The Third World War: August 1985

Troop movement by the GSFG (Group of Soviet Forces in Germany) into the designated manoeuvre area began in a spell of good summer weather in the first week of July. Information coming out of East Germany to the West was, as usual, plentiful, and it soon became apparent that these exercises were going to be conducted on a very massive scale indeed — much larger, even, than had been expected. The Red Army and Air Force certainly seemed to be playing it, as the saying goes, for real. Ammunition, fuel and warlike stores were being moved up in actual tonnages. At the same time, in the Soviet Union itself, the arrangements for recall of reservists seemed to be getting a complete work-out and the men were joining their units. The same thing appeared to be happening in all the Warsaw Pact countries.

It was the New York Times that first aroused really widespread misgiving in the West by reporting that what was going on in the Warsaw Pact looked mighty like a mobilization. Two days later the Frankfurter Allgemeine came out bluntly with the statement that that was just what it was. On the same day a journalist regarded by some as the bane of Whitehall and by others as its only hope, a man called Jardine Snatcher, told the world under banner headlines that he was defying D-notices to let it be known that the British Chiefs of Staff had exercised their constitutional right of access to the Prime Minister in order to call on Mrs Plumber in No. 10 Downing Street and tell her precisely that.

Meanwhile, outside Europe, disquieting developments, referred to elsewhere in this book, were causing increasing concern throughout the Western world — above all, not unnaturally, in Washington.

Relations between the United States and the communist bloc in the Caribbean were more than usually strained and getting worse. Events in Southern Africa and the Middle East seemed to be moving towards not one crisis but several. In all three areas Soviet activity was open, marked and increasing. One-third of the Soviet submarine fleet was known to be at sea. Units of it, with support vessels, had been reported not only off Cuba and Jamaica but also at Alexandria and in North African waters, as well as off Malta and in the Arabian Gulf. Units of the Black Sea Fleet were known to have been moving in some numbers through the Straits into the Mediterranean. What was no less significant was that Soviet combat aircraft were widely deployed in the Caribbean, as also in Libya, Malta, East Africa and Syria, while there was much movement of transport aircraft.

In the USSR the harvest was expected to be even more disastrous than those of the previous two years and critical foodstuffs were known to be scarce. The measures which, in the recent past, had produced waves of unrest in Poland and Romania and even in parts of the Soviet Union itself-in the Ukraine, for example, and in Georgia — were likely to be repeated. Yugoslavia, meanwhile, was on the brink of civil war.

Kremlin-watchers were pointing out the propitious opportunities for Soviet exploitation that were opening up in many different places at once. They were also adding gloomily that if ever there was a time when the Soviet Union needed foreign adventure as a distraction from domestic discontent this was probably it. Of the two prime potential adversaries, moreover, China was not yet ready for a major military enterprise and NATO, though something had been done in the past few years to remedy some of its better known defects, had still not recovered from more than a decade of neglect. Kremlin-watchers had said all that, of course, before. One thing at least was clear: time was not on the side of the Soviet Union.

Looking back on events, it became clear to Western observers later that, with the less noticeable preliminaries embarked on a good deal earlier, full mobilization in the Warsaw Pact had begun on or about 14 July. Though no public announcement had been made in Moscow the indicators were enough for the Secretary of State to advise President Thompson on 18 July that Soviet mobilization must now be accepted as a fact. The same advice was given to heads of government in all member states of the Alliance at about the same time. In the three major partner countries in NATO, the United States, the United Kingdom and the Federal Republic of Germany, defence chiefs urged mobilization at once. Only in the Federal Republic was there immediate agreement.