The Third World War: The Untold Story

In the longer term the fate of Asia, and not only of the former Soviet territories, is going to be shaped largely by the answers to questions about China. Can any system, can any set of men, successfully govern a country of a billion people? Assuming that, for a time, they can, will such a country be land-hungry, or power-hungry, or will it seek to control a vast defensive glacis like its predecessor as a world power in the Eurasian landmass? It is still too early to attempt an assessment. In the short period since the war, China's external effort has been fully devoted to absorbing Mongolia and managing Vietnam. After the liquidation of the Soviet maritime command at Vladivostok it was inevitable that the United States with the connivance of its allies (including Japan and South Korea) should set up and maintain, however reluctantly, a Russian-manned centre of government and command until more permanent arrangements could be arrived at.

Japan was for the time being busy settling into the Northern Islands it had now repossessed. It betrayed no overt interest in Sakhalin, but was no doubt concerned about possible Chinese ambitions in an area so recently a part of the Soviet empire. There will be hope that this, if it is made, will be China's 'last territorial demand' and that a period of stability will be seen to be required if China is to have any hope of remaining among the leaders of the twenty-first century.

The answers to the questions about China will turn also on relationships with Japan and India. Japan will seek to give economic leadership but to avoid the political entanglement of its previous intervention in the mainland. Even so, the melding together of two such disparate economic systems will demand a fuller measure of tact and subtlety than has in the past always characterized Japanese policy. On the Chinese side much will depend upon whether the present pervasive state control of every facet of life can co-exist with the freedom of enterprise which all experience — including the recent negative experience of the Soviet Union — has shown to be necessary for economic development, even for economic survival. The United States will not be able to stay out of this vastly complicated process, as it might have hoped. If China is to remain a nuclear power, Japan is likely to feel the need for a continuing US guarantee of ultimate nuclear support against any nuclear threat from China. The non-proliferation argument seems likely to win the day, with the consequence of a US-Japan security arrangement continuing for an indefinite future. If such a guarantee were not maintained Japan would have to give thought to its own protection.

But this is only one element in another long story of which we can now scarcely glimpse even the chapter headings.

Postscript I

It was not long after midnight in the Lefortovo prison in Moscow, in late August 1985. Two prisoners, tried, convicted and condemned to death, facing execution at dawn, had been brought together for their last night on earth in a cell which had, of course, for occasions such as this, been fitted with appropriate equipment for the recording of their conversation. One was Constantin Andrievich Malinsky, upon whom the mantle of Supreme Party Ideologist had fallen, as a successor to Suslov.

The other one was Alexei Alexandrovich Nastin, lately Marshal of the Soviet Union and Defence Minister of the USSR.

The record of their conversation proved to be of no great value to those who listened to it later. They had never been friends (who, at a high level in the CPSU, ever had any friends?) and had little to say to each other. Their differences in the past had been quite well known and each regarded it as something of an affront when, after perfunctory visits from their families (and offers, accepted by Nastin and refused with contempt by Malinsky, of last rites from the Church), they had been put into this cell to spend their last few hours together.

“I recall,” said the ex-Minister of Defence, after a long silence, “that in that meeting where we discussed the use of nuclear weapons, near the end of last year, you were very much against it. Your argument was, I seem to recall, that there was no point in extending socialist rule over a world half destroyed, and that it was better to keep the world going more or less as it was, and move in by degrees. So when war came we did not use our nuclear armoury either from the start, as I advised, or even with its full weight when we were checked in central Europe. And this is where that has got us!”

“I also recall,” said Malinsky, the some-time Supreme Ideologist, “I also recall, Comrade…”

“Do we use that form of address any longer?” said the other.