The Third World War: August 1985

This outline of developments in the United Kingdom, seen as an indicator of a trend, widespread if uneven, in European countries of the Atlantic Alliance at the end of the seventies, is amplified, in some of its more important aspects, at the end of this book in Appendix 1. It is enough to say here that a sharper awareness of the threat to peace from the growing military strength and the persistent political intransigence of the USSR, on the part of some (but not all) of the European Allies, was leading, in varying degree, towards improvements in their contribution to the defence of the West. The consequent condition of NATO, as the point of decision approached, will be reviewed in Chapter 12.

CHAPTER 5: Unrest in Poland

The Third World War was said by many to have broken out in the same country as the Second, in Poland, on 11 November 1984, the sixty-sixth anniversary of the end of the First World War. It did not seem like an outbreak of world war at the time. In fact, many put the blame for the initial workers’ riots in Poland on what was no more than an incident during the US presidential election campaign.

During the Thompson-Mondale television debates, both candidates had been asked whether they regarded the present Polish government as a satellite of the Soviet Union. Mindful of the Polish-American votes that President Ford had lost in Chicago and elsewhere through giving a soft-on-communism answer to that same question in 1976, Governor Thompson had been careful to keep his answer on what might be called the hawkish side of Mr Mondale’s. One of his aides evidently feared that he had been too hawkish, and shortly before his press conference next day was urging an unwilling candidate to find some way of recanting.

By a misfortune which had dogged US politicians’ microphones on other matters Polish, a microphone inadvertently left live passed on to waiting pressmen Mr Thompson’s reply: ‘Goddammit, Art, I’m not going to say that I wish to make it clear that if the brave Polish people rise against their Russian oppressors, then a Thompson Administration would most certainly leave them in the…’ Suddenly, realizing that his words were being overheard by newsmen, Thompson ended with a grin and the words, ‘expletive deleted’.

There was a ripple of amused applause from the newsmen. In subsequent statements, Mr Thompson was at pains to emphasize that he was threatening nobody. Nonetheless, he was now to some extent saddled with this overheard statement — and it would have been politically damaging for him to retreat too abjectly from it. Indeed, under questioning at a meeting of minority groups in Chicago, he attempted a counter-attack. He accused the Carter Administration’s Secretary of State, Zbigniew Brzezinski (himself a Pole by birth), of being ‘altogether too ready to sell his native country down the river’. Nobody who analysed Thompson’s statements could seriously suppose he was encouraging a Polish insurrection, but there were a good many people (including some in Poland) who feared that restless Poles who heard what he had said repeated in garbled form might suppose that that was just what he was doing.

After Mr Thompson’s election as president on the first Tuesday in November, a memo from the Polish Ministry of Home Security ordered the political police, assisted where necessary by the army, quietly to round up potential strike leaders from factories in Polish towns other than Warsaw. The Ministry had heard a rumour that otherwise some sort of provincial general strike might be called to mark President Thompson’s Inauguration Day on 20 January.

The rumour was untrue, but the arrests caused a crisis. The political police and the army tried to arrest workers’ leaders on 11 November, and met with resistance. In some places shots were fired. In more Polish troops were reluctant to obey orders and continue with the arrest of workers.