The Third World War: August 1985

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.