The Third World War: August 1985

The presence of large numbers of nuclear warheads in Europe presented the Allies with a new and very difficult 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.