The Third World War: August 1985

CHAPTER 4: Awakening Response in the West

In Western Europe the late seventies had seen something of a shift in attitudes to East-West relations. Disillusion and disappointment over the resolute Soviet refusal to make any real concession to Western concern over human rights, international agreements notwithstanding, probably did as much as anything to foster the new note of realism. The Russians began to be given more and more credit for meaning what they had now been consistently saying for a long time, that Western capitalist societies were doomed to fall before the inexorable advance of Marxism-Leninism, and that the armed forces of the socialist countries, under the leadership of the USSR, must expect to play a major part in their overthrow.

The warning was as clear as any given by Hitler before the Second World War. The steady build-up of offensive military power in the Soviet Union, at the cost of much else, was not only wholly consistent with a determination to impose Soviet-Russian ends upon other societies, by force of arms if necessary. It was hardly consistent with anything else.

There were those in the West who believed in the existence of a Soviet master plan for the achievement of world dominion, with every move at every level ordered in accordance with it. This was fanciful. Its palpable unreality, however, was not unhelpful to the Soviet interest. The derision it attracted did something to distract attention from what was really happening, which was nothing less than the preparation of a position of military strength from which any international situation could be manipulated to the Soviet advantage.

Soviet policy was one of unlimited opportunism within a wide range of possible contingencies, for very many of which quite detailed military plans were constantly kept up to date. It drew strength from two main sources. On the one hand was the dogma of the dialectic, that capitalism was bound to disintegrate under the stresses of its own internal contradictions — to which was added the somewhat puzzling injunction that though this was inevitable it was still the duty of all socialists to try to bring it about. On the other hand was the endemic thrust of Russian imperialist expansionism, owing nothing to the dialectic, constant under any form of rule.

The threat from the Soviet Union to the parliamentary democracies of the West had, in the preceding thirty years, engaged the serious attention of their governments. The Atlantic Alliance, with the supporting military structure of NATO, resulted. Public opinion in the member countries of the Alliance, however, had long showed some reluctance to support the military measures required to meet the threat. In this respect the last years of the seventies had seen something of a change, as a result of which the military defences of the Alliance began to move out of the highly dangerous conditions of weakness into which, by 1977, they had been allowed to sink.

The position of the United Kingdom, a country of critical importance to the Alliance, if only because of its geographical location, was in some ways typical of the position among the European allies in general and on both counts deserves particular consideration.

Britain had its own special problems. Withdrawal from empire had been unsettling. Swift though this had been in the twenty-five years since the Second World War, insufficient time had elapsed by 1975 to allow of complete recovery of national balance in the new role of a second-class power with negligible overseas possessions. An extraordinary obsession in the people of Britain with the redistribution of wealth, rather than its creation, had done much in the same period to cripple national enterprise. This had gone hand in hand with the encouragement of general reliance upon state-provided welfare in place of the reliance upon themselves which had previously been characteristic of the British, while there had also been an ugly and unscrupulous exploitation of the politics of envy. It began to be increasingly clear, however, even to those politicians whose hearts were stronger than their heads, that national welfare depended on national wealth, and that the state produced nothing to distribute.

At the same time the massive burden of British trade unionism began to prove unwelcome to the working people who had to bear it. Of the desirability of combination to promote and protect the interests of workers, once the Industrial Revolution had opened the door to the predatory instincts and the restless, innovatory genius of an island race of adventurers, there can be little doubt. The importance of the protection afforded to the workers by the unions, and the benefit this brought them in earlier days, can hardly be exaggerated. It was when the blind benevolence of politicians had allowed the unions to move outside the law, when a proper watchfulness on the union side had given way to unimaginative Luddism, when reaction and restrictive practices were putting a savage brake on enterprise, when activities originally intended to improve living standards were now seen to be doing just the opposite, that the majority of the nation, who did not belong to trade unions, began to be increasingly resentful of their subjection to the minority who did.

Although, as events in Britain in the mid-seventies showed, politicians in a parliamentary democracy can go on governing for some time in a manner unpopular with the people as a whole, they cannot go on doing this indefinitely. Attempts at confrontation with the power of the trade unions, made by both the main political parties, when each in its turn was in power, had been total failures. Up to the mid-seventies public opinion in Britain was not yet sufficiently aware of the menace from union power to face the discomforts of standing up to it, and the attempts of both parties to diminish it were dropped.

After a few years more, however, the British public had had enough. When prudent men in politics and sensible men in trade unions, of which there were very many, saw that it was not going to be easy to push the public around much more, they gently and adroitly let some of the steam out of the situation. Trade unionism in Britain did not go out with a bang, as some had hoped, nor even with a whimper. It gradually subsided to a convenient shape and size and continued to play a very important part in its originally intended role.

What happened over the trade unions was evidence of the refreshing and welcome spirit of realism and common sense which gradually began to emerge on every side in British public opinion in the late seventies. A new political approach — which also demonstrated how politicians will inevitably in the end be guided by changes in public opinion — was before very long to become evident in the matter of defence.

These years saw slow but significant changes in Britain. A total addiction to redistributive economic and fiscal policies, which showed itself in hostility to profit-making and in penal taxation on industrial enterprise, was gradually being replaced by more sensible attitudes, which at last permitted an increase in national wealth. These changes, together with the movement of world trade out of recession and the revenue from North Sea oil, contributed to some recovery in the standard of living in Britain and, in no small measure, to a revival of national confidence.

As the United Kingdom at last began to find a new awareness of national identity in a post-imperial mode, less began to be heard of separatism in the parts. Devolution became less fashionable. Less was also heard of any suggestion that the world owed Britain special consideration, which may have at one time been justified, let alone a living, which never was. There was less and less support of what had previously been known as progressive education. There was acceptance of the necessity for children in school to learn, even when they did not greatly like it. Variety in educational provision almost ceased to be regarded as sinful, independent schools were once more allowed to flourish, as so many parents wished, and even the public schools, their old-fashioned discipline long derided by radicals who so often sent their sons to profit from it, came under less violent attack.

The instinct to voluntary service, an instinct rather disliked by the more extreme addicts of the welfare state, was also seen to have survived, and even once again began to flourish. Scouts, Guides, St John Ambulance and countless other voluntary organizations reported sharp rises in recruiting. So did the volunteer reserves of the armed forces. In universities it began to be quite fashionable once more to join the Officer Training Corps. There was even a movement towards a voluntary revival of civil defence, long neglected by government.

In this changing climate of public opinion some scrutiny of Britain’s security in the world was before long inevitable. More notice began to be taken of what threatened it. There was more questioning of the extent to which Britain was taking a proper share in her own defence. It was even suggested, possibly unfairly, that it might no longer be enough to rest on what some called abject reliance on the United States.

The British record in the sphere of common defence did not stand up under scrutiny any too well. At the close of the Korean war in 1952 the proportion of the gross national product devoted to defence was 11.2 per cent. This was possibly too much. In the financial year 1976-7 it was 4.9 per cent. This was certainly too little. Even further reductions were being sought by some. The National Executive Committee of the British Labour Party (from whose control the Labour government of the day was content to remain free) was in 1977 demanding a further reduction in defence spending by one-third.

It is still, as this is being written, too early for a balanced assessment of where responsibility lies for the dangerously low state to which the defences of Great Britain had by the year 1977 been allowed to fall. Though historians will probably agree that no political party is free from serious blame, they are already beginning to accept that, however regrettable the economies made in the mid-seventies under the transparent guise of improved efficiency, it was in the defence policies formulated in the UK Defence White Paper of 1957 that the rot really began. It is here that the first real signs appear in the sphere of defence of a latter-day British tendency to duck responsibility and shy off into make-believe, a tendency which did much to bedevil relations with Britain’s allies in the years that followed.

The basic idea behind the 1957 White Paper was that American strategic nuclear power was to be the primary guardian of peace in Europe. Britain contributed her own nuclear bomber force, but beyond that all she was called upon to do was help provide a conventional trip-wire to identify a major incursion, which would then be answered by massive nuclear retaliation from the United States. A very great saving in cost would result as well as a great saving in manpower. This is, in fact, what happened. The political party in power at the time was able to go to the country at the next general election as the party which had freed the nation from military conscription in peacetime.

The baleful spirit of the 1957 White Paper brooded over British defence policy for twenty years. When the USSR achieved rough parity in strategic nuclear power with the United States the US moved from the somewhat implausible concept of deterrence extended over her allies by the threat of massive nuclear retaliation, if any of her allies were attacked, to a rather more realistic concept of defence at any level of attack — the concept of flexible response.

To this, which became the accepted policy of NATO, successive British governments paid lip service, but little more. It was clear that what they relied upon to prevent the Soviet Union from attacking the West, even with conventional means alone, was the threat of very early escalation into a strategic nuclear exchange between the Soviet Union and the United States. Delivery systems for battlefield nuclear weapons, for which the warheads (numbering some 7,000 in the European theatre by 1977) remained under US control, were integrated into the British-commanded Northern Army Group in NATO, as they were elsewhere in Allied Command Europe. What was emerging as the basis of Allied defence planning was the concept of the ‘Triad’ — the combination of conventional defence, battlefield nuclear weapons and strategic nuclear action in closely coupled sequence. This was as fully endorsed in the United Kingdom as anywhere else in the Alliance. How far it was taken seriously anywhere is open to argument. There is little evidence that it was ever taken seriously in the UK.

The NATO concept of the ‘Triad’ envisaged the development of sufficient conventional forces in the forward areas to identify a major aggression and slow it down, while posing the threat of an early introduction of battlefield nuclear weapons if it did not come to a halt, followed, if necessary, by strategic nuclear action. No one knew exactly what would happen when battlefield nuclear weapons were released, but it was widely accepted within the Alliance that a tactical nuclear battle could hardly be expected to proceed for long without escalation into a strategic nuclear exchange. On the other hand, an observer of the British Army’s deployment, equipment and training policy could scarcely fail to conclude that, whatever happened, the British did not expect to have to take part in a tactical nuclear battle at all, or indeed, it may be added (to judge by the dismantling of their civil defences), in any form of nuclear action whatsoever.

It has been pointed out elsewhere in this book that the policy of the ‘forward defence’ of the territory of the Federal Republic of Germany, to which more and more attention had to be paid as the stature of the FRG among its allies grew, required, if it implied no surrender of West German soil, either enormously strong conventional forces deployed along the frontier or an immediate nuclear response. The first was impossible: Allied governments made it quite clear that they were not prepared to furnish the necessary troops. The second, an immediate nuclear release, was highly unlikely.

This dilemma in planning the defence of the Federal Republic was of not very great consequence in the southern half of it, where difficult terrain gave the Allied forces available there (under American command in the Central Army Group (CENTAG)) some chance of holding a stronger enemy. For the weaker forces deployed in easier and more open country, under British command, in the Northern Army Group (NORTHAG), there was far less hope of this. Many would say there was none, and that the only hope of countering an invasion in the north by conventional means lay in abandoning what was described as ‘forward defence’ (which looked uncomfortably linear) and fighting instead a battle of manoeuvre in depth.

Observance of West German susceptibilities over surrender of territory, however, obliged NORTHAG to plan for a forward battle. If the troops (some of whom were stationed a long way back in their home countries, in Belgium and Holland) could be got up in time the attack, under this concept, would be met on, or near, the Demarcation Line with East Germany. With much greater weight on the other side, as well as the initiative in choice of time and place, there could hardly be any chance of holding it there. However it began, the battle was bound to develop in depth, with the outcome being determined by the action of reserves held further back for counter-penetration operations in the first place and then for a counter-offensive.

Such reserves did not exist, even on paper. Why not? Because, the answer would run, when it became clear that the available conventional forces could not hold the enemy the situation would be restored by the use of battlefield nuclear weapons. There was therefore no great need for conventional forces deployed in depth.

Though the forward location of special weapon stores (in which nuclear warheads were kept) meant that some would be overrun before the weapons could be used, there would still be plenty left. Delay in securing their release, however, was inevitable, even supposing a very early resolution of the agonizing dilemma which impaled the FRG, in whose territory very many of these warheads, if not most, would land. The Allied rubric, moreover, enjoined that no release could be expected before all conventional means had already been tried and exhausted — that is, in effect, before the conventional battle had been lost, leaving a situation which could almost certainly no longer be ‘restored’.

The wisdom of locating stores of nuclear warheads in vulnerable forward areas was brought in question in 1977, when it was pointed out that nuclear attack was much more likely on fixed, static concentrations than on troop formations in the field, and that in consequence missile attack from submarine launchers might be more sensible than from launchers on the battlefield. By 1984 there had been some reduction in forward holdings but these were still considerable.

Accepting the declared NATO concept of the ‘Triad’, however, and assuming that tactical nuclear weapons were introduced, a nuclear battle would result. For this the Russians were equipped and trained. The British (and most of the other Allies) were not. No major British weapon system in use in 1978, even the newest, offered plausible protection to crewmen fighting in a nuclear environment. Training in movement over contaminated ground was rudimentary, equipment for decontamination and provision for its practice — and even for the acquisition and dissemination of radiation intelligence — was far from adequate. British defence policy, in contra-distinction to that of the Soviet Union, clearly embodied no real requirement to fight on a nuclear battlefield. It even seemed that the British contribution to the defence of Europe in the Central Region of the Allied Command contained a deliberate insufficiency, whose purpose was to force on the United States not so much an early release of battlefield nuclear weapons as an almost immediate movement into strategic nuclear attack, perhaps on the USSR itself. There could be no doubt, the argument ran, that the Soviet Union realized this too. It was here, the British seemed to think, that true deterrence lay.

To British politicians in the seventies, under pressure from some of their supporters to cut the defence vote at almost any cost, the approach was an attractive one. It was, in essence, indistinguishable from that of the 1957 White Paper. Whatever it might now be called, British defence policy was still that of trip-wire and massive retaliation, disfigured somewhat by claims that economies, which left front-line troops less capable of fighting, were in fact contributions to military efficiency. Whether this would remain indefinitely acceptable to the United States, which was clearly expected to hold the baby, was another matter.

Professional military men in the parliamentary democracies of the West are generally honest people, loyal to those they serve and reluctant to take part in politics. Many were anxious and deeply disturbed over the situation here described. But as long as the public demanded of their politicians nothing more, and showed little inclination to put up the money for anything better, there was not much that the military men could do. The difficulty was compounded in Britain where, although the Civil Service had been allowed greater freedom of political expression during the late seventies, the tradition that the military must not debate government defence policy in public was still rigorously applied. It was paradoxical that in a country where free speech was so cherished the military remained so firmly muzzled. Nevertheless, in institutes and societies devoted to the debate of public affairs, with which Britain abounded, some awareness grew up among responsible people of the real situation and, in particular, of the dangerously changed character of the air threat to the British Isles and the urgent need to repair its air defences.

The heart and core of the Alliance remained, as it always had been, the United States. There, in the mid-seventies, four tendencies began to converge. First, there was a growing awareness of the true dimensions of the threat. It was accompanied by none of the hysteria occasionally evident in the early fifties but was nonetheless impressive. Second, there was increasing impatience with the reluctance of the European Allies to take a fair share in their own defence — an impatience that grew more marked as growing prosperity left the European allies with less and less excuse. Third, it began to be questioned even in Europe whether it would be easy to persuade any American president to invite the incineration of Chicago, for example, if the Northern Army Group in Germany were broken through and there was nothing left to SACEUR but nuclear weapons. Finally, the feeling grew that flexible response should mean just what it said. This implied that a radical review of the defences of the Alliance at the non-nuclear level — including the massive contribution of the United States itself — was overdue.

The European allies did not long remain in ignorance of the trend of opinion on the other side of the Atlantic and the force behind it. In Britain, which was no bad indicator of European opinion, the public began to develop a more receptive attitude. Pressure to make better provision for the air defence of the British Isles, upon which an American effort in Europe would so much depend, now met with a more favourable response. In some of the countries whose troops were assigned to Allied Command Europe, the initiative and example of the United States began at last to be followed. It was certainly clear in Britain that the public was beginning to take a positive interest in defence which the politicians could not forever disregard.

Quite small things often have a decisive effect. SACEUR realized that the lack of reserves in depth in the NORTHAG area, coupled with the inability of NORTHAG either to offer a credible forward defence with non-nuclear forces or to sustain a tactical nuclear engagement, and the near certainty that a breakthrough would not be at once followed, as the British seemed to hope, by strategic nuclear action on the part of the United States, set up a dangerous situation. To help correct it two US brigades were deployed in the sector of the Northern Army Group (which had hitherto had no US formations under command) where NORTHAG’s reserves might have been located, had there been any.

In Britain, the implications of this did not at first sink in. When it was more widely realized that the Americans were doing for the British what the British had been too idle, too apathetic or too parsimonious to do for themselves, a trace of public uneasiness was discernible which would almost certainly not have been evident a year or two before. It was by no means inconsistent with what some observers saw as a reawakening of a sense of national identity. This was to have considerable influence on British defence policy.

As the current of public concern over national security began to flow in Britain at the end of the seventies, it became increasingly clear that the reductions in defence expenditure to which all political parties had from time to time inclined — some, it must be said, more consistently than others — and which it had become part of the ritual liturgy of radicalism always to demand, no longer wholly conformed to the wishes of the people. The restoration of cuts, and even some increases, hesitantly begun in the financial year 1978-9, were seen to meet with public approval. Greater national affluence helped them to be more easily borne. By 1983 the ceiling imposed on defence expenditure five years before, regarded then by many as immutable, was already being exceeded by more than two-thirds.

The points at which improvements in provision for the national defence were seen to be most needed, and where improvements were in fact made the earliest, were three. There was a reversal of the suicidal tendency to weaken NATO on land by erosion of the British Army of the Rhine; more attention was paid to the no less critical situation of the air defence of the United Kingdom; and improvements were at last set in hand to the country’s ASW (anti-submarine warfare) defences and its maritime air forces.

This outline of developments in the United Kingdom, seen as an indicator of a trend, widespread if uneven, in European countries of the Atlantic Alliance at the end of the seventies, is amplified, in some of its more important aspects, at the end of this book in Appendix 1. It is enough to say here that a sharper awareness of the threat to peace from the growing military strength and the persistent political intransigence of the USSR, on the part of some (but not all) of the European Allies, was leading, in varying degree, towards improvements in their contribution to the defence of the West. The consequent condition of NATO, as the point of decision approached, will be reviewed in Chapter 12.