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
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.
CHAPTER 5: Unrest in Poland
The Third World War was said by many to have broken out in the same country as the Second, in Poland, on 11 November 1984, the sixty-sixth anniversary of the end of the First World War. It did not seem like an outbreak of world war at the time. In fact, many put the blame for the initial workers’ riots in Poland on what was no more than an incident during the US presidential election campaign.
During the Thompson-Mondale television debates, both candidates had been asked whether they regarded the present Polish government as a satellite of the Soviet Union. Mindful of the Polish-American votes that President Ford had lost in Chicago and elsewhere through giving a soft-on-communism answer to that same question in 1976, Governor Thompson had been careful to keep his answer on what might be called the hawkish side of Mr Mondale’s. One of his aides evidently feared that he had been too hawkish, and shortly before his press conference next day was urging an unwilling candidate to find some way of recanting.
By a misfortune which had dogged US politicians’ microphones on other matters Polish, a microphone inadvertently left live passed on to waiting pressmen Mr Thompson’s reply: ‘Goddammit, Art, I’m not going to say that I wish to make it clear that if the brave Polish people rise against their Russian oppressors, then a Thompson Administration would most certainly leave them in the…’ Suddenly, realizing that his words were being overheard by newsmen, Thompson ended with a grin and the words, ‘expletive deleted’.
There was a ripple of amused applause from the newsmen. In subsequent statements, Mr Thompson was at pains to emphasize that he was threatening nobody. Nonetheless, he was now to some extent saddled with this overheard statement — and it would have been politically damaging for him to retreat too abjectly from it. Indeed, under questioning at a meeting of minority groups in Chicago, he attempted a counter-attack. He accused the Carter Administration’s Secretary of State, Zbigniew Brzezinski (himself a Pole by birth), of being ‘altogether too ready to sell his native country down the river’. Nobody who analysed Thompson’s statements could seriously suppose he was encouraging a Polish insurrection, but there were a good many people (including some in Poland) who feared that restless Poles who heard what he had said repeated in garbled form might suppose that that was just what he was doing.
After Mr Thompson’s election as president on the first Tuesday in November, a memo from the Polish Ministry of Home Security ordered the political police, assisted where necessary by the army, quietly to round up potential strike leaders from factories in Polish towns other than Warsaw. The Ministry had heard a rumour that otherwise some sort of provincial general strike might be called to mark President Thompson’s Inauguration Day on 20 January.
The rumour was untrue, but the arrests caused a crisis. The political police and the army tried to arrest workers’ leaders on 11 November, and met with resistance. In some places shots were fired. In more Polish troops were reluctant to obey orders and continue with the arrest of workers.
By 12 November factories in several provincial cities of Poland were under workers’ control, flying the prewar flag of Poland with the communist insignia torn out. Dramatic visual evidence of these events was provided by a group of dissidents working in Polish television. In Gdansk, the television station was taken over and held for some hours by technicians whose sympathies were with the strikers. Though the government reacted promptly, ordering the police to storm the station regardless of casualties, the staff were able in the time available to them to beam pictures of the riots out to Denmark and Sweden. In Sweden the authorities yielded at once to the threats which swiftly followed both from the Soviet Union and from Poland. They forbade both the use of the material in Sweden and its onward transmission. The Danes, on the other hand, passed it at once to Eurovision. From there it reached stations all over the world, affording striking and ineradicable proof of the intensity of feeling in Poland against the regime. One sequence in particular, showing Polish troops standing by while strikers wrecked a Soviet cultural centre in Szczecin, was more damaging to the Soviet Union than any.
In Wroclaw and Szczecin, communist party leaders went into the factories to ‘negotiate’. In both places they
