The Third World War: August 1985

The decision by the United Kingdom to provide once more a proper defence of its own airspace, described in detail in Chapter 19, helped the tactical air forces to solve two of the problems mentioned above: first, it provided protected airfields that enabled aircraft to be diverted to as well as based in the United Kingdom, thus easing the operational difficulties posed by an insufficiency of airfields; second, it enabled reinforcement by fighter squadrons from the United States to be carried out more safely, taking advantage of the steps that the United States had put in train to make her large reserves of aircraft rapidly available.

The Soviet Air Force had, of course, been increasing its own ground-attack and deep strike and interdiction capability for some years, which posed severe air defence problems for the NATO forces, ground and air. Furthermore, the Soviet Union’s own dense air defence made the task of NATO aircraft much more difficult. Despite this, NATO air commanders had some confidence that the quality and versatility of their aircraft, the edge that their weapon systems and electronic warfare capability gave them, and the higher training standards of NATO airmen, would all go a long way to redress the numerical imbalance with which they had to contend.

A very important change in the command structure of NATO air forces had been the setting up, under the Central Region, of a Commander Allied Air Force Central Europe (COMAAFCE) in 1976. This greatly increased the flexibility of the Allied air forces and enormously enhanced their effectiveness.

It was technology, however, that was the principal key to the marked improvements made to NATO forces in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Weapons systems were now more effective and more versatile than they had ever been and tactical concepts and organizations had been improved to make the best use of them.

When the new NATO strategy of ‘flexible response’, introduced in the middle to late 1960s, was first discussed, it signalled the wish by the United States, in the face of her own increased strategic nuclear vulnerability, to have more defence options in Europe than an early recourse to the use of nuclear weapons. Her European allies were initially reluctant to downgrade the nuclear element in deterrence — seeing this as the important link between the United States and the European battlefield — and unwilling to improve their conventional forces to the level that the new strategy demanded. This reluctance persisted generally until nearly a decade later, when concern at the steady and continuous increase in Soviet military capacity slowly began to make itself felt, first among conservatives, then almost right across the whole spectrum of public opinion. The steady erosion of the military balance in Europe, coupled with an assertive and opportunistic Soviet foreign policy, notably in Africa, led by the late 1970s to the growth in almost every Allied country of a political climate more receptive to the claims of defence spending.

This new mood of caution towards the Soviet Union (following as it did one of rather euphoric expectations about detente, now disappointed) had coincided with a sudden surge in military technology, both nuclear and conventional. In the field of theatre nuclear weapons, the enhanced radiation weapon (the ‘neutron bomb’) offered the West the possibility of suddenly nullifying the Soviet tank advantage while inflicting less civilian casualties than would be caused by nuclear weapons in the existing armoury. At the same time new, very-small-yield nuclear weapons (‘mini-nucs’) began to be introduced and others were modernized. The possibility of basing deterrence primarily on nuclear weapons once more began to find adherents — though not, it must be said, among governments, who were treading warily. This was partly because there had also been rapid advances in conventional weapons technology. Dramatic improvements in accuracy of attack and miniaturization of components and vastly increased explosive yields (such as from fuel-air weapons — the so-called concussion bombs) made it possible to contemplate engaging with conventional weapons targets (such as aircraft shelters, that could hitherto only have been destroyed with nuclear weapons.

The debate over strategy — and with it over the allocation of resources — continued to a varying extent for some years, and in a sense a compromise was gradually adopted: the strategy of flexible response was retained and new technology was used to enhance the strength of the conventional forces, but the theatre nuclear armoury was modernized as well, on the theory that if the new nuclear weapons were known to be more effective and thus more usable the Soviet Union would be less likely to provoke their use. So both aspects of deterrence, conventional and nuclear, were strengthened.