The Third World War: August 1985

disadvantages to the Soviet Union of this space mission, the Politburo and military alike found it intolerable that four Americans should be able to sweep across their country with impunity ten times a day when they were on the brink of war. But they were well prepared, and had already laid plans for putting Enterprise out of business if they could.

In the early hours of 4 August a Soyuz 49 mission was launched with a two-man crew, and on its fourth orbit the Soyuz craft was manoeuvred to within 150 metres of Enterprise. Wentworth was keeping a visual look-out at that time, and when Mission 49 made its first beam sweep across Enterprise the laser traversed his line of sight and blinded him. The Enterprise crew therefore had plenty on their hands, both in alerting space control as to what was going on and in coping with a blinded and weightless commander. Captain Jensen of the US Navy took over command and ordered an immediate check for further damage. The craft had in fact been subjected to other high energy beam sweeps and the damage check brought gloomy news: their five engine nozzles and their elevons had been damaged, and there was now no possibility of a successful controlled re-entry into the atmosphere. Worst of all, their solar cells seemed to have suffered and electric power generation had ceased. They had a large battery capacity, but Jensen immediately ordered a reduction of all electrical services to the minimum required for life support and for communication with space control.

Space control were reassuring; after a five-minute pause they announced that Enterprise 103, which was now safely back at Vandenberg with her recovered satellite, would be readied with all possible haste and sent up to recover them. Jensen and his crew knew very well that it normally took several days to get one of the orbiters ready for flight again, and they wondered quietly to themselves whether their own batteries would be able to maintain their life support functions until the relief mission could arrive.

But the war was now on, and damage and interference to US surveillance required the two waiting Big Birds to be placed in orbit without delay. Grimly, the Joint Chiefs decided that when Enterprise 103 was ready she must be held for priority satellite replacement. Colonel Wentworth and his crew had left the earth before hostilities started. They spent the duration of the Third World War orbiting in space, and their bodies were recovered on a solemn mission at the end of August 1985. They were the first casualties of the war in space and are buried in Arlington National Cemetery.

CHAPTER 19: Air Defence of the United Kingdom and Eastern Atlantic

For some years after the Second World War the UK maintained a high level of air defence. The Berlin crisis and the airlift in 1948, and then the Korean War in 1950, did much to offset the idealists’ beliefs that all arms could be laid aside at once, and while the threat was possibly not very great in those days wartime memories of 1940 were still vivid. As a result Fighter Command’s resources up to the first half of the 1950s remained considerable. Indeed, in 1957 it boasted some 600 jet fighters and a sufficiency of airfields and radars to support them.

But in 1957 there was a major shift in policy that was to leave the country denuded of adequate air defence for nearly twenty years. Evaluation of the nuclear missile threat from the USSR in the early fifties, at a time of overwhelming strategic nuclear power in the USA, had led to the contemporary strategy of trip-wire and retaliation. In 1957 it was decided, with impeccable logic, that all that was needed was a fighter shield to protect our nuclear- armed V-bomber bases to ensure that they could get into the air on their retaliatory missions just as soon as the ballistic missile warning system indicated that they must go. (For a discussion of this phase of British defence policy see Chapter 4.)

Whether or not the policy of trip-wire and massive retaliation was appropriate to the circumstances of the time, it was later to demonstrate a fatal flaw. As Soviet missile strength grew and the retaliatory strategy had to give way to the flexible response, with its emphasis on the ability to fight with conventional as well as nuclear weapons, so the basic assumption on which this minimal air defence was predicated disappeared. But by then the demands on government spending from many quarters left no room for the costly rebuilding of a comprehensive air defence system to counter the growing Soviet capability to attack the UK in a phase of conventional war.

By the time intelligence assessments had finally (and rather belatedly) recognized the conventional air threat it was not just a matter of numbers of aircraft — though heaven knows they were short enough; it was also a matter of numbers of men in the air and on the ground. Both were difficult to come by with the competing attractions of industry and commerce in an affluent society. Radar communications and control centres were also insufficient in capacity or availability for the changed situation. The shortage of airfields gave particular concern. By the end of the 1939-45 war there had been an airfield every fifteen to twenty-five kilometres throughout most of the country; now there were only a handful — all the others had gone back to the plough or had been handed over to municipalities or other users for a variety of purposes. The shortage of airfields was critical.

In the seventies it was necessary to think of air defence on an immeasurably larger canvas than that on which the Battle of Britain was portrayed. Not only did the stand-off weapons of an attacking force require the defences to be pushed out hundreds of kilometres if the launching aircraft were to be destroyed in time, but the areas to be defended now reached across the Eastern Atlantic, where it was necessary to protect shipping which would no longer have air cover from large fleet carriers in the Royal Navy. In addition to the central task of the defence of the United Kingdom and its base facilities, SACLANT and SACEUR assigned air defence responsibilities to the British in an area that extended from the Channel to the North Norwegian Sea in the north and out very nearly to the coast of Iceland in the west. It was a tall order. If the worst NATO fears were ever to be realized then the air resources available in the mid-seventies would be decidedly inadequate, for in those circumstances the United Kingdom — as a rearward base for SACEUR and a forward base for SACLANT, roles decided by the strategic geography of the British Isles rather than by defence planners — could not hope to escape the close attention of the Soviet Air Forces.

To SACLANT, apart from affording air defence and antisubmarine air patrols for shipping in the Eastern Atlantic and Channel, the UK was a critically important base from which to mount flank support for his Strike Fleet as and when it had to fight its way against Soviet sea and air opposition into the North Norwegian Sea. And in war this was, assuredly what the Strike Fleet would have to do. For SACEUR, the UK would be the mounting base for much of the deeper air effort behind the forward edge of the enemy’s battle area on the Continent. It would also be to the UK that any aircraft and crews held in reserve would be likely to be withdrawn. And then there was the air bridge: the endless belt of heavy-lift jumbo-sized aircraft that would carry most of the human reinforcements and much of their equipment from the USA to Europe as soon as full mobilization’ plans were put into effect. Given a rudimentary air-to-air missile system, even early generation long-range aircraft could wreak havoc with this flow if they got into that great aerial procession. They must not do so — and it was the task of the British Air Defence Commander to see that they did not. If that officer appeared, with the resources available to him in the mid- seventies, a preoccupied man, no one could say he had no cause.

Nevertheless, by 1977 things were beginning to improve, even if, in the view of the Royal Air Force, nothing like quickly enough. Some measurable progress had been made with the addition of two extra air defence squadrons provided by extending the life of some of the Lightning interceptors; the F-4 Phantoms were now the backbone of an interceptor force and had greatly raised its capability at all levels, as well as its resistance to electronic jamming; Bloodhound surface-to-air missiles (SAM) had been re-introduced to give low-level area defence in the south-east of England, while mobile squadrons of the British Rapier SAM provided point defence to vital airfields in the north. More improvements were in the pipeline: the Tornado air defence variant was due to replace the Phantom in the eighties; Nimrod airborne early warning (AEW) aircraft were on order; and a major rationalization and modernization plan was in train to streamline the heterogeneous and unwieldy radar communications and control systems that had grown up piecemeal through the years as the RAF struggled to improve its air defence under the parsimony of British defence policy. Looking further ahead, airfields were to have hardened protection for their aircraft, while a particularly flexible and jamming-resistant new data communications system, the United Kingdom Air Defence Ground Environment (UKADGE), would link the fighters, control centres, airborne early warning systems and airfields by the early 1980s.

Once the national consciousness began to become uneasy about the danger to the UK of unchecked Soviet