The Third World War: The Untold Story

by John Hackett

  Wherever the arguments led in the field of inter-continental nuclear strategy (that is to say, in what was unkindly described by some military men as ‘military metaphysics’), it was in connection with shorter-range theatre nuclear forces (TNF) that critical divisions and uncertainties developed in the Western Alliance. At the beginning of the eighties, the USSR was able, in the prevailing state of uneasiness in the West over the nuclear threat, to exploit these most effectively, through a massive propaganda campaign and with the aid of the ‘useful fools’.

  For all the Soviet Union’s often displayed maladroitness, there is no doubt that its handling of Western concern over nuclear weapons was most skilful.

  When the American strategic nuclear superiority in the 1960s gave way to the state of rough parity between the two superpowers, their vulnerability to each other’s inter-continental weapons was perhaps of less importance in the Alliance than the vulnerability to nuclear attack of the European allies. Whatever marginal advantage might accrue to either superpower from improved accuracy, the hardening or concealment of launchers, their increased mobility and so on, the simple fact remained that neither could be so hard hit by the other in a first strike as to be incapable of a devastating response. The critical question that began to emerge in the seventies was how far the US would be induced by the difficulties of the European allies in wartime to initiate a central attack on the Soviet Union. If the willingness of any American president to invite the appalling reprisals this would produce would be questionable (as it could hardly fail to be), what could be done to find an acceptable alternative? Thus was born, out of European uncertainty whether the USA could be relied upon to accept truly appalling damage at home on behalf of allies abroad, the debate on TNF and their modernization, a debate which did much to throw the Alliance into disarray and to offer the Soviet Union opportunities it did not fail to exploit.

  The introduction into service by the USSR of the SS-20 ballistic missile and the Backfire bomber (to use the NATO term) in the late 1970s gave the Warsaw Pact new options for an attack on Western Europe, although Soviet military thinking saw this as only a continuance of an established line of policy. It was now possible, given the SS-20’s range of 3–4,000 miles (as against 1–2,500 for the SS-4 and 5 it was replacing), for the USSR to attack almost any major target in Western Europe from inside its own territory. None of NATO’s land-based missiles in Europe could reach beyond Eastern Europe into the USSR itself and the few nuclear-capable aircraft possessed by the Alliance, even if of just sufficient range, could not confidently count on penetration. There were, it is true, 400-odd Poseidon SLBM warheads assigned to the Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR), but the use of any of these would be likely to invite Soviet attack on the continental United States itself, while attack by ICBM from the US, of course, would be certain to do so.

  European concern over the imbalance in theatre nuclear capabilities led to NATO’s decision in December 1979 to install on the territory of European allies, through the next decade, 572 American missiles of greater range and accuracy than those at that time available. Thus 108 Pershing II intermediate-range ballistic missiles would replace the Pershing I-A stationed in Germany, giving about 1,000 miles more range and, with their terminal radar guidance system, far greater accuracy. At the same time, 464 ground-launched cruise missiles (GLCM) would be installed, with a range of some 1,500 miles and a highly accurate terrain contour-matching guidance system known as TERCOM. Of these, 160 would be located in the UK, 96 in the Federal Republic of Germany, 48 each in Belgium and the Netherlands, and 112 in Italy. This decision, unanimously arrived at in the NATO Council, was accompanied by a proposal to negotiate with the USSR for the reduction of theatre nuclear systems. The deployment decision and the arms control proposal were seen as one package.

  To the West the installation of these modernized weapons would do no more than correct a critical imbalance. To the Soviet Union, however, as Brezhnev had already warned, in an unsuccessful effort in October 1979 to avert the impending NATO decision, it was clearly seen as an attempt to change the strategic balance in Europe and give the West a decisive superiority. This would lie in affording the USA an option not hitherto available of attack upon the Soviet homeland (always an interest of paramount importance for the USSR) without using central strategic forces and so inviting attack on the American continent.

  An immediate offer to halt the deployment of SS-20s would have cut the ground from under NATO’s feet. They were already being installed and would reach a total of some 250 by mid-1981, with a final total of 300 in 1982. Since in Soviet eyes this did no more than improve the effectiveness of an already established policy, no need was seen to depart from it and the offer was not made. The SS-20, the argument ran, was only replacing less efficient SS-4 and 5, with a greater range which would, as a bonus, enable all China to be targeted from inside the Soviet Union as well. The NATO move, however, was seen by the Soviet Union as a new and threatening departure, even though none of the modernized missiles would be ready before 1983 at the earliest.

  The TNF decision also began to generate a heightened public uneasiness in Europe. The greater range, flexibility and accuracy conferred by the introduction of Pershing II and GLCM was seen as raising the possibility of actually fighting a nuclear war in Europe which could leave the USA unscathed. There was concern that US military thinking might be moving towards the concept of a containable or limited nuclear war, which would clearly, of course, be a war contained in Europe.

  The proposal made by NATO that negotiations should begin upon limitation of TNF was followed up by preliminary discussions between the USA and the USSR in Geneva in the autumn of 1980, which had to be abandoned when the US Administration changed. Little was achieved other than a slightly clearer definition of positions, though it was at least agreed that the talks should remain bilateral and include continental systems based in Europe, though the Soviets were still hoping to bring in the so-called forward-based systems (FBS) as well, including SLBM and nuclear-capable aircraft on aircraft carriers in European waters.

  The new US Administration made no attempt to restart the negotiations and the prospects for them were not greatly helped by Brezhnev’s offer at the 26th Party Congress in February 1981 of a moratorium on new medium-range missiles as soon as effective talks began. The SS-20 deployment programme was at that time nearing completion, with one missile coming into service every five days. The NATO deployment was still two to three years off.

  Though many in the West saw in Brezhnev’s offer no more than blatant cynicism, it did reflect a genuine distinction made by the Soviets between what they were doing, which was much the same as before, and what NATO proposed, which to the Soviet way of thinking introduced an entirely new principle. It was also symptomatic of the unsettled state of public opinion in Western Europe at the time, that the Brezhnev proposal was welcomed by some (including the opposition Labour Party leadership in Britain) as a helpful concession.

  The circumstances which more than anything else had led to President de Gaulle taking France out of NATO in 1966 looked now like being reversed. One of his chief objections was that in the Atlantic Alliance Europe was too closely linked with the United States. The Alliance, in fact, looked like becoming no more than a structure for the projection of American interests in Europe. Now, at the beginning of the eighties, there was a tendency to uncouple the defence interests of the United States from those of Europe and set up a situation which might have been rather more to de Gaulle’s liking. There is little doubt, however, that this tendency was seen by many thoughtful people in the West as presenting a serious threat to the Alliance and to world peace.

  To prevent this diversion of interest from growing dangerously great it was imperative that the modernization of theatre nuclear weapons should be very closely associated with negotiations between the USSR and the USA for their reduction.

  It was made abundantly clear to the US Administration (perhaps this had not been taken
as seriously in Washington before now as it should have been) that uneasiness among the European allies and the highly vocal expression of popular discontent in which it was being manifested must be allayed, and this could only be done by what was seen to be a genuine move on the part of the United States to enter into serious negotiations with the Soviet Union on arms control.

  In September 1981 the new US Secretary of State and the Soviet Foreign Minister met in New York to discuss a resumption of TNF talks which could start at the end of November in that year. There were still considerable reservations in Europe as to whether the United States was wholly serious in its stated intention to reach an agreement. It was only through strenuous efforts on the part of the US Administration that public opinion in Europe was eventually persuaded, at least in part, that real progress was being made. The process that was eventually to result in what came to be known as the START Treaty of 1984 was none the less truly under way. Its culmination in the summit meeting in January of that year might, it was thought, have had as much to do with the coming presidential campaign as with the conclusion of the business of negotiations.

  An arms control treaty is an advantage to a conservative in an election year though an encumbrance to a liberal. This point was underlined by the fact that the ratification process in the US Senate was complete by the summer. The negotiations had been difficult but (though the outcome failed in differing ways, but to about the same degree, to satisfy both sides) not as difficult or as protracted as was expected, and the work that had gone into the abandoned SALT II Treaty of June 1979 saved much time in the formulation of definitions and of types of limitation.

  The new treaty justified its descriptive acronym of START, Strategic Arms Reduction Talks. The term, proposed by the Americans at the outset of the new negotiations, was only accepted with misgivings by the Soviets, not so much because they rejected the explicit aspiration to reduce armaments, but because they wished to preserve continuity with the established SALT process. The substitution of ‘reduction’, however, for ‘limitation’ had such wide popular appeal, in Warsaw Pact countries scarcely less than in Western and even (to the limited extent that this was possible) in the USSR itself, that its acceptance was inevitable.

  Unlike the SALT II agreement, which would only have lasted for five years, the START Treaty was to be of indefinite duration. In addition to this and the actual achievement of cuts, the key feature of START was that it also incorporated an interim agreement of the previous year to limit TNF in Europe.

  Although much work had to be done on the rest of the Treaty, the US had pressed hard for an early deal on TNF to accompany the actual deployment of the first new Tomahawk GLCM in Britain and Italy in late 1983, with more to follow in West Germany and Belgium, but with none in the Netherlands, which had opted out. From December 1979, when the decision had first been taken by NATO to modernize the TNF, there had been a curious and ambivalent relationship between the implementation of the decision and arms control. Unless there was some chance of a serious diplomatic effort through arms control measures to remove the military requirement (or at least to reduce the number of weapons), it was not certain that any of the European nations would be willing to take these missiles in and very likely that some would refuse. At the same time, unless there was some chance of the programme being implemented, NATO would have no bargaining position, and without it would be unlikely to secure any cuts at all in the 250 Soviet SS-20 or the 350 older SS-4 and SS-5 missiles which also remained in service.

  In their early stages the discussions on TNF arms control were not easy. This was in part a consequence of the mutual suspicions in the tense international climate following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, crisis in Poland, and the election of a US Administration bent on major rearmament. But the difficulties were even more a result of the sheer intractability of the issues: the USA wished to focus primarily on land-based missiles in the USSR that could hit Western Europe, which included many SS-20s based east of the Urals; the USSR wished to exclude weapons based outside Europe but include the American FBS, notably aircraft such as the F-111 and F-4 and even some aircraft carriers whose A-6 Intruder and A-7 Corsair aircraft could only attack Soviet territory with difficulty but which constituted a significant danger none the less. Lastly, because the Soviet SS-20 missiles were fitted with MIRV with three warheads (while the Pershing II and GLCM had only one warhead each) the US wished to use warheads as the basis for comparison while the USSR wished to count only the launchers. There was also the tricky question of the British and French nuclear forces which the Soviet Union wished to take into account, while Britain and France wanted them left out.

  Not one of these issues was close to resolution by the time the talks (not yet in their new guise of START) began in mid-1982. This new beginning provided an opportunity to break the deadlock. The basic conceptual breakthrough was to try to identify a class of weapons which, though deployed in theatres, were essentially strategic in nature in their yield and in the targets they were likely to engage, and so ought to be linked with the other strategic weapons that had been considered appropriate for SALT.

  Any demarcation line with nuclear weapons is inevitably arbitrary, but this approach made it possible to accept that the only United States TNF that deserved to be called strategic were the Tomahawk GLCM and Pershing II due for deployment, and the F-111 aircraft already based in Europe. On the Soviet side, account would have to be taken of the SS-20, SS-4 and SS-5 missiles, and the Backfire, Badger and Blinder aircraft under the command of the Soviet Long-Range Air Force. This allowed for all shorter-range systems to be excluded, perhaps for another negotiating forum, and got round the problem of how to justify the inclusion of Soviet systems facing China and some medium-range US aircraft based in the United Kingdom that would otherwise have been left out. The formula still could not accommodate the British and French strategic nuclear forces, but it was agreed to put off this issue, once again, for the next stage in the talks.

  This broader definition of strategic weapons having been agreed, the issue then switched to how they should all be counted. In the past, the basic unit of account had been missile launchers or aircraft, with special categories for missiles with multiple warheads or bombers with air-launched cruise missiles (ALCM). The Americans attempted to introduce new counting rules whereby full notice would be taken of the properties of the various weapons, such as yield, accuracy and number of warheads. These proved complicated to formulate, however, and raised verification difficulties, and were anyway strongly resisted by the Soviet side. Eventually the Americans gave up on these new rules but pressed instead for stricter restrictions on MIRV missiles and greater co-operation on verification procedures. The main concession that the US made was to accept that major deployment of submarine-launched cruise missiles (SLCM), then being contemplated by Washington, would undermine any agreement. This concession led to the resignation of the US Navy Secretary.

  The eventual agreement reached was to place a limit of 2,000 on the strategic forces (bombers, ICBM and SLBM) on each side (compared with a figure of 2,250 that had been part of the 1979 SALT II agreement). However, the new ceiling also had to accommodate the weapons based in Europe. Ceilings were placed on missiles with MIRV (including the SS-20) and aircraft carrying ALCM (1,000) and on ICBM with MIRV (650). The Soviets made a token cut of fifty in their giant ‘heavy’ ICBM (to 250) and accepted that the USA could build weapons of a similar size should they desire (which was unlikely). Each side would be free to mix its weapon types and their geographical distribution within these limits but at least 200 could be based in Europe. NATO decided that this figure would be sufficient for its needs in Europe. Since this meant a cut to a quarter of the planned complement of missiles and aircraft it was readily accepted as a significant arms control achievement — achieved multilaterally.

  Such was the situation reached in the mid-eighties as mankind moved on towards an uncertain and forbidding future. Both sides stood like brooding giants
, each guarding a store of weapons more than enough to destroy the entire population of the planet. Both deeply hoped that none of these deadly engines would ever need to be employed but their hopes were based on different thinking. On the Soviet side the aim was to offer to Western democracies a choice between a war of nuclear annihilation on the one hand, or acceptance on the other of piecemeal absorption into a communist world. If, in the event, the use of force had to be initiated it would, in the Soviet concept, be in the first instance with conventional weapons but sufficiently powerful to make the use of nuclear means unnecessary. On the Western side the most widely favoured aim was to possess sufficient non-nuclear war-fighting strength to halt an initial thrust by conventional means alone. This would leave the Soviets to choose between calling a halt, or invoking a nuclear exchange which would mean appalling and unpredictable disaster on both sides with little possible advantage in the outcome to anyone.

  Western hopes lay, therefore, in the creation of an adequate non-nuclear armoury, in which the early years of the 1980s had shown disquieting deficiencies. What had been done to correct these, how far it was effective and how far it fell short we shall now enquire.