which had seemed to be coming its way in an intensified struggle between the two rival superpowers. The ensuing reassessment showed China still a long way behind in nuclear potential and conventional sophistication. Numbers of men seemed hardly to make up for these deficiencies. It was necessary to seek some other way of compensating for the Soviet predominance in armaments.
The home front in the USSR — or at least in the Soviet areas contiguous to China — seemed to offer a possible target. It would have been dangerous for China to invoke nationalism as a subversive slogan before Sinkiang and Tibet had been fully brought under control. Now the risk of regional insurgency was far less there than in the Soviet republics in central Asia. Moreover, there were elements from many of these Moslem people, ethnically and linguistically Turkish, living in China’s far west. With a modest growth of cultural freedom and with economic development springing from Japanese investment in the new co-prosperity sphere, it should not be too difficult to create centres of attraction in China for the Uzbeks and the Kazakhs. A movement for real autonomy in the Soviet republics on the Sino-Soviet border could have enormous advantages for China, at least in providing another preoccupation for Soviet policy makers, in drawing off Soviet troops who might otherwise be threatening China, and in creating suspicion as to the loyalty of units recruited in those areas.
Meanwhile, back in the West the phoney peace was beginning to wear thin. It goes without saying that neither the US nor the USSR trusted the other enough to make any real attempt at disarmament. On the contrary, Warsaw Pact preparedness increased at the same rate as before while NATO continued to make some modest improvements. Political skirmishing was resumed. Three elements in particular contributed to the build-up of instability: oil, the Middle East and the Balkans, none of them new but each spreading its effects like secondary growths after an unsuccessful operation.
The disruption of oil supplies and the resulting shortages all over the world were like a running sore, making calm thought more difficult, leading to internal and international tensions, distorting economies and increasing unemployment. The new patterns of distribution were fragile and susceptible to political uncertainty. The control of the North Arabian supplies by the Egyptian-dominated UAR was in these circumstances hardly a guarantee of stability.
This was the sixth attempt at Arab union in which Egypt had been involved. All the previous ones had failed after longer or shorter periods. The few centres of population in Saudi Arabia could be controlled by military force. The association with Iraq was more uneasy. The age-old cry of Arab unity was tarnished by the only too visible presence of Soviet technicians at the oil fields and the ports. Even in this day and age the old hatreds between Sunnis and Shias were likely to erupt when Saudis and Iraqis were too closely intermingled. Arab unity is a dream which has inspired some of the noblest thinkers of that race, but in actual history Arab division has been more constant and more influential. The personal rivalries of Arab politicians have always fed on the discrepancies of tribe and dogma and social stratification.
The new union had stalled before accomplishing its full purpose. With all the Arabian oil (especially if Iran had dissolved into chaos, as Arab propagandists had persuaded themselves would happen) the Arab union might have stood a chance of real independence. It might even have held the superpowers to ransom, from the moment when Middle Eastern oil was seen to be essential for their survival. But now, with Arabia only half won, and with Iran resurgent and better armed, the divisions of the Arab world were compounded by the contest between Soviet Russia and America. Imperialism was back under other names, and it was no wonder that disillusion had set in.
Assassination was not far behind. The association between the Shias in Iraq and the godless Russians provoked a resurgence of that orthodox fanaticism which had claimed so many political victims in the past. The murder of the Egyptian Prime Minister not only left a power vacuum in the Council of the Union, but caused ripples and echoes among the Moslem subject races of the Soviet Union, already wooed by China.
A new government was patched together with military participation, but the seeds of doubt had been sown in the Politburo about the viability of control by proxy in so vital an area. Plans were made and forces earmarked for a more direct Soviet intervention. Equipment, clothing and warlike stores appropriate for hot climate operations were issued, and an urgent programme of modification to vehicles and weapons put in hand. Crash courses in Arabic were undertaken and encyclopaedia articles rewritten to prove the fundamental compatibility between the social principles of Islam and those of Marxism-Leninism.
Meanwhile, a new crisis began to develop nearer home. After Tito’s disappearance from the political scene Yugoslavia had survived the succession problem in the first instance with less difficulty than had been forecast. Inevitably the regions had obtained a little more power and the economic arrangements in each region had diverged a little more from the general norm, mostly leaning even further than before towards the market economy, but the basic federal organization remained more or less intact. Now, however, the general difficulties caused by oil shortages and price increases added to the latent tensions between the richer north and the poorer south of the country. The non-aligned group of countries, of which Yugoslavia and Egypt had been founder members, had been brusquely reduced by Egypt’s acceptance of Soviet tutelage. As the path of non-commitment became narrower, Slovenia began slipping off to the West and Serbia to the East.
West Germany had for some time seen Ljubljana as one of the gateways to the development of the more intensive trade with Eastern Europe which its industry seemed increasingly to require. The Slovenian provincial administration responded to West German advances with an alacrity that went beyond merely commercial advantage and suggested a vision of a new Balkan Switzerland where East and West could meet on equal terms. The central government took fright at this separatist trend and sought to redress the balance by turning a blind eye to pro-Soviet groups which had always been in existence and had lately been sharpening up their capability for agitation against just this eventuality. Their danger signals to the CPSU lost nothing in transmission. The restoration of orthodox communist control in Yugoslavia was now moved up to quite near the top in the Kremlin’s list of objectives.
CHAPTER 8: Heidelberg, 27 July 1985
It was a warm summer afternoon in Heidelberg. The visitors from the Committee on Armed Services of the United States Senate were listening with close attention to the Chief of Staff of the United States Army in Europe (USAREUR). The press and TV crews were absent.
‘As I am sure was made abundantly clear this morning in the Commanding General’s opening address and the informal group briefings which followed,’ the Chief of Staff was recorded as saying, ‘this visit is warmly welcome in USAREUR, from top to bottom in the whole command. It is evidence of the interest and support we have increasingly been able to count on in the United States as international tension has mounted further south and as we in this command have steadily improved our state of readiness.
‘What I have to say is classified but, as you have wished, it is on the record, and I know you will bear with me if it is occasionally on the technical side.’
He turned to the map.
Dispositions in CENTAG are known to you, and I have at this stage no further comment on them. It is a matter for regret that the recommendations of the Nunn-Bartlett Report in 1977 and of the Annual Defense Department Report of Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld for the Fiscal Year 1978, could not, for reasons of finance, be fully acted on. Nevertheless, there has been steady progress since the period of dangerously low levels of readiness during which these reports were rendered — progress which is at least to some extent, if in varying degree, reflected among our allies — and the US Army in Europe is today in better shape than at any time in the last ten years. Progress at this rate, other things being equal, could within two years put the Alliance in a position of unquestioned security against any conventional attack from the Warsaw Pact.
Nuclear armaments will be covered at another time. I shall deal now with conventional equipment.
The XM-1 tank, three times as effective as the M-60 it is replacing, is widely in service throughout the command. The Mechanized Infantry 86 Combat Vehicle, whose earlier introduction would have doubled the effectiveness of our infantry, regrettably is not. Its stabilized auto-cannon for fire suppression and its two under- armor ATGW
