The Third World War: August 1985

by John Hackett

  Deliberate all-out attack with complete surprise from a standing start, it must be repeated, was always unlikely. The more probable way in which it was thought in the West that a war in Europe would be likely to break out was just the way it did. What happened to start it off in 1985 could have happened, in one way or another, much earlier.

  If the crisis of 1985 had occurred in 1977, say, or even in 1978, it is, as we have seen, scarcely conceivable that the Soviet plan for an advance to the Rhine, the dismemberment of the Alliance and the total destruction of the Federal Republic of Germany could have failed given the state of preparedness of the Allies at that time.

  What was done in the years between 1978 and 1984 was enough to prevent this. The tale of it has already been referred to in outline. It is told more fully, using Britain as a test case, in Appendices 1 and 3.

  The advantages of the military structure formed to function in peacetime — a quite unique feature of the Atlantic Alliance — have become ever more abundantly clear. Without NATO as a framework the individual efforts of the Allies would have been of little account and much less effective in the aggregate. Within NATO the contributions of the Allies, though incompletely co-ordinated, added up to far more than the sum of the parts. In these years the United States came out of its post-Vietnam trance. Great Britain threw off some of the illusions which had flooded into the vacuum left by the disappearance of an empire. The Federal Republic ceased to be mesmerized by the success of its economic miracle and the allure of a welfare state. Even Belgium and Holland, though late and incompletely, began to show some awareness that the Soviet Union was already in a position to meet and master a real crisis and would welcome a showdown with the capitalist West, and sooner rather than later at that. Throughout NATO there was a growing tendency to face and accept defence responsibilities, nowhere more clearly shown than in a steady rise in readiness, an improvement in reinforcement capabilities and a striking advance in anti-tank and air defence.

  The miscalculation over the possible participation of France was a major blunder on the Soviet Union’s part at the very outset. In the sphere of grand strategy the Soviet Union was soon to be in deeper water still. It was attempting to handle an almost worldwide problem of war command, with operations proceeding simultaneously from Bodo in Norway to Berbera in North-east Africa, from the Caribbean to the Caucasus. This was beyond the powers of the centralized system of control on which the regime depended. Only a degree of independence in command which was wholly foreign to it, and to which Soviet commanders themselves were completely unaccustomed, could have enabled peripheral commands to retain the initiative without which they were bound to fail.

  At the tactical level, a very similar point applied. The Russians were attempting to apply a battle-fighting method which demanded a degree of independence in junior leaders which it had been a major interest of the Marxist-Leninist system to discourage.

  The battle-fighting method itself was on the whole unremarkable. What was hailed in the West by some in the late seventies as a tactical revolution in the Red Army, the conversion from mass attack to manoeuvre, from the shock of frontal assault to the ‘deep thrust’ and the ‘daring raid’, was neither so novel nor so radical as was thought. What was being developed in Red Army tactical practice was the action of combined arms, co-ordinated and commanded at a lower level than was customary. This marked a shift of emphasis which showed up weaknesses none the less. The BMP, designed for the nuclear battlefield, was found not to be the best combat vehicle for the carriage of infantry supporting armour in a non-nuclear battle. It was in the process of being somewhat hesitantly replaced by a better vehicle, the MTLB, when war broke out. The problems of interrelating combat elements with different speeds and other characteristics remained unsolved.

  So did the difficulties of combining many widely differing parts into a composite tactical whole in a fluid situation, where initiative, inventiveness and a bold independence of mind in junior leaders were what counted. The Red Army had made much over the years of the importance of free and lively debate among junior officers, particularly in journals available to the public and to foreigners — much more, in fact, than the armies of the West where such things were taken more for granted. In action on the battlefield, however, the young Red Army officer — who almost certainly expected nothing else — found himself as usual under the deadening hand of total conformity. It was this which made the command posts, control structures and communications systems of the Warsaw Pact such rewarding targets for attack.

  It must here be strongly emphasized again, however — and it cannot be too often repeated — that the forces of the Western Allies were only in a position to survive the onslaught of the Warsaw Pact because, though heavily outnumbered from the outset, they were able to remain in being. Without the sort of improvements effected in the years between 1978 and 1984 this would have been impossible.

  The war on land in Europe was a short one. Deprived of the swift victory that could have been so confidently predicted only a few years before, the Warsaw Pact, once checked, could not recover momentum in time to achieve and stabilize a decisive advantage before the arrival of the first of those Western reinforcements, with their great weight of weapons, which could soon be expected to flow so plentifully.

  The fighting could hardly have gone on for very long in any case. Neither side could have sustained for more than a few weeks the expenditure of aircraft and of missile and other stocks — of fuel, for example, and of all manner of warlike stores and equipment — demanded in the modern battle. Even if the production of munitions of war in the home bases had been possible at the rate at which they were used up on the battlefield, it is doubtful whether, with hostile interference to the lines of communication, supply could ever have kept up with consumption.

  The Soviet concept of the application of armed force for the purpose of securing a political advantage, in the state of the art in the last twenty years of the twentieth century and in the circumstances of the time, was thus wholly rational. It was facing an adversary relatively weak in the first instance but disposing of potentially overwhelming resources. Late twentieth-century war consumed material in such enormous quantities as to put very long drawn-out operations out of the question. It was imperative, therefore, to secure a position of great political advantage in a short, sharp, violent encounter, starting with the offensive initiative, exploiting as far as possible the advantages of surprise and of a somewhat longer period of preparation than the enemy’s, and reaching a chosen strategic objective before the enemy could bring his superior resources to bear and while stocks were still sufficient to sustain intensive action.

  We have seen what happened. In the last few years before the outbreak of war the West began to wake up to the danger it faced, and in the time available did just enough in repair of its neglected defences to enable it, by a small margin, to survive. The Allies had better luck, perhaps, than they deserved. The Soviet Union was guilty of an important misjudgement in the matter of the American response to intervention in Yugoslavia, and of a critical blunder in their assumption that the French would not come in on the Allied side. A check to the forward impetus of the Warsaw Pact’s invasion of the Federal Republic of Germany followed by a single, catastrophic, strategic nuclear exchange, triggered off the dissolution of the Pact and started the disintegration of the Soviet Union itself into its national components. The Marxist-Leninist empire, as hated and feared, perhaps, as any regime the world has seen, collapsed in total ruin, and the world is even now engaged, in many different ways, in picking up and sorting out the pieces.

  The immediate tidying up which engaged the Allies, as soon as the USSR ceased to be able to prosecute the war and hostilities in Europe came to an end, contained operations that were already more or less familiar from experience of other wars but also one that was both highly important and quite new.

  The presence of large numbers of nuclear warheads in Europe presented the Allies with a new and very d
ifficult post-war problem. Many remained firmly in Allied hands, though a considerable number had been in Special Weapons Stores overrun in the offensive and could not now be accounted for. Very many more were dispersed and lost on the other side, amidst the confusion in which hostilities ended. Much of the deadly content of these weapons had disappeared and so far has not been traced. The United Nations Fissile Materials Recovery Organization (UNFISMATRECO) is seeking urgently to recover all it can. Some will almost certainly find its way into hands from which, in the interests of peace and security, it should at any cost be kept.

  One last lesson is worth drawing from the war itself. Not inappropriately in an age of high technology, it lies in a technical area.

  The period of full-scale hostilities between the forces of the Atlantic Alliance and the Warsaw Pact was short — no more, in fact, than a few weeks. It was still sufficient to show in quite astonishing fashion how far the electronic technology of the West had outstripped that of the Eastern bloc. The reason was very simple and beyond dispute. The advantage of the West lay in commercial competition. No state-controlled activity, no collective operation, in a field wide open to scientific inventiveness and industrial enterprise, could have produced developments as staggering as those in the electronics industries of the non-communist world. The reduction in size, weight, power consumption and cost of electronic components in a competitive market had been quite phenomenal. The evolution of micro-electronics and of micro-processing had been nothing less than a technological explosion.

  Let a short example suffice. In the 1950s the transistor began to replace the vacuum tube. In the 1960s circuits often transistors were in use. Within ten years transistors numbering several hundreds could be mounted on one small chip of substrate two centimetres square. What was called medium-scale integration (MSI) was then possible. By 1977 large-scale integration (LSI) had come in, employing 1,000 or more transistors mounted in the same space. When war broke out very large-scale integration (VLSI) was already in use, with 10,000 transistors mounted on a chip still only the size of a postage stamp. The work of a computer whose equipment in the forties, using vacuum tubes, would have filled a barn could now be done by something the size of a wrist-watch.

  The impact of this on the development of military hardware was incalculable. The equipment for communications, control, guidance, the detection and location of weapons and emitters, the means of jamming, interception, interpolation, diversion and a thousand and one other functions, was flowing in such profusion that there was much more, and in much greater variety, than could be used. The irony for the West, in the shortness of the war, welcome though it was, lay in the inability of military men to find the questions to which the electronics men already had the answers.

  They were only beginning, when the fighting ended, to get the best out of the equipment and techniques already in service. They had not yet begun to explore, in a technology developing at an almost frightening rate, the applications of techniques already far advanced and being improved on daily.

  The wars of the late nineteenth century — the American Civil War, for example, and the Franco-Prussian War — were wars of the railway, the telegraph, breech-loading small arms and tinned rations. The seas were dominated by the ironclad. At the beginning of the twentieth century the Russo-Japanese War showed to any who cared to learn the dominance on the battlefield of the spade, barbed wire and automatic weapons. The First World War rammed home the same lesson, in a war in which the internal combustion engine, artillery, the submarine, air power and armoured vehicles became the dominant features. The Second World War was one of worldwide mobility on land and sea and in the air, of total mobilization of population and industrial reserves, of seapower and of air forces. It ended in the shadow of the nuclear weapon. The Third World War was widely expected to be the first nuclear war — and perhaps the last. It turned out in the event to be essentially a war of electronics.

  To end these reflections on the Third World War upon a technological note may appear odd. It is unlikely to seem so to some future reader. Wars commonly produce an acceleration of technical advance. This one did more: it took the lid off Pandora’s box. We are now moving forward into a world which will be more and more dominated by electronic technology. It is likely to prove a very different world from the one we knew, the one which came so near to destruction in the Third World War. That war was fought, it is true, under the shadow of the threat of nuclear devastation. On the basis of NATO’s rediscovered confidence and hastily repaired defences it was largely won by electronics. We cannot begin to guess how our lives, and even more our children’s lives, will be influenced by the possibilities which these swiftly developing techniques are now opening up. An unfamiliar, perhaps uncomfortable world awaits us, very strange and new. We can only be thankful to have survived, and wait and see.

  CHAPTER 28: The Beginning of the Future

  We believe that later historians who write the history of the Third World War will not drastically alter our conclusions about its causes. However, we are writing very shortly after the end of the war and can only provide the best predictions we have about its effects — and we are very mindful of the anecdote with which this chapter concludes. History is not an exact science. And ‘the historian of the future’ is as much artist as scientist or academic. But the futurologist cannot be taken lightly. He bases his conclusions on perceived trends, and his predictions themselves may possibly have some effect on the future: in helping either to prevent his predictions coming true or to realize them.

  Nobody can be sure which of the many meetings and international position papers of the first three months of 1987 will prove of lasting significance to the world. At least one of these papers, we suspect, may have begun to paint the picture of the future.

  It was prepared for the meeting of the EEC heads of government at Copenhagen. It had been collated in the Council of Foreign Ministers. This had not been a recipe for meaningful documents in the past, but this document may be destined to play a role in the history of Europe more significant than the past treaties of Rome, Versailles, Vienna and Utrecht put together. What it embodies has already become known as the Copenhagen doctrine. It is a lengthy document, legalistically expressed. A detailed summary of it appeared in The Times of 15 February 1987, and we quote this in full:

  1 At the end of the 1939-45 war there were two superpowers: the United States and the Soviet Union. At the end of the 1985 war, there are again two superpowers: the United States and the China-Japan co-prosperity sphere. The difference for us this time is that Europe does not lie between them.

  2 America and China-Japan will face each other — we hope in amity — across the Pacific Ocean. The Pacific basin will become more important to each of them than the Atlantic is.

  3 The most extreme version of this emerging Pacific superpower isolationism is already being expressed in the Schneider memorandum, from the American General Art Schneider, who was most angry when President Thompson allowed European political instincts and fears in 1985 to delay the invasion of East Germany which Schneider (popularly known as ‘young blood and guts’) had expected his own army group to spearhead. Schneider, who may be the Democratic candidate against President Thompson in next year’s 1988 presidential election (and failing that will almost certainly win the now almost as important office of Governor of his native California), has written:

  ‘Henceforth we should let Europe and Africa stew in their own tribal wars. It will not be worth the death of a single American soldier to prevent them, especially as (a) the Birmingham and Minsk bombs have shown that the whole world is not contaminated by single N-blasts and (b) it will be possible for China-Japan and the US to quarantine smaller countries’ N-wars from afar by saying that any country which launches an N-weapon will immediately have a neutron bomb from us homed in by missile to its president’s palace.’

  It is possible that within ten years an even more tempting weapon for such quarantining may become available to countries
with the technological capability of the US and Japan. They may be able to announce the setting up of a telecommunications ‘ring fence’, for the state of the art will then permit those capable of developing the appropriate technology to take charge by telecommunication of the guidance system of any missile in flight and redirect it at will. This would mean that any country launching a missile could find it reversed upon a reciprocal course and turned back to land and detonate at its point of launch. The advance in telecommunications during the technological spurt caused by the threat of war, even more than in the brief duration of the war itself, has been greater than in any other technology except that of energy.

  4 It is therefore important for us in the EEC to see that the sort of Europe we rebuild during this peace should not be one liable to ‘tribal wars’.

  5 The rest of Europe, both East and West, will be frightened if the two Germanies unite. They would then form too dominant a European power. It is therefore important that each Germany should be a member of the EEC, and be united within the EEC to the same degree as France and West Germany are, but no more than that.

  6 The same applies to all the former communist states, including the European states of the former Soviet Union. The EEC now needs to extend its boundaries in the way that Charles de Gaulle once envisaged. The European Economic Community should become a Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals.

  This document was accepted at Copenhagen with some relief by the governments concerned, including that of the Federal Republic of Germany. Charles de Gaulle was now seen in retrospect as a prophet, where in life he had more often been regarded as a prickly and tiresome man. Two new issues were strenuously discussed at Copenhagen. One concerned the best rules and aims for the new, enlarged EEC; on this there was a note of innovation, excitement, enthusiasm and intellectual daring — an attractive throwback to the European spirit of the late 1950s which had seemed to be sleeping since. The second issue was what on earth to do about the politico-strategic problems on the long southern border of the new EEC; on this there was a note of near-despair.