by John Hackett
The basic idea behind the 1957 White Paper was that American strategic nuclear power was to be the primary guardian of peace in Europe. Britain contributed her own nuclear bomber force, but beyond that all she was called upon to do was help provide a conventional trip-wire to identify a major incursion, which would then be answered by massive nuclear retaliation from the United States. A very great saving in cost would result as well as a great saving in manpower. This is, in fact, what happened. The political party in power at the time was able to go to the country at the next general election as the party which had freed the nation from military conscription in peacetime.
The baleful spirit of the 1957 White Paper brooded over British defence policy for twenty years. When the USSR achieved rough parity in strategic nuclear power with the United States the US moved from the somewhat implausible concept of deterrence extended over her allies by the threat of massive nuclear retaliation, if any of her allies were attacked, to a rather more realistic concept of defence at any level of attack — the concept of flexible response.
To this, which became the accepted policy of NATO, successive British governments paid lip service, but little more. It was clear that what they relied upon to prevent the Soviet Union from attacking the West, even with conventional means alone, was the threat of very early escalation into a strategic nuclear exchange between the Soviet Union and the United States. Delivery systems for battlefield nuclear weapons, for which the warheads (numbering some 7,000 in the European theatre by 1977) remained under US control, were integrated into the British-commanded Northern Army Group in NATO, as they were elsewhere in Allied Command Europe. What was emerging as the basis of Allied defence planning was the concept of the ‘Triad’ — the combination of conventional defence, battlefield nuclear weapons and strategic nuclear action in closely coupled sequence. This was as fully endorsed in the United Kingdom as anywhere else in the Alliance. How far it was taken seriously anywhere is open to argument. There is little evidence that it was ever taken seriously in the UK.
The NATO concept of the ‘Triad’ envisaged the development of sufficient conventional forces in the forward areas to identify a major aggression and slow it down, while posing the threat of an early introduction of battlefield nuclear weapons if it did not come to a halt, followed, if necessary, by strategic nuclear action. No one knew exactly what would happen when battlefield nuclear weapons were released, but it was widely accepted within the Alliance that a tactical nuclear battle could hardly be expected to proceed for long without escalation into a strategic nuclear exchange. On the other hand, an observer of the British Army’s deployment, equipment and training policy could scarcely fail to conclude that, whatever happened, the British did not expect to have to take part in a tactical nuclear battle at all, or indeed, it may be added (to judge by the dismantling of their civil defences), in any form of nuclear action whatsoever.
It has been pointed out elsewhere in this book that the policy of the ‘forward defence’ of the territory of the Federal Republic of Germany, to which more and more attention had to be paid as the stature of the FRG among its allies grew, required, if it implied no surrender of West German soil, either enormously strong conventional forces deployed along the frontier or an immediate nuclear response. The first was impossible: Allied governments made it quite clear that they were not prepared to furnish the necessary troops. The second, an immediate nuclear release, was highly unlikely.
This dilemma in planning the defence of the Federal Republic was of not very great consequence in the southern half of it, where difficult terrain gave the Allied forces available there (under American command in the Central Army Group (CENTAG)) some chance of holding a stronger enemy. For the weaker forces deployed in easier and more open country, under British command, in the Northern Army Group (NORTHAG), there was far less hope of this. Many would say there was none, and that the only hope of countering an invasion in the north by conventional means lay in abandoning what was described as ‘forward defence’ (which looked uncomfortably linear) and fighting instead a battle of manoeuvre in depth.
Observance of West German susceptibilities over surrender of territory, however, obliged NORTHAG to plan for a forward battle. If the troops (some of whom were stationed a long way back in their home countries, in Belgium and Holland) could be got up in time the attack, under this concept, would be met on, or near, the Demarcation Line with East Germany. With much greater weight on the other side, as well as the initiative in choice of time and place, there could hardly be any chance of holding it there. However it began, the battle was bound to develop in depth, with the outcome being determined by the action of reserves held further back for counter-penetration operations in the first place and then for a counter-offensive.
Such reserves did not exist, even on paper. Why not? Because, the answer would run, when it became clear that the available conventional forces could not hold the enemy the situation would be restored by the use of battlefield nuclear weapons. There was therefore no great need for conventional forces deployed in depth.
Though the forward location of special weapon stores (in which nuclear warheads were kept) meant that some would be overrun before the weapons could be used, there would still be plenty left. Delay in securing their release, however, was inevitable, even supposing a very early resolution of the agonizing dilemma which impaled the FRG, in whose territory very many of these warheads, if not most, would land. The Allied rubric, moreover, enjoined that no release could be expected before all conventional means had already been tried and exhausted — that is, in effect, before the conventional battle had been lost, leaving a situation which could almost certainly no longer be ‘restored’.
The wisdom of locating stores of nuclear warheads in vulnerable forward areas was brought in question in 1977, when it was pointed out that nuclear attack was much more likely on fixed, static concentrations than on troop formations in the field, and that in consequence missile attack from submarine launchers might be more sensible than from launchers on the battlefield. By 1984 there had been some reduction in forward holdings but these were still considerable.
Accepting the declared NATO concept of the ‘Triad’, however, and assuming that tactical nuclear weapons were introduced, a nuclear battle would result. For this the Russians were equipped and trained. The British (and most of the other Allies) were not. No major British weapon system in use in 1978, even the newest, offered plausible protection to crewmen fighting in a nuclear environment. Training in movement over contaminated ground was rudimentary, equipment for decontamination and provision for its practice — and even for the acquisition and dissemination of radiation intelligence — was far from adequate. British defence policy, in contra-distinction to that of the Soviet Union, clearly embodied no real requirement to fight on a nuclear battlefield. It even seemed that the British contribution to the defence of Europe in the Central Region of the Allied Command contained a deliberate insufficiency, whose purpose was to force on the United States not so much an early release of battlefield nuclear weapons as an almost immediate movement into strategic nuclear attack, perhaps on the USSR itself. There could be no doubt, the argument ran, that the Soviet Union realized this too. It was here, the British seemed to think, that true deterrence lay.
To British politicians in the seventies, under pressure from some of their supporters to cut the defence vote at almost any cost, the approach was an attractive one. It was, in essence, indistinguishable from that of the 1957 White Paper. Whatever it might now be called, British defence policy was still that of trip-wire and massive retaliation, disfigured somewhat by claims that economies, which left front-line troops less capable of fighting, were in fact contributions to military efficiency. Whether this would remain indefinitely acceptable to the United States, which was clearly expected to hold the baby, was another matter.
Professional military men in the parliamentary democracies of the West are generally honest people, loyal to those they serve and r
eluctant to take part in politics. Many were anxious and deeply disturbed over the situation here described. But as long as the public demanded of their politicians nothing more, and showed little inclination to put up the money for anything better, there was not much that the military men could do. The difficulty was compounded in Britain where, although the Civil Service had been allowed greater freedom of political expression during the late seventies, the tradition that the military must not debate government defence policy in public was still rigorously applied. It was paradoxical that in a country where free speech was so cherished the military remained so firmly muzzled. Nevertheless, in institutes and societies devoted to the debate of public affairs, with which Britain abounded, some awareness grew up among responsible people of the real situation and, in particular, of the dangerously changed character of the air threat to the British Isles and the urgent need to repair its air defences.
The heart and core of the Alliance remained, as it always had been, the United States. There, in the mid-seventies, four tendencies began to converge. First, there was a growing awareness of the true dimensions of the threat. It was accompanied by none of the hysteria occasionally evident in the early fifties but was nonetheless impressive. Second, there was increasing impatience with the reluctance of the European Allies to take a fair share in their own defence — an impatience that grew more marked as growing prosperity left the European allies with less and less excuse. Third, it began to be questioned even in Europe whether it would be easy to persuade any American president to invite the incineration of Chicago, for example, if the Northern Army Group in Germany were broken through and there was nothing left to SACEUR but nuclear weapons. Finally, the feeling grew that flexible response should mean just what it said. This implied that a radical review of the defences of the Alliance at the non-nuclear level — including the massive contribution of the United States itself — was overdue.
The European allies did not long remain in ignorance of the trend of opinion on the other side of the Atlantic and the force behind it. In Britain, which was no bad indicator of European opinion, the public began to develop a more receptive attitude. Pressure to make better provision for the air defence of the British Isles, upon which an American effort in Europe would so much depend, now met with a more favourable response. In some of the countries whose troops were assigned to Allied Command Europe, the initiative and example of the United States began at last to be followed. It was certainly clear in Britain that the public was beginning to take a positive interest in defence which the politicians could not forever disregard.
Quite small things often have a decisive effect. SACEUR realized that the lack of reserves in depth in the NORTHAG area, coupled with the inability of NORTHAG either to offer a credible forward defence with non-nuclear forces or to sustain a tactical nuclear engagement, and the near certainty that a breakthrough would not be at once followed, as the British seemed to hope, by strategic nuclear action on the part of the United States, set up a dangerous situation. To help correct it two US brigades were deployed in the sector of the Northern Army Group (which had hitherto had no US formations under command) where NORTHAG’s reserves might have been located, had there been any.
In Britain, the implications of this did not at first sink in. When it was more widely realized that the Americans were doing for the British what the British had been too idle, too apathetic or too parsimonious to do for themselves, a trace of public uneasiness was discernible which would almost certainly not have been evident a year or two before. It was by no means inconsistent with what some observers saw as a reawakening of a sense of national identity. This was to have considerable influence on British defence policy.
As the current of public concern over national security began to flow in Britain at the end of the seventies, it became increasingly clear that the reductions in defence expenditure to which all political parties had from time to time inclined — some, it must be said, more consistently than others — and which it had become part of the ritual liturgy of radicalism always to demand, no longer wholly conformed to the wishes of the people. The restoration of cuts, and even some increases, hesitantly begun in the financial year 1978-9, were seen to meet with public approval. Greater national affluence helped them to be more easily borne. By 1983 the ceiling imposed on defence expenditure five years before, regarded then by many as immutable, was already being exceeded by more than two-thirds.
The points at which improvements in provision for the national defence were seen to be most needed, and where improvements were in fact made the earliest, were three. There was a reversal of the suicidal tendency to weaken NATO on land by erosion of the British Army of the Rhine; more attention was paid to the no less critical situation of the air defence of the United Kingdom; and improvements were at last set in hand to the country’s ASW (anti-submarine warfare) defences and its maritime air forces.
This outline of developments in the United Kingdom, seen as an indicator of a trend, widespread if uneven, in European countries of the Atlantic Alliance at the end of the seventies, is amplified, in some of its more important aspects, at the end of this book in Appendix 1. It is enough to say here that a sharper awareness of the threat to peace from the growing military strength and the persistent political intransigence of the USSR, on the part of some (but not all) of the European Allies, was leading, in varying degree, towards improvements in their contribution to the defence of the West. The consequent condition of NATO, as the point of decision approached, will be reviewed in Chapter 12.
CHAPTER 5: Unrest in Poland
The Third World War was said by many to have broken out in the same country as the Second, in Poland, on 11 November 1984, the sixty-sixth anniversary of the end of the First World War. It did not seem like an outbreak of world war at the time. In fact, many put the blame for the initial workers’ riots in Poland on what was no more than an incident during the US presidential election campaign.
During the Thompson-Mondale television debates, both candidates had been asked whether they regarded the present Polish government as a satellite of the Soviet Union. Mindful of the Polish-American votes that President Ford had lost in Chicago and elsewhere through giving a soft-on-communism answer to that same question in 1976, Governor Thompson had been careful to keep his answer on what might be called the hawkish side of Mr Mondale’s. One of his aides evidently feared that he had been too hawkish, and shortly before his press conference next day was urging an unwilling candidate to find some way of recanting.
By a misfortune which had dogged US politicians’ microphones on other matters Polish, a microphone inadvertently left live passed on to waiting pressmen Mr Thompson’s reply: ‘Goddammit, Art, I’m not going to say that I wish to make it clear that if the brave Polish people rise against their Russian oppressors, then a Thompson Administration would most certainly leave them in the…’ Suddenly, realizing that his words were being overheard by newsmen, Thompson ended with a grin and the words, ‘expletive deleted’.
There was a ripple of amused applause from the newsmen. In subsequent statements, Mr Thompson was at pains to emphasize that he was threatening nobody. Nonetheless, he was now to some extent saddled with this overheard statement — and it would have been politically damaging for him to retreat too abjectly from it. Indeed, under questioning at a meeting of minority groups in Chicago, he attempted a counter-attack. He accused the Carter Administration’s Secretary of State, Zbigniew Brzezinski (himself a Pole by birth), of being ‘altogether too ready to sell his native country down the river’. Nobody who analysed Thompson’s statements could seriously suppose he was encouraging a Polish insurrection, but there were a good many people (including some in Poland) who feared that restless Poles who heard what he had said repeated in garbled form might suppose that that was just what he was doing.
After Mr Thompson’s election as president on the first Tuesday in November, a memo from the Polish Ministry of Home Security ordered the political police, assis
ted where necessary by the army, quietly to round up potential strike leaders from factories in Polish towns other than Warsaw. The Ministry had heard a rumour that otherwise some sort of provincial general strike might be called to mark President Thompson’s Inauguration Day on 20 January.
The rumour was untrue, but the arrests caused a crisis. The political police and the army tried to arrest workers’ leaders on 11 November, and met with resistance. In some places shots were fired. In more Polish troops were reluctant to obey orders and continue with the arrest of workers.
By 12 November factories in several provincial cities of Poland were under workers’ control, flying the prewar flag of Poland with the communist insignia torn out. Dramatic visual evidence of these events was provided by a group of dissidents working in Polish television. In Gdansk, the television station was taken over and held for some hours by technicians whose sympathies were with the strikers. Though the government reacted promptly, ordering the police to storm the station regardless of casualties, the staff were able in the time available to them to beam pictures of the riots out to Denmark and Sweden. In Sweden the authorities yielded at once to the threats which swiftly followed both from the Soviet Union and from Poland. They forbade both the use of the material in Sweden and its onward transmission. The Danes, on the other hand, passed it at once to Eurovision. From there it reached stations all over the world, affording striking and ineradicable proof of the intensity of feeling in Poland against the regime. One sequence in particular, showing Polish troops standing by while strikers wrecked a Soviet cultural centre in Szczecin, was more damaging to the Soviet Union than any.