The Third World War: August 1985

25 December. In a Christmas message to the world, the ‘lame-duck’ President Carter proposes high-level discussions with the Soviet Union in accordance with the Agreement for the Prevention of Nuclear War of 1973, to consider means to end tensions in Africa and the Middle East. His proposal is that there should be a standstill of military forces all round the globe in their existing positions. There should also be a ban on the export of all arms to either side in Africa or the Middle East. He proposes that the US Navy enforce the blockade of the west coast of Africa; meanwhile the Soviet Navy should enforce the blockade of the east coast of Africa and the Gulf, with assistance to be invited from the US Navy. Both superpowers are to enforce a blockade of arms-carrying ships passing through the Mediterranean.

26 December. The Soviet Union says it will talk only to President Thompson after his Inauguration Day on 20 January. It blames lame-duck President Carter for much of the world’s present ills, but meanwhile agrees that a standstill should be enforced by both the US and the USSR.

28 December. Iran declares that it is not bound by the standstill agreement. Acting contrary to US advice, it reinforces its existing troops in Oman and secures an invitation from the United Arab Emirates to send defensive forces to Abu Dhabi. Television pictures, secured by an American camera team, of Iranian troops landing in Oman, and of armoured cars with Iranian markings alongside Omani troops, are distributed worldwide, and are triumphantly used by the Russians to support their claims of Iranian belligerency. The USSR says this is a blatant breach of the standstill, and that US naval forces (which are supposed to be co-operating in preventing such breaches) have connived at it.

29 December. A Soviet submarine sinks an Iranian transport. A US intelligence ship is attacked by missiles in the Gulf of Aden.

The Soviet attacks on the 29th can with some justification be called the first shots of the Third World War. Symbolically they were fired at sea and in Middle Eastern waters. Both maritime affairs and the Middle East had each been a focus of intense Soviet interest and planning for many years (see Appendix 2).

Having got over the initial shock of the submarine attack, the Iranian government set in train measures to assume complete control of the waters of the Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz. The luckless US intelligence ship, limping slowly towards Mombasa, following a friendly offer of help from the government of Kenya to the outgoing President in his last days of office, was to be joined by a US carrier group which had been on passage south in the Red Sea, on a routine relief of the standing US Navy Indian Ocean Force. Having cleared the Straits of Bab el Mandeb this carrier group was under orders to carry out an armed reconnaissance of Aden, where it located and identified beyond doubt the group of fast missile boats of Soviet origin which had attacked the US intelligence ship. Also reported was a formidable force of the latest Soviet maritime strike-reconnaissance aircraft. A request to Washington for approval to strike both fast missile boats and maritime aircraft was not approved, and the intelligence ship remained, for the time being, unavenged but still afloat.

It was possible, without too much loss of face, either domestically or externally, for the US Administration to refrain, with due public claim to be acting in the best interests of keeping the peace, from taking immediate offensive action in response to the attack upon the intelligence ship. Instead, the US carrier group made all speed to join the damaged ship and escort it to Mombasa, while strong protests were made to Moscow, coupled with demands for an international court of enquiry, apologies and compensation. Then came news that a Soviet patrol submarine of the Tango class had been brought to the surface in the Strait of Hormuz by Iranian antisubmarine forces and the crew taken prisoner. In short, the first essay by the Soviet Navy in the actual use of force in support of Soviet policy had misfired.