The Third World War: The Untold Story

As one further example of the myriad difficulties arising from the disintegration of the Soviet Union, Cossacks presented, and continue to present, a problem. They form a distinct nation of Slavonic origin, dispersed in several widely separated localities. There are groups, for example, on the Don and the Kuban, in the Caucasus, in Astrakhan and Siberia, forming eleven separate tribal districts. It is by no means yet clear how these groups, which cannot be physically co-located, can be associated with successor states in their vicinity, whether in one form of association or several different forms. An Allied mission is at present established with each one.

Before moving on to the rather separate fate of Central Asia it may be appropriate to reflect that whatever problems the collapse of the Soviet regime may have solved, many others have rushed in to fill the resultant empty spaces. There are inevitably those who argue now (as some even argued before) that to struggle along in a world divided by the rivalries of two superpowers doing whatever was possible to smooth the rough edges at the interface made more sense than to try to resolve the situation by the destruction of one of them. Had the USSR offered any convincing gesture of willingness to accept peaceful co-existence the Soviet Union might still be a great power today. It did not because it could not. Acceptance of the legitimacy of capitalist democracy was a contradiction wholly intolerable to the Marxist-Leninist ideology. The rugged strength developed by the structure in its sixty-eight years of life made sure that when it was destroyed by its own weaknesses it would go down, as it did, in a bloodbath of terrifying magnitude.

The problems left behind are still with us, some brought into being by the disappearance of Soviet imperialism, others existing before, but now made greater still. We have at least been spared the worst on two major counts.

The first, of transcendental importance, is our almost miraculous escape from total nuclear war. Some say it was never very likely anyway, since it would have led to something approaching so close to annihilation for either side that both were determined to avoid it. Others do not agree and argue that given the unpredictability of human behaviour under stress it could very easily have happened.

The second was that the US had, at last, learned the lesson it ignored, with disastrous consequences, in the Second World War — that war must never be waged except to a clear political end. The American approach had been that a war was to be fought by the military, to whom the politicians deferred until the war was won. Politics then once more took over and the President could turn from being primarily Commander-in-Chief to the resumption of his other and more important functions as head of government and head of state.

The overriding and very nearly the sole consideration in war, under this approach, was the defeat of the enemy in the field at minimum cost in American life. Nothing else mattered nearly so much. Eisenhower was therefore halted on the Elbe in 1945 to let the Soviet steamroller drive on into Berlin. Patton was within a day's march of Prague when he too was halted, again to let the Soviets do the job. Meanwhile Alexander in Italy, in spite of Churchill's strong opposition, had been deprived, in order to mount a futile Allied operation on the French Riviera, of the troops which would have got him safely, before the Russians, to Vienna. Berlin, Prague, Vienna — all gifts to Stalin from the United States, gifts which paved the way to Soviet imperial dominance of Eastern Europe, and helped to make a Third World War inevitable.

Whether or not US policies can be described as fully effective in the disordered world left by the collapse of Soviet imperialism in 1985, at least the lesson had now been learnt that post-war policies deserve most serious consideration not only before hostilities end but even before they begin. This is only one of many important lessons learned by policy makers in the United States over the years. Another, too recent to be fully evaluated, was the result of events in the Caribbean and Central America, events in which the United States could have lost the war in Europe before it began, and which have been described in chapter 16.

East of the Urals the collapse of central authority left about half the land mass of Asia in a state of high confusion. The centres of influence consisted of the important towns along the Trans-Siberian railway and the ancient cities of Central Asia and the remains of Soviet commands with such forces as had continued at their disposal. After urgent action had been taken to obtain control of the nuclear weapons left in the hands of the Soviet forces, two factors dominated the problem of what was to become of this enormous area and the many millions of its inhabitants.