of intermediaries because we're deniable , we're small, we're not powerful, we're not a threat to a government. One of the most interesting to do that was a group called Sant'Endigio, which is a lay Catholic order based in Rome
as sort of early middle age. But it was not totally deniable that I might possibly be entering early middle age. And because death was hovering at my shoulder, I began to think really seriously about what I should do for my next book.
And the reason that the book focuses on what happens right of boom is my concern that we're getting to a tipping point, if we haven't already reached it, in which nuclear warfare becomes plausibly deniable . I'm gonna just note an example of my concern.
I'd like to put all my memories in a Swiss databank. So just like a Swiss bank hides money, and it's plausibly deniable , and no one knows it's there. That's where I want to stash all my memories. I want someone to store it for me. I'd like to have a second password, which is the "I'm compromised" password, where I log in and it goes off and it shreds all the
And this would likely result in things like air strikes, and commando raids, and visible law enforcement actions. Things that while necessary, would be unlikely to fundamentally address the problem of say, plausibly deniable nuclear warfare, more broadly. These things would just deal with immediate political requirements.
It really came from one judgment and two questions. The judgment is my view, as I've said, that we're getting close to a tipping point in which we enter a world where nuclear warfare is plausibly deniable . And the questions that I had after reaching this conclusion were first, what could realistically
So he was at risk of being imprisoned. He took that risk, he conducted the talks, but he was totally deniable . But he got to a successful agreement.