The Third World War - August 1985

by John Hackett

  The West Germans became aware of these views through the increased contacts they were able to establish across the growing anarchy of the Warsaw Pact’s forward areas. They were shocked and surprised that their fellow Germans in the East should be reluctant to join in the economic miracle and the political freedom of the West. Secretly, perhaps, some of them were also a little relieved to find that they would not after all have to assimilate 17 million more Germans (and probably as many socialist voters), which would have considerably distorted the German political scene. In the light of these assessments West German pressure to invade the East was significantly reduced. There was little joy in the prospect of a West German army entering the East as liberators, only to be shortly told by their liberated brothers to go back home.

  This increased the difficulty for the Americans in persuading their allies to join in a counter-offensive against Soviet Russia and the Warsaw Pact through East Germany, Poland and the Ukraine. In a final attempt to resolve the argument the President of the United States called for a summit meeting to be held in London and attended by the heads of Government of the Atlantic Allies.

  The discussion revolved round three topics:

  1. The advantages of finishing off the job and so guaranteeing peace in our time.

  2. The risk that a Western attack would trigger nuclear war.

  3. The German problem.

  The Americans argued that they had once again saved Europe by their exertions; three times was enough. The only way to make sure it didn’t happen again was to push the Soviet Union back out of Europe. The Russians were not mad enough to prefer nuclear destruction to the loss of their East European satellites, even if they also lost some of their territory. Limited war aims would be announced, giving them the assurance of a continued secure existence in their own heartland, but not of dominion over others. The German problem was for the Germans to solve. Even if they chose to unite, there would be so much repair and reconstruction to be done after the war that they could hardly constitute a threat to the other West Europeans, whose territory had escaped comparatively lightly and so left them with less rebuilding.

  The West German leaders, still divided among themselves and conscious of continuing army pressure to move forward, kept a low profile in the discussion. The British, French, Beneluxians and Scandinavians were unimpressed by the American arguments and repeated their fears of nuclear attack and of a future united Germany. Moreover, the march of events in the Soviet Union was rapidly leading to collapse even without any further Western attack. It was much easier and less costly, as the German General Staff had argued in 1917 when they smuggled in Lenin, if defeat came about from internal disintegration rather than from external invasion. Any future Soviet attempt to arouse nationalistic passions against the foreigner and regain lost positions would be much less plausible if no foreign armies had invaded Russian soil.

  The Americans, with the more hawkish elements of the German armed forces, considered moving in alone. Who knows what might have been the outcome if they had? A new dramatic shift in the debate in Moscow removed the necessity to reach a conclusion.

  The ‘nuclear’ party in the Kremlin hierarchy, recognizing that time was against them, staged a secret meeting with the President and Secretary General from which their opponents were excluded at gun point. They insisted on an immediate move towards the threat of nuclear action. A single atomic attack on a Western target would be enough to demonstrate their determination. A simultaneous message would be sent to the US proposing the immediate withdrawal of all foreign forces in Africa and the Middle East and bilateral negotiation to establish US and Soviet spheres of influence throughout the world. It would be appropriate to attack a target in England while the Western summit was in session there, to bring home to everyone the dangers of any other course than that proposed by the Soviet Union. London itself should not be the target. The effect on national feeling of the destruction of the British capital would be enormous; it would almost certainly result in a hardening of Allied opposition and determination to a degree that would render the attack counterproductive. Birmingham would do. It was a great industrial concentration and a centre of the armaments industry, and near enough to the capital for London to feel the blast without being razed to the ground. President Vorotnikov had no choice but to agree.

  It was important to make it absolutely clear to the Americans that this was a single attack to demonstrate what might happen if they refused Soviet demands. It was not to be seen as an immediate prelude to a general nuclear offensive. It had to be expected that some retaliation would occur, but if the signals were understood this should be limited to a more or less comparable strike. In spite of hostilities, the Moscow-Washington hot-line had never been closed down. The plan was worked out in detail. The timing had to be very precise. The ballistic missile early warning system (BMEWS) would give only a few minutes’ warning of the missile launch before its impact. The American President had to know just before this that there was only one missile on its way, and where it was going, but not long enough before for any counter-measures to be taken.

  A warning message was sent via Washington to the President in London that the Soviet President would speak on the hot-line at 1020 hours GMT on the following day, 20 August. In London and Washington the intervening hours were spent in a fevered guessing game on what the message would be. One thing was fairly clear and brought relief. It could hardly be to announce a full-scale nuclear offensive, since surprise would be an essential element in any such action. Most views were fairly near the truth so far as a proposal for negotiation was concerned, but few guessed that this would be accompanied by a Hiroshima-type demonstration, or that the timetable would be as narrow and as threatening as it turned out to be. For when the Soviet President spoke, after announcing the single missile launch, he demanded that the US should send representatives within one week to negotiate on the Soviet proposal, failing which further selective strikes would be carried out. If there were any thought of preventing this by a pre-emptive general nuclear attack, President Thompson was reminded of the Soviet Union’s significant second strike capability.

  CHAPTER 25: The Destruction of Birmingham

  In the main control room of the great BMEWS station on Fylingdales Moor in Yorkshire the day watch had been on duty for a couple of hours and it was just coming up to ten o’clock in the morning. The station looked out over beautiful misty moorland, but the controller and his staff did not - there was plenty else for them to do as the giant radars swept some 3,200 kilometres out into space. They were searching and sifting the 7,000 pieces of orbiting debris and satellites that man had projected into inner space since his first invasion of it in 1957.

  The control staff were of course well abreast of the war situation and they knew that, in political terms anyway, the threat of a nuclear attack was small. But they were not there to make judgments of that sort. Warning of an attack rested with the automated system coupled to the scanning and tracking dishes in the great radomes. Anything detected that was not immediately reconciled with the ever-growing catalogue of known objects was subject to an instantaneous analysis in spherical trigonometry by a battery of computers. These would assess the probability that the radar return indicated a missile and, as further radar tracking information came through, discard, decrease or increase the assessed degree of probability in the threat. If things ever went as far as that, the computer and the cathode ray consoles would show, in a somewhat academic way it might be thought, the estimated point of impact of each missile and the seconds to go before its strike.

  A system that had to have the highest reliability that man’s ingenuity could devise was inevitably hyper-sensitive, and operators highly trained in monitoring the auditory and visual responses grew instinctively to feel the computer’s mood. Occasionally, even in peacetime, the alerting bell would sound as particles or atmospheric conditions produced a response from space that the computer took longer than usual to analyse. When it was identifie
d as innocuous the computer would apologize seconds later and explain its over-eagerness.

  This was the way it was meant to work, and it was the pattern to which the controller and his staff were accustomed. During the last two weeks at Fylingdales and its sister stations in Alaska and Greenland bells had sounded frequently as the Soviet rockets launched more satellites into orbit to maintain their space activities. There had been plenty going on.

  The station was a sitting-duck target for an air attack but no guided weapon had come anywhere near it. This was not surprising -indeed it was to be expected - because it was very much in the interests of the Russians, in their non-nuclear war policy, not to risk anything that might so much as vibrate the hair-trigger of the Allied nuclear response. For the same reason the persistent jamming to which the other electronic warning systems had been subjected from the sea and air had not been directed against BMEWS. There was an occasional indication from badly tuned airborne equipment to remind the crew that the electronic battle was still in progress, but otherwise the displays were clear.

  At 1005 hours a neighbouring air defence radar warning station rang to say it was no longer affected by jamming. Wing Commander Warburton, the Controller, entered this in his log and thought it curious enough to tell his controller colleagues in the other operational centres. An airwoman brought round the tea. It was all very different from the smoke, dust, blood and horror of the battle raging in the Central Region - but they were concerned here with a different kind of war. Warburton had finished his tea when an American controller from the Detection and Tracking Centre at Colorado Springs called to say that they had detected a launch via a warning satellite over the Indian Ocean. It had come from a distance, west of Baikonur, the site from which the satellite launches had been flying during the last sixteen days, and they had not reconciled it. It would not be visible within the Fylingdales detection range for a while, and he said he would call back as soon as they had any tracking information on it.

  The line to the Springs was crystal clear. The whole watch had strained their ears to piece together the message and they had all mentally worked out where the response would appear on the display before the American controller had finished what he had to say. There was a scraping of chairs as each one took up a position so that he could see over the observer’s shoulder. The seconds ticked by and the radar movement seemed more sluggish than it had ever been before. Suddenly there it was: the next scan of the radar confirmed it and the computed display gave a very firm digital threat assessment on one missile on an approaching path. Instantaneously the threat light flashed and the tracking radar slewed.

  The Royal Air Force control staffs were well used to calming their adrenalin flow, both through exercises simulated on magnetic tape and by the frequency with which bells punctuated the various steps in the computer process, but this had a very different feel about it. A single missile launch against the UK or the US was a highly improbable event, but the confident mood of the computer had come through to them, and with war raging in Europe anything could happen. Very definitely something was happening now.

  It was twenty-four minutes past ten when the digital display abruptly upgraded the threat as the tracking radar picked up the missile soaring out of the atmosphere into space. The computer instantly calculated that it was on a sub-orbital trajectory with 353 seconds to impact. The whole watch was galvanized: if this was a real nuclear attack how could a single missile on its own make any sense? The digital warning display had gone instantaneously to all the other operations centres, including the Government Situation Room, but the Controller pressed the switch which connected them all on the voice circuit to confirm, even though they could make no sense of the alarm, that the BMEWS was 100 per cent serviceable and that the computers were continuing to upgrade the threat assessment.

  While he spoke one of the plotters called out ‘impact somewhere in UK, sir’, and the computer print-out typed that before his eyes. The digital time-counter had now spun down to 317 seconds to impact. Warburton kept the voice circuit open to his fellow controllers with an additional hand-set to his ear connecting him directly to the Controller at Strike Command, High Wycombe, where he knew his commander-in-chief would be standing behind the control desk.

  The Polaris Executive was the man in the system who would have the most to do if the President and the Prime Minister decided that a nuclear response was to be made, but it seemed hardly likely that they would agree to let sixty-four submarine-launched megaton missiles fly to the heart of Soviet Russia in response to this one baffling radar trace. ‘We still don’t understand it,’ said Warburton as he confirmed the amplification of the threat which had just gone up on the display, showing the Midlands as the impact area. The two plotters were poised over the print-out waiting for the next mathematical refinement of the target information as the seconds to go slid down to 227. It was the RAF Strike Command Controller who had the news first: ‘It’s real - it’s the real thing,’ came over the voice system. ‘The Government Situation Centre have just told us that a message has come in on the hot-line. Acknowledge -acknowledge - and Fylingdales have you any better estimate of the point of impact yet?’

  The print-out started up again and in a split second it had written ‘Lat/Long 52° 23’ N. 001° 49’ W.’ As this appeared simultaneously on the main display there was no need to plot it on a map, for by one of the miracles of electronic automation a luminous green circle with a cross in the middle had appeared on the cathode ray map of the British Isles. It was over Birmingham. ‘It’s Birmingham - repeat Birmingham,’ Warburton called into the voice circuit. The other controllers acknowledged this grim news in the disciplined and mechanical way in which they had been conditioned for so long to think about the unthinkable. But on the other hand-set at his ear Warburton detected more than a tremor in the voice of the Strike Command Controller when he overheard him say, after his acknowledgement, ‘Oh my God!’ At High Wycombe only his squadron leader assistant knew that when mobilization was ordered the Wing Commander had sent his wife and their three children to stay with her family on the outskirts of that now hapless city.

  The time-counter showed 114 seconds to go as the Fylingdales assistant controller exchanged and cross-checked data on the line to his opposite number in the Detection and Tracking Center at Colorado Springs. A US Air Force major was repeating back the facts and factors as he verified them with the information at the master control centre. All the space satellite and ground radar information was now integrated in the main computer at Colorado Springs, and as he logged the details from Fylingdales he said, ‘Yeah - yeah, that all checks with our data here’ - and then, with more than a touch of melancholy in his voice, as the counter slid down to sixty-three seconds, ‘It sure is going to be hot in Birmingham England.’

  The SS-17 missile detonated its nuclear warhead 3,500 metres above Winson Green prison at 1030 hours on the morning of 20 August. Within a fraction of a second the resulting fireball, with temperatures approaching those of the sun, was over 2,000 metres in diameter and reached down towards the centre of Birmingham. The incredibly brilliant flash which accompanied the detonation was visible in London. Even at that range, individuals looking at the fireball suffered temporary blindness and felt a faint flush of heat on their faces.

  The tremendous heat given off by the fireball had a more significant effect upon people and materials within a range of twenty kilometres. Lightly clad yachtsmen on Chasewater about nineteen kilometres from Winson Green felt their skin begin to burn as the lasting pulse of heat from the fireball hit them. The thoughtful ones dived into the water to escape the burning heat. Those who did not suffered blistering burns on all exposed skin. The varnish on their boats bubbled, nylon sails melted and newspapers lying in the boats burst into flames. Only those who were protected from the pulse of heat by their clothing, or were shielded in some way, escaped severe burns.

  Closer in towards Winson Green the effects of the heat from the fireball were more p
ronounced. The foliage in the countryside had crisped as if autumn had arrived. Smaller brushwood was smouldering. Haystacks were burning and paintwork on buildings and vehicles in the path of the heat-wave blistered. At Aldridge, and at other places within about twelve kilometres of the fireball, people caught in the open received burns which needed immediate hospital treatment. At this range curtains and other materials inside rooms that were exposed to the heat pulse began to smoulder and in some cases burst into flames. Any lightweight objects such as newspapers, canvas and empty packaging in the open soon caught fire.

  Closer to the fireball heat levels became even more intense, so that almost any lightweight material subject to the heat-wave burst into flame while metals and other objects were scorched and distorted. At these ranges the clothing worn by individuals no longer gave effective protection against the heat. Clothes burned off, and people in the open received such extensive burns that their prospects of recovery, even with first-class medical assistance, were negligible. Fires were started inside and outside buildings to an increasing extent as the epicentre was approached, with apparently almost total conflagration occurring within three to four kilometres of Winson Green.