The Third World War: August 1985

Though the forward location of special weapon stores (in which nuclear warheads were kept) meant that some would be overrun before the weapons could be used, there would still be plenty left. Delay in securing their release, however, was inevitable, even supposing a very early resolution of the agonizing dilemma which impaled the FRG, in whose territory very many of these warheads, if not most, would land. The Allied rubric, moreover, enjoined that no release could be expected before all conventional means had already been tried and exhausted — that is, in effect, before the conventional battle had been lost, leaving a situation which could almost certainly no longer be ‘restored’.

The wisdom of locating stores of nuclear warheads in vulnerable forward areas was brought in question in 1977, when it was pointed out that nuclear attack was much more likely on fixed, static concentrations than on troop formations in the field, and that in consequence missile attack from submarine launchers might be more sensible than from launchers on the battlefield. By 1984 there had been some reduction in forward holdings but these were still considerable.

Accepting the declared NATO concept of the ‘Triad’, however, and assuming that tactical nuclear weapons were introduced, a nuclear battle would result. For this the Russians were equipped and trained. The British (and most of the other Allies) were not. No major British weapon system in use in 1978, even the newest, offered plausible protection to crewmen fighting in a nuclear environment. Training in movement over contaminated ground was rudimentary, equipment for decontamination and provision for its practice — and even for the acquisition and dissemination of radiation intelligence — was far from adequate. British defence policy, in contra-distinction to that of the Soviet Union, clearly embodied no real requirement to fight on a nuclear battlefield. It even seemed that the British contribution to the defence of Europe in the Central Region of the Allied Command contained a deliberate insufficiency, whose purpose was to force on the United States not so much an early release of battlefield nuclear weapons as an almost immediate movement into strategic nuclear attack, perhaps on the USSR itself. There could be no doubt, the argument ran, that the Soviet Union realized this too. It was here, the British seemed to think, that true deterrence lay.

To British politicians in the seventies, under pressure from some of their supporters to cut the defence vote at almost any cost, the approach was an attractive one. It was, in essence, indistinguishable from that of the 1957 White Paper. Whatever it might now be called, British defence policy was still that of trip-wire and massive retaliation, disfigured somewhat by claims that economies, which left front-line troops less capable of fighting, were in fact contributions to military efficiency. Whether this would remain indefinitely acceptable to the United States, which was clearly expected to hold the baby, was another matter.

Professional military men in the parliamentary democracies of the West are generally honest people, loyal to those they serve and reluctant to take part in politics. Many were anxious and deeply disturbed over the situation here described. But as long as the public demanded of their politicians nothing more, and showed little inclination to put up the money for anything better, there was not much that the military men could do. The difficulty was compounded in Britain where, although the Civil Service had been allowed greater freedom of political expression during the late seventies, the tradition that the military must not debate government defence policy in public was still rigorously applied. It was paradoxical that in a country where free speech was so cherished the military remained so firmly muzzled. Nevertheless, in institutes and societies devoted to the debate of public affairs, with which Britain abounded, some awareness grew up among responsible people of the real situation and, in particular, of the dangerously changed character of the air threat to the British Isles and the urgent need to repair its air defences.