The Third World War: The Untold Story

Soviet air defence systems in the probable battle zone ranged from SA-2 up to SA-14, with the new generation starting at SA-8. The mobile medium- to low-level SA-6 and the hand-held low-level SA-7 had proved themselves, without any question, many years before in Sinai, and the successor equipments were even more effective, lethal and mobile. The ZSU-23-4 radar controlled anti-aircraft gun was still in service in 1985 in spite of its age and no equivalent equipment in NATO came anywhere near to matching it in terms of numbers. It was probably the most feared item of the Warsaw Pact battlefield air defence armoury.

In the US artillery the automated tactical fire-direction system (TACFIRE), so long awaited, began to come into service in USAREUR in 1981 and was well established in 1985, giving much increased responsiveness and control. The British battlefield artillery target engagement system (BATES) was another example of the application of microprocessor technology to the central control of artillery, transmitting accurate fire orders from observer to gun in milliseconds and producing the swift response necessary for the engagement of fleeting targets. The use of this system, though it had faults, marked a quantum jump in British methods of artillery control and was expected to do much to compensate for the shortage of guns in the two British corps in NORTHAG. In both cases, in TACFIRE and BATES, the failure of government, in the US no less than in the UK, to ensure adequate and timely funding resulted in dangerous delays in bringing systems of incalculable value into service.

It was fortunate for NATO in 1985 that the Assault Breaker concept, already in 1978 under research and development in the United States but threatened by budgetary hazards thereafter, had been at least partially rescued in time. This was an attempt to provide non-nuclear response to armoured superiority, with improved effectiveness against first-echelon forces but with the emphasis on second and third echelons up to 160 kilometres in depth. It had been from the first a joint US Army/Air Force project, involving an airborne target acquisition and weapons delivery system (TAWDS) and a ground-based army element. The full exploitation of the potential of Assault Breaker depended on the development of systems such as the helicopter-borne SOTAS mentioned earlier. The Patriot missile (originally intended as a surface-to-air missile, or SAM, but now also to be used as a surface-to-surface missile, or SSM) could be guided both from a ground-based command and control centre or from an airborne command post if the ground centre were out of action. An essential element in Assault Breaker was to be the use of terminally- guided sub-munitions. Each bomblet (or Smartlet, as these developments of ‘smart’ munitions came to be called) was furnished with a terminal seeker and a limited degree of manoeuvrability. The seeker would send out a millimetric wave signal to which there would be from the unwitting target an involuntary response. The weapon would then lock on to the response and find its path to the target. It was unfortunate that funding in the US for the development of Assault Breaker was so far reduced in the early 1980s that the whole system was only partially in troop service by 19 84.

In the field of chemical warfare (CW) the offensive capability available to Warsaw Pact armies in the field was well known, as well as the use to which in Soviet military practice it could be put. Specialist CW personnel, perhaps numbering in the aggregate 150,000, were deployed in the Red Army down to battalions. Some 15 per cent of all Soviet artillery ammunition carried chemical fillings, with up to 50 per cent of theatre and strategic missiles armed in the same way. The availability of aircraft fitted with spray tanks was high.

The practice would be to employ non-persistent non-lethal or incapacitating agents in the advance in bombardment preparatory to attack, for example, on positions it was intended to overrun or occupy. Such agents would disperse in a matter of minutes. Tear gas, or the CS used in civil disturbance, are good examples of such agents. What are known in the West as DM and DC, with secondary effects such as nausea, giddiness and reduction of the will to fight, are military versions. Non-persistent agents include chlorine and phosgene, lethal when sufficient is inhaled, but by the early 1980s thought to be of little use on account of unreliability.

More persistent agents, including blister gases — for example mustard and nerve agents such as the highly lethal Tabun (GA) and Soman (DC) — would be used to seal flanks and deny areas not intended for occupation, as well as to attack airfields, often in conjunction with delayed-action bombs.

The purpose of all CW attack would be twofold: to inflict casualties, and by causing opponents to take full protective action to impede performance.