The Third World War: The Untold Story

The early 1970s had seen the achievement by the Soviet Union of strategic nuclear parity with the United States. The Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) produced in May 1972 an agreement which set ceilings upon numbers of strategic ballistic missile launchers and a treaty which imposed limitations on anti-ballistic missile defence systems. Together these appeared to suggest that both superpowers had accepted the principle of mutual and assured destruction (MAD). In fact, neither had. To the USSR, deterrence lay in a demonstrable ability to fight, win and survive a nuclear war. The USA relied on a continuing technological superiority to check any Soviet confidence that this was possible. On both sides the 1970s witnessed a sharp growth in the numbers of deliverable warheads, largely owing to the introduction of multiple individually-targeted re-entry vehicles (MIRV), and a marked increase in the efficiency of guidance systems and thus in accuracy of delivery. The United States had doubled the numbers of its strategic warheads from around 5,000 in 1970 to over 11,000 in 1980; in the USSR the increase was from about 2,500 in 1970 to about 5,000 at the end of 1980, though this figure was due to rise to some 7,500 in the next few years. Meanwhile, accuracy in strategic weapons had improved on both sides, from circular error probable (CEP — the radius from a target within which 50 per cent of warheads directed at it would probably fall) of two and even three thousand feet down to (for missiles launched from the ground but not, as yet, from submarines) six or seven hundred.

The technological advantage, in terms of strategic weapons, of the USA over the USSR in 1980 was much less than it had been ten years before. Moreover, the total lethality of the American strategic armoury (its counter-military potential, in the jargon, or CMP), which was almost three times that of the USSR at the end of the 1970s, was overtaken and surpassed by the Soviet Union in the early eighties. The USA had some advantages in both bombers and submarines (of the thirty or so US ballistic missile submarines constantly held in readiness, up to twenty were at sea at any one time, as against no more than ten for the Soviet Union) and in anti-submarine warfare (ASW) techniques Western navies were definitely in front. In intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM), however, the USSR would remain a good way ahead until the US Trident II submarine-launched ballistic missile (SLBM) — a very accurate missile — and the MX ICBM would become operational in the second half of the eighties.

When the Soviet Union’s much more advanced arrangements for the protection of government and industry and for civil defence were taken into account, it was clear that the first half of the eighties would indeed open what the analysts tended to call, after Henry Kissinger, a ‘window of opportunity’ for the USSR. In spite of the enormous technical difficulty of launching a fully co-ordinated strategic nuclear first strike against US land-based ICBM and the certainty that even with optimum results this would leave a considerable strategic nuclear force in the United States as well as an intact US submarine force still able to reply, the opportunity open to the USSR to use its strategic nuclear lead in the first half of the 1980s to apply political pressures in international affairs was clear. If these failed to achieve decisive results there was always the possibility of open warfare in the field against NATO in Europe. In any case, the so-called ‘window of opportunity’ would not remain open for more than a few years.

Wherever the arguments led in the field of inter-continental nuclear strategy (that is to say, in what was unkindly described by some military men as ‘military metaphysics’), it was in connection with shorter-range theatre nuclear forces (TNF) that critical divisions and uncertainties developed in the Western Alliance. At the beginning of the eighties, the USSR was able, in the prevailing state of uneasiness in the West over the nuclear threat, to exploit these most effectively, through a massive propaganda campaign and with the aid of the ‘useful fools’.

For all the Soviet Union’s often displayed maladroitness, there is no doubt that its handling of Western concern over nuclear weapons was most skilful.