The Third World War: August 1985

the war, and books about interstellar wars in deep space, fascinated and absorbed the public while real men and their machines performing tasks as they orbited the world, no further away than London is from Manchester in England, seemed of no particular account. That was not, of course, true of the small scientific-military groups whose task it was to think about and manage these things; especially so in the Soviet Union. It was this inner space from 300 to, at most, 32,000 kilometres that occupied their attention. The military applications of this extended area of man’s domination over his environment were seen as precisely those first sought in aviation — namely, reconnaissance and communications.

By 1985 the superpowers had developed astonishing capabilities in those directions. Especially dramatic was space photography of such high resolution that soldiers marching on earth could be counted in their columns. In the event of war, the Russians would be especially interested in seeing what was going on in the Atlantic and on the eastern seaboard of the United States. The US, on behalf of the West, had a prime interest in observing military developments and deployments in the heartland of the USSR by photography and electronic eavesdropping, particularly during periods of tension or actual war, but also in routine times of peace. Communications satellites acting as relay stations in space had not only enormously increased the extent of available facilities, they had enhanced the reliability and quality of radio transmission and reception out of all recognition. They had also provided remarkable navigation assistance, with an accuracy down to a few metres, to ships, submarines and aircraft.

Just as this inner space was now a quite readily accessible extension of the atmosphere, so its military opportunities proved to be, in the main, extensions of existing earth-based facilities, considerably enhanced but not unique — and therefore never wholly indispensable. There was just one activity, of critical interest to the Allies, where the time advantages in war might be so great that it was perhaps in a special category and an exception to that general rule. That activity was electronic reconnaissance. As noted elsewhere in this book, the West enjoyed a decided advantage over the Communist East in ECM, and for that reason the Soviet Union in peacetime shrouded its communications with every possible veil of secrecy. If the West was to exploit its electronic advantage to the fullest extent it needed to know from the outset of hostilities just which parts of the frequency spectrum, and in what modes of emission, the Soviet forces would operate. This information was urgently needed as soon as the battle was joined; the Soviet cloak of secrecy had to be torn aside. This could all be done very much more quickly and comprehensively from space reconnaissance satellites than would ever have been possible by monitoring the communications networks in the war theatre on the ground.

After the early scramble to catch up with the Soviet Union, when spurred into competition by the success of the Sputnik shots, the USA soon took the lead. Their vehicles and systems were demonstrably more capable, more reliable and more durable than those of the USSR. Out of that technological and engineering success came a difference of approach that was to be of fundamental strategic importance: the Americans invested their resources in complicated long-life, multi-purpose craft designed to function in orbit for periods as long as a year. The Russians, under force majeure, went for frequent launchings of simple, single-purpose, short-life payloads. The corollary to this in 1985 was that the Soviet Union had a high launch capability — they had put no less than thirty-two photo-recce satellites in orbit in the previous twelve months, and on 3 August they had more than twenty launchers ready at Baikonur and Plesetsk with a variety of satellites ready as their payloads. The USA, on the other hand, had no more than a few giant Titan II rockets designed to put the thirteen-tonne Big Bird II satellites into space, and five Orbiter aerospace vehicles developed for their space shuttle system.

In the late seventies the US programme seemed to have reached a plateau of development, while the USSR continued with frequent manned launches on research tasks, the exact purposes of which were not always evident to Western observers. It was, however, pretty well authenticated that they were developing a counter-satellite capability employing, in addition to jamming, certainly lasers and other high energy beams. In 1985 both sides had some counter-satellite capability, but it was suspected that the USSR was well in the lead. It refrained from making use of this capability until the early hours of 4 August for fear of still further conceding the advantage of surprise but, as recorded elsewhere, as soon as the offensive was launched in the Central Region it made an all-out effort in space.

This immediately degraded Allied communications, but it was a degradation that could at least in part be compensated for by switching to atmospheric systems as soon as space circuits went out. When the history of the space war comes to be written the part played by the communications managers in the US control centres will be seen to have made a remarkable and decisive contribution to the Allied war effort.

On NATO’s declaration of alert in July 1985, NASA, together with the Department of Defense, urgently reviewed the launch schedules for the space shuttle Orbiter vehicles. Of the five in service, one was available. Of the others, one was on long turn-round for replacement of its thermal tiles; one was having its undercarriage renewed after a heavy landing at Vandenberg AFB; one was on a thirty-day refit and one was in orbit recovering a satellite. The European Space Laboratory was on the ground and not scheduled to be relaunched until later in the year.

At 0600 hours Eastern Standard Time on Friday 2 August the available orbiter (Enterprise 101) was launched from Cape Kennedy with a four-man crew and Colonel ‘Slim’ Wentworth, USAF, in command. It was a multi-purpose mission in which priorities might need to be changed, and a manned craft was the best way of preserving flexibility. Photography and a full range of electronic reconnaissance was required from its regular passes over Soviet Russia and Eastern Europe. In addition it was ready with specially prepared tapes in over a dozen languages for propaganda broadcasts, but these would only be ordered if political developments during the mission made it propitious to do so.

As tension heightened towards the end of July the two Big Birds were so manoeuvred as to photograph the likely dispersal sites for the Soviet SS-16 mobile ICBM (inter-continental ballistic missiles). At the same time the Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff ordered the readying of two further Big Birds as replacements for any damaged satellites, with priority going to maintaining the electronic surveillance which would be so vital to the Allied ECM campaign if war broke out. He and his colleagues had also ruled that three supplementary navigation satellites should be placed in geostationary orbit 30,000 kilometres up over the Atlantic. This was the system that gave such an astonishing navigational capability and allowed USAF’s F-111 aircraft to be immediately capable of reading out a ground position to an accuracy of twelve metres. It was not thought that these high satellites would be at much risk. They were very difficult to get at, and there must surely be more cost-effective ways of disrupting the system than by days of satellite manoeuvring in order to effect close-range interference. Some corroboration of that view came on 2 August when the FLEETSATCOM (fleet satellite communications) tracking and control station on the eastern seaboard suffered major damage from an undetected saboteur. The very disturbing feature of this was that the damage was done by electronic means and could only have been inflicted by someone with an intimate knowledge of the station and its technology.

The war in space was very much a matter of move and counter-move and the outcome was fairly evenly balanced. The US were all the time concerned to husband their limited number of launchers. On the other hand, their satellites had much more comprehensive and versatile capabilities in space than those of the USSR. Furthermore, with doubling and tripling up of systems they were very resilient to interference and could accept extensive damage on occasions and still usefully carry on their tasks. The key information on Soviet electronic emissions in the Central Region battle area was in fact extracted very rapidly and early on in the war to the great advantage of the Allies. Ballistic missile warning from high satellites was also preserved completely throughout the war. The Soviet system suffered heavily from US interference and from the random effect of its own inherent unreliability and the short life of its vehicles. By dint of frequent replacements the Russians kept up good coverage of the Atlantic and the United States itself, but in the event this was not to give them the same practical advantage that the Allies obtained from their own electronic reconnaissance.

None of this accorded very closely with popular ideas gleaned from the bookstalls and the cinemas, and it was not to be expected that it would. However, there was one incident that came quite near to the science fiction fantasies, and for what it may presage for the future it may be worth recounting here.

Enterprise 101 had been in orbit for forty hours by midnight on 3 August. All her systems were working excellently and she had been discharging regular canisters of exposed film back into the atmosphere for recovery and processing. Colonel Wentworth had not been ordered to start the broadcasts but his spacecraft had been under close observation by the Soviet Union; her missions, on which the Russians were well informed from their own sources in the States, were highly unacceptable to them. Apart from the very real strategic