Won't Get Fooled Again

by James Philip

  Olga stepped away from the nose of the nearest missile.

  “These two ‘babies’ are original Kh-20 Variant Ms, which tells you something about how many modifications the original pre-production testbeds went through just to reach squadron service!”

  Tatyana Zhukov nodded intently, much like a delicate, pecking bird.

  “They are big mothers, aren’t they?” Olga said proudly. “Fifteen metres long, over nine from wingtip to wingtip, the fuselage is nearly two metres in diameter at one point. These two have engines that were among the last model Lyulka AL-7FK produced. They can pump up to seven thousand pounds of thrust out of the tailpipe and accelerate the missile up to around twice the speed of sound during a two hundred kilometre terminal attack run.”

  Tatyana’s eyes were gleaming now.

  “Fully-loaded, a Kh-20M weighs in at about twelve metric tons; which is why it needs a really big bird like our Amerikanskaya Mechta to carry it into the air, and to fly it to a launch point close enough to the target, for it to do its work.”

  Olga was not about to tell the other woman that the weakest chink in the otherwise, apparently brutally impressive Kh-20’s armour, was its airborne command guidance system, the vulnerability of which in trials before the war of October 1962, and the ineffectiveness of the Tu-95 force during the war itself, had cruelly emphasised. Thus, although the maximum designed stand-off range for launching a Kh-20 was theoretically around six hundred kilometres, it was generally accepted that any launch less than a hundred kilometres short of the target was, to all intents, a waste of time. It was for this reason that almost as soon as it was introduced, its role had been relegated to that of a secondary strike weapon, or a system to be employed to attack fleets or ships at sea, specifically, American of British aircraft carriers.

  “How close?” Tatyana inquired innocently.

  “It depends on what the target is,” Olga replied, hoping she sounded confident. “Ideally less than a hundred kilometres.”

  The other woman nodded mutely.

  “The reason I am telling you all this,” Olga hurried on, “and the reason that your security clearance has – as of now - been upgraded, is that General Zakharov believes it would be a giant morale booster, if at least one of these Rh-20s was put back together again and test flown by the Amerikanskaya Mechta. Our people at Seryshevo need something to give them a kick in the arse, and something that they can be proud of. So, he’s asked me to supervise the job and I recommended to him, and to Dmitry, that I needed you to help me do it!”

  Chapter 25

  Tuesday 21st May, 1968

  Churchill House, Headington Quarry, Oxford

  Margaret Thatcher looked to Airey Neave and Tom Harding-Grayson, and then to others, including Peter Carington, with her gaze lingering on Keith Joseph’s inscrutable physiognomy and oddly, amused eyes. Then, for a moment her gaze fell on the chair vacated by her friend, Miriam Prior-Bramall.

  “The next time we go to the country we must offer our people something more than the vague assurance that we stand for one-nation conservatism, the rule of law. It will be imperative that we also disassociate the Party from the old, irrelevant social and economic models of the Macmillan era.”

  Nobody spoke, there was a general acceptance in the room that things worked better that way when their leader was in full flow. Any intervention would have been like trying to fly a kite in a hurricane – likely to drawn down a verbal bolt of lightning - or a futile attempt to turn back the tide with stern words.

  “It is my view that the manifesto for the next election campaign should unambiguously reflect both our global aspirations, and the duties we have to our people at home. Personally, I see the two things as inseparable. For example, I believe that the Commonwealth Mutual Assistance and Free Trade Agreement, which already includes the countries of the Scandinavian League and others as associate members, ought in the fullness of time to wholly embrace the new French Republic as well as Portugal.”

  India had been granted ‘special partner’ status within the CMAFTA framework in the wake of last year’s San Francisco United Nation’s conference. Presently, France was treated as a part of the British Isles, and therefore enjoyed all the benefits of the Treaty but inevitably, that was only a temporary arrangement which, it was anticipated Alain de Boissieu’s government would wish to renegotiate, probably before the end of the year.

  Likewise, many of the recently independent former British colonies and dependencies in the Caribbean, several of which had been direly impacted, like Jamaica, by the October War, currently enjoyed implicit, rather than ratified, associate member status within CMAFTA; effectively the ability to trade tariff-free within the wider trade zone.

  There was a lot of tidying up to do!

  Not least because in sub-Saharan Africa Botswana, Kenya, Uganda and Zambia were all in the queue to join CMAFTA, notwithstanding that their governments were unhappy about the stance of the rest of the ‘white’ Commonwealth vis-à-vis South Africa and Rhodesia, on account of those countries’ Apartheid, separate development polices denying the overwhelming majority of the populations of both countries any meaningful say in their ‘supposedly democratic’ politics.

  Until the last year or so, the Prime Minister had had very little sympathy for the moralistic ‘bleating’ of the Labour and the Liberal Parties in Parliament, or the occasional demonstrations which snaked their way through the streets of Oxford, waving placards and chanting, accusing her and her ministers of being Nazis and racists for supporting the all-white regimes in Pretoria and Salisbury, the capital of Rhodesia. However, her indifference had always been more to do with the pressures of other imperative, for example, the struggle to keep the nation fed, to ensure that over-stretched health services were sufficiently resourced to fight off the next wave of war plagues, and in fighting and winning whichever war had been inflicted on the country, than worrying about the abominable fashion in which the white Afrikaners in the Cape and a bunch of pig-headed more English than the English ex-patriots in Rhodesia – the parcel of land carved out and appropriated by that most incorrigible of late Victorian merchant adventurers, Cecil Rhodes – treated their native populations.

  That was going to have to change, albeit she had no time for Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition’s demands for economic, and military sanctions, or the diplomatic isolation of the offending regimes; both of which were strategically important allies who had sent troops, ships and equipment to help throw the Soviets out of the Middle East, and in the case of Rhodesia, large grain shipments to the old country every year since the cataclysm.

  The trouble with her opponents in the House of Commons was that they had little or no experience of government, and therefore, had no comprehension of how bloody complicated the world was!

  There were no easy answers to anything…

  “We also need to do something about Northern Ireland,” she informed her colleagues.

  This prompted weary grimaces around the table.

  “For this reason, I want the next National Conservative Government to extend the open hand of friendship to Dublin. This implies offering the Irish in the South full membership of CMAFTA, or failing that, the unconditional restoration of a join tariff-free common UK-Irish trade zone with a medium-term promise of eliminating borders on the island of Ireland.”

  Full members of CMAFTA had a ‘weighted’ vote in all policy decisions. The worth of that vote was calculated using an equation which traded-off population against the size of respective home markets and industrial production assessed annually in US Dollars, and included a percentage figure to represent the area of land under agricultural or pastoral management. This latter had been written-in to reflect that Australia, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa had relatively small ‘qualifying populations’, only the ‘whites’ in the latter, but geographically occupied very large territories.

  Despite the ravages of the October War, the United Kingdom was by far the biggest economy in the CMAFTA, ev
en though dollar values tended to under-calculate its worth it was easily two to three times the size of the next two full members of CMAFTA. The British Isles were never going to be the workshop of the world again, nor of CMAFTA but nowhere within the organisation was industrial production racing ahead as it was in the English Midlands and the North. The nett ‘voting picture’ therefore, was that the United Kingdom controlled about one-quarter of the ‘rights’; and while it was not Margaret Thatcher’s Government’s policy to so do, steamroller any measure through the Council of Leaders of the CMAFTA – the body which decided membership issues by a two-thirds majority, on those occasions when consensus was impractical – the British lead on any initiative was usually followed by the others.

  If Her Majesty’s Government proposed the Republic of Ireland for full membership of the organisation; sooner or later, it would probably happen.

  This prompted several coughs, and more than one of her ministers to sit forward and throw looks of askance at Jim Prior, the man in the hot seat in Ulster.

  Lugubriously, he exchanged a glance, arching an eyebrow, at the Prime Minister.

  She waved for him to speak.

  “I agree whole-heartedly, that we must do something to break the log-jam in the Province. Security-wise, we have things on a more or less even keel at the moment but only because half the Army is either garrisoning the province or ready to intervene at any given time. The cost, not just in lives – thirty to fifty servicemen and perhaps, twice as many civilians, caught up in or instigating terroristic activity, or one or other of the border skirmishes most months – but in economic and fiscal terms. Ulster is becoming an economic wasteland and increasingly, young people are leaving for Scotland and England, regrettably, a significant proportion of those exiles bringing their poisonous sectarian prejudices with them to the mainland. I have said it before, and I will say it again now; we forget at our peril that the Irish Republican Army is a much greater existential threat to the government in Dublin than it is to us in England. We can just about live with the troubles in the six northern counties, albeit holding our noses and doing our best to ring-fence the most egregious of the violence; but that is not a realistic long-term option for our counterparts in Dublin. We have been attempting to deal with the zealots behind the sectarian strife, the fanatics who periodically bomb British cities; perhaps, it is time we gave the elected representatives of the Irish Republic a real voice in this ages’ old conflict?”

  “Thank you, Jim,” Margaret Thatcher murmured, quietly daring anybody around the table to gainsay her Northern Ireland Secretary. She went on: “Our manifesto must also re-dedicate our special relationship with the United States, whoever is in the White House and whatever the Americans are doing to vex us at the time. Our opponents, particularly the Labour Party, however it styles its various warring factions, will attack us for this but let them. The Sverdlovsk compacts imply that it is unlikely there will be large numbers of US ground troops deployed in Europe again in the foreseeable future; but we all know that the Nixon Administration is committed to the Polaris Joint Nuclear Strike Force, and that the US Air Force will probably want more, not less bases in the UK, France and Portugal in the coming years.”

  The Prime Minister suddenly changed tack, apparently going off at a tangent.

  “I’ll have more to say about the United Kingdom’s global role later. Our election manifesto must comprehensively address the great societal issues facing us. I have asked Keith,” smiling meaningfully at the Minister for Health, “to draft that side of the manifesto.”

  Keith Joseph nodded, seemingly lost in his introspection, alone in the room in that instant. He sighed, placed his arms on the table and unhurriedly surveyed the faces of his colleagues.

  “Our people do not need to be told that everything has changed in the last five years,” he prefaced solemnly. “They can see as much for themselves, and live with the consequences of those tumultuous changes every minute of every day of their lives. I am in lock-step with the Prime Minister in believing that we must drive through what I, we all, I suspect, might before October 1962 have condemned as a recklessly socialistic program, of publicly-funded renewal and reconstruction, beginning with our health, education, social and housing sectors, and that a pre-condition for this must be to retain our standing in the wider world and thereby maintain, and hopefully continually expand our access to global markets, resources and technological excellence. As the world recovers from the long-lasting effects of the October War, new powers will emerge and nations will adapt, and we will surely face ever-growing economic and possibly, military competition from emergent nations. Our ongoing strength overseas is the guarantor of our wealth at home; one without the other is improbable and we can achieve nothing if our global competitors perceive that we are weak, or that we have lost the national will to stand up for our own rightful interests.”

  Eyes were widening, others glazing over, but nobody interrupted Keith Joseph; he clearly had the Prime Minister’s licence to stray, willy-nilly into other departmental spheres and this was, after all, a ‘political cabinet’.

  Margaret Thatcher cleared her throat.

  “I have tasked Michael Heseltine to co-ordinate a Minister of State committee-level,” she explained, “forum of the Education, Health, Labour, Trade and other interested parties, to report to Keith not later than the end of August, on how best to achieve a,” she hesitated, “wide-ranging renewal of civil society.’

  Basically, she had just co-opted the sub-cabinet level ministers of half-a-dozen of those present, to work on the Party’s manifesto, without consulting anybody other than Keith Joseph.

  She let this sink in; but was mindful not to give her colleagues the opportunity to dwell overlong on this fait accompli. Not least, because she was keen to move onto the next one!

  However, a few half-frowns, mostly behind hands briefly raised to mask momentarily bowed head apart, there was no murmur of dissent around the table.

  “Cabinet will be apprised of the government’s representations to the United Nations Commission on National Borders, in respect of the South Atlantic Issue,” she stated, abruptly.

  If she was aware of the rolling eyes, or of the stoic blank looks of many of her ministers, Margaret Thatcher showed no sign of acknowledging it. Notwithstanding that at her request the Joint Intelligence Committee of the Chiefs of Staff had circulated its latest report on the 1964 invasion of the Falkland Islands Dependencies to the Cabinet prior to the weekend, and that therefore, they had all known that the thorniest of all questions was to be discussed, yet again, few of those in the room had seriously anticipated it would be raised, let alone granted precedence in a full ‘political cabinet’.

  Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition had already raised a white flag over the seizure by the Argentine Republic of the Falklands Archipelago (over which the two countries had been in dispute since the 1830s), South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands (over which the Argentine had never had a lawful claim, or legitimate interest in recent years), and the British Antarctic Territories (which even the United Nations thought was illegal), in April 1964.

  In Buenos Aires, the Argentine invasion had cemented a wobbling fascist military junta in place for the last four years, despite the horror stories which had emerged when the surviving civilian citizens of the Falklands – Kelpers – had eventually reached safety in America, Canada and the United Kingdom.

  The ‘facts’ about the events of 1964 were now undisputed in Britain, the New Commonwealth, and when the Nixon State Department could be drawn on the issue – which was rarely and never in public – in the corridors of its re-built post-Battle of Washington, Foggy Bottom building in Washington.

  This of course, was problematic because nobody in the Cabinet Room needed to be reminded that truth is the first casualty in any war. Needless to say, the Argentine Junta vehemently rejected many of the accusations of war crimes, and crimes against humanity levelled at it by the United Kingdom, several CMAFTA allies,
and sotto voce, by the White House.

  What had been a humiliating military and political defeat in April 1964, had long ago become an open wound in the British body politic, and many had dreaded the day when with the return of peace, or at least, the absence of open conflict elsewhere, that the Government might finally get around to addressing that old, still festering wound.

  Optimists had hoped it might be cauterised by adroit diplomacy; if any man was equal to the challenge it had to be Tom Harding-Grayson.

  Pessimists, had always known that there was very nearly endless scope for tragedy, or if that extremity could be avoided, then the loss of untold treasure and moral capital, in leaving the old injury unattended.

  Never had the ‘facts’ of the matter been more contentious – if not in Oxford then in Washington, Buenos Aires and practically every Latin American capital.

  So, what was known and what was accepted to be ‘the truth’ was one thing in England, and another entirely in many, many other places in the world, and therein, everybody in the room knew that there was unfathomable peril.