The Third World War: August 1985

The heart and core of the Alliance remained, as it always had been, the United States. There, in the mid-seventies, four tendencies began to converge. First, there was a growing awareness of the true dimensions of the threat. It was accompanied by none of the hysteria occasionally evident in the early fifties but was nonetheless impressive. Second, there was increasing impatience with the reluctance of the European Allies to take a fair share in their own defence — an impatience that grew more marked as growing prosperity left the European allies with less and less excuse. Third, it began to be questioned even in Europe whether it would be easy to persuade any American president to invite the incineration of Chicago, for example, if the Northern Army Group in Germany were broken through and there was nothing left to SACEUR but nuclear weapons. Finally, the feeling grew that flexible response should mean just what it said. This implied that a radical review of the defences of the Alliance at the non-nuclear level — including the massive contribution of the United States itself — was overdue.

The European allies did not long remain in ignorance of the trend of opinion on the other side of the Atlantic and the force behind it. In Britain, which was no bad indicator of European opinion, the public began to develop a more receptive attitude. Pressure to make better provision for the air defence of the British Isles, upon which an American effort in Europe would so much depend, now met with a more favourable response. In some of the countries whose troops were assigned to Allied Command Europe, the initiative and example of the United States began at last to be followed. It was certainly clear in Britain that the public was beginning to take a positive interest in defence which the politicians could not forever disregard.

Quite small things often have a decisive effect. SACEUR realized that the lack of reserves in depth in the NORTHAG area, coupled with the inability of NORTHAG either to offer a credible forward defence with non-nuclear forces or to sustain a tactical nuclear engagement, and the near certainty that a breakthrough would not be at once followed, as the British seemed to hope, by strategic nuclear action on the part of the United States, set up a dangerous situation. To help correct it two US brigades were deployed in the sector of the Northern Army Group (which had hitherto had no US formations under command) where NORTHAG’s reserves might have been located, had there been any.

In Britain, the implications of this did not at first sink in. When it was more widely realized that the Americans were doing for the British what the British had been too idle, too apathetic or too parsimonious to do for themselves, a trace of public uneasiness was discernible which would almost certainly not have been evident a year or two before. It was by no means inconsistent with what some observers saw as a reawakening of a sense of national identity. This was to have considerable influence on British defence policy.

As the current of public concern over national security began to flow in Britain at the end of the seventies, it became increasingly clear that the reductions in defence expenditure to which all political parties had from time to time inclined — some, it must be said, more consistently than others — and which it had become part of the ritual liturgy of radicalism always to demand, no longer wholly conformed to the wishes of the people. The restoration of cuts, and even some increases, hesitantly begun in the financial year 1978-9, were seen to meet with public approval. Greater national affluence helped them to be more easily borne. By 1983 the ceiling imposed on defence expenditure five years before, regarded then by many as immutable, was already being exceeded by more than two-thirds.

The points at which improvements in provision for the national defence were seen to be most needed, and where improvements were in fact made the earliest, were three. There was a reversal of the suicidal tendency to weaken NATO on land by erosion of the British Army of the Rhine; more attention was paid to the no less critical situation of the air defence of the United Kingdom; and improvements were at last set in hand to the country’s ASW (anti-submarine warfare) defences and its maritime air forces.