The Third World War: August 1985

While Iran’s western border is with Iraq and the Gulf, its north-eastern border is with the Asiatic republics of the former Soviet Union, now under Chinese influence, and its south-eastern border is with Pakistan. India-Pakistan was not a scene of fighting in the war; the new generation of youngsters coming out of its schools is the first generation to be almost entirely literate (like the first generation of literate Chinese to emerge from their schools fifteen years ago, and look how they’ve progressed); some people therefore expect rapid economic development in India-Pakistan at last. Some trends suggest it may become the manufacturing area for the China-Japan co-prosperity sphere, the place to which that rich area devolves its pollutant heavy industries. This may be especially likely if nearby Middle Eastern oil remains an important industrial fuel.

There could be a paradox here. The Japanese remember all too well that, on the day in 1941 when they started their war with the United States, a paper before the imperial government had said that war was necessary because of the coming shortage of oil. In that December of 1941 Japan had a reserve of oil sufficient for its needs for a few months ahead; the Japanese government believed that it would never have so much oil again unless it seized control of the oilfields of Indonesia and perhaps Burma. Thirty years later oil supplies from Indonesia and Burma were much less important than anybody had forecast. Though Japan had been defeated, Japanese industry was using every six hours an amount of oil equal to the entire stock that Japan held on Pearl Harbor day. It was buying it easily from temporarily glutted supplies in the Middle East.

The 1985 war also owed its start partly to fears on the part of the great nations that they would face penury unless they could secure physical possession of oil-producing areas. One remembers the competition run in 1920 by an Austrian newspaper for the most dramatic conceivable newspaper headline. The winning entry was ‘Archduke Franz Ferdinand alive. World war fought by mistake.’

The history of energy supplies during the recent conflict has raised some question as to whether, in relation to the ‘oil shortage’, that sort of headline may not now be proved apposite.

The areas that have increased their industrial production most in recent years (Japan-China and South America) were cut off from imported supplies of oil when the 1985 war broke out. Each had accumulated large reserve stocks before the war and the war was far shorter than they expected. They got by with ease. The Japanese, who are now the world’s most advanced technicians and who had feared that the impeding of oil supplies from the Middle East might prove much longer-lasting, have progressed dramatically with experiments on the thousands of possible other ways of releasing energy from storage in matter. This does not apply simply to nuclear, solar, wave and geothermal energy, but also to, for example, creating artificial rain in large tanks by allowing warm air above sea water to rise through deliberately cooled upper air and getting hydro-electric power from that. Also, the protests of environmentalists against nuclear fission have diminished since the war, and nuclear fusion is at hand.

One must beware of any forecasts about fuel supplies now the war is behind us. In February of 1947, during the Shinwell fuel crisis, Britain’s Prime Minister, Clem Attlee, said that no coal miner need fear for his job for the rest of the century. Within twelve years, a majority of the then existing coal mines in Europe and Japan had closed down. The forecast ‘oil-short 1990s’ may prove like that. The Middle East may, like the coal-mining districts at the end of the coal age, have tragically priced itself into standards of living it will no longer be able to afford. Or it could still prove for some years (as many people suppose) to be the main supply area for a valuable and depleted natural resource.

In either event, the Middle East is not going to be a comfortable southern neighbour for the new EEC. If oil is still scarce, there will be a jockeying for positions there. If the area is going to be poorer than it has grown accustomed to thinking it has a right to be, there may be constant coups d’état. It became fashionable in the 1970s and early 1980s to suppose that a main object of diplomacy would always be to make good friends of the rulers of Iran and the Arab oil countries. But billionaire shahs and sheikhs are not likely to be the most popular folk heroes for the last decade of the twentieth century.