The Third World War: August 1985

Very few of the men now engulfed in the volcanic eruption of ground action on a modern battlefield had ever before been exposed to anything remotely like it. The thunderous clamour, the monstrous explosions, the sheets and floods and fountains of flame and the billowing clouds of thick black smoke around them, the confusion, the bewilderment, the sickening reek of blood and high explosives, the raw uncertainty and, more than anything else, the hideous, unmanning noise — all combined to produce an almost overpowering urge to panic flight. To men in forward units the enemy seemed everywhere. Their roaring aircraft filled the sky, ripping the earth with raking cannon fire. Their tanks came on in clanging black hordes, spouting flames and thunder. The fighting vehicles of their infantry surged into and between the forward positions of the Allied defence like clattering swarms of fire- breathing dragons. It looked as though nothing could stop the oncoming waves. There seemed to be no hope, no refuge anywhere.

Panic here and there was only to be expected. Some lately recalled reservists — and even long-service regulars — found this sudden exposure to gigantic stress more than they could bear. Occasionally, under the swift contagion of uncertainty and fear, NATO units simply broke and melted away — but not often. Men adjust quite quickly, even to the appalling conditions of the battlefield, particularly where there is a job to be done which they know how to do and for which they have the right tools, and above all when they do it under competent direction in the company of their friends. The first day was a nightmare — but it was far from a total disaster.

But why was all this happening? What had brought it about? How had the course of events developed to this point — and what was now to follow?

CHAPTER 2: The World in 1984

By the inauguration of the fortieth president of the United States in January 1985, the world was in transition from the old-fashioned conflict situations, based on military and political competition for power, towards the newer ones involving urban guerrilladom and a ‘Third World manufacturing revolution’ — though in some places this was going erratically wrong. North-South had begun to overshadow East-West.

There were 180 governments in the world. As in 1977, at the time of President Carter’s inauguration, only about thirty-five of these could realistically expect their leaders to be replaced by a process of election. The most common way to change a government was by coup d’etat or by dictatorial succession.

But the frequency of coups was growing, and they were often bloody. Bureaucrats in some communist countries had reason to fear that the habit might spread to them. The more fearful apparatchiks included some in the Soviet Union, a country which had for so many decades normally changed its government not by violent overthrow but by cosy dictatorial arrangement. China, by contrast, was concentrating on becoming ‘a new Japan’ through economic expansion. There was already talk of a China-Japan co-prosperity sphere.

The new President-elect of the United States, Governor Thompson, was a southern (and therefore conservative) Republican. He had been quite unknown nationally two years before his election in 1984, just as his two-term predecessor, President Carter, had been two years before his own election in 1976.

Mr Thompson had campaigned energetically against the ‘soft-centred international liberalism’ of the Democratic candidate, Vice-President Mondale. The President-elect was, however, worried by his own relative lack of knowledge of international affairs, and called two prestigious advisers in this field down to his South Carolina home the weekend after his election. One adviser was the director of the new United Universities Think-Tank. The other was a previous Secretary of State, always known as the Ex-Secretary.

The two were asked to set down a summary of their views about the main challenges that would face the Thompson Administration over (as it was assumed) the years 1985-93, and to compare these with the challenges that had faced the USA on President Carter’s Inauguration Day in 1977. The Think-Tank’s report was to concentrate on the ‘poor South’ of the world, the Ex-Secretary’s report on the Soviet Union and the ‘rich North’.

During the week after the election of November 1984, and therefore eleven weeks before his Inauguration Day in January 1985, Governor Thompson received these two reports.

The Think-Tank’s report displeased him. It seemed, he told his wife, to be ‘written by a computer with a bleeding heart’.

THE THINK-TANK’S REPORT ON THE ‘POOR SOUTH’, NOVEMBER 1984

On President Carter’s Inauguration Day in January 1977 there were 4 billion people in the world, of whom two-thirds (or 2.7 billion) lived in countries with a median income below $300 a head, while one-third lived in countries with median incomes above $3,000 per head. About 55 per cent (or 1.5 billion) of the 2.7 billion people in very poor countries were below the age of twenty-one. That, indeed, is a major reason why they were such poor countries. They were, in 1977, nations of children, who produced pretty well nothing, and of teenagers, who produced little but riots.

The main change on your Inauguration Day in 1985 will be that those 1.5 billion people will be eight years older than they were in 1977. The main change on your retirement day in 1993 will be that they will be sixteen years older. As the 1.5 billion have moved up into the main childbearing age groups, world population has inevitably risen somewhat (to 4.5 billion), although fertility rates have luckily continued the decline they were already showing by the early 1970s.

The poor countries of 1985-93 are no longer nations of children and of teenagers, but of under-employed cohabiting couples in potentially the most productive (and militarily effective) age groups, the twenties and early thirties.

The great majority of this unprecedented addition of 1.5 billion people to the world’s labor force since 1977 are non-white, and are as literate as, for example, the Turkish workers in Germany in 1977, when they had an earnings level of around an annual $5,000 in 1977 dollars. There is no reason why with a proper technostructure the additional population should not attain earnings of something like the same standard, bringing from those 1.5 billion young workers by far the biggest sudden increase in real gross world product the world has ever seen. The tragedy is that the technostructure is not in most places being provided.

The poor South of the world can today be divided into four groups:

1 A few breakthrough countries where real GNP is increasing at 7-12 per cent per annum, but which have also maintained social cohesion. Apart from the People’s Republic of China, most of these are countries which have retained free-market economic systems: e.g. Brazil in South America; Singapore, Malaysia and the Philippines in Asia. Many of them are in East Asia, however, and have therefore been aided by the remarkable economic growth in China since the death of Chairman Mao, even more by the coming together of the Japanese and Chinese economic miracles [see the Ex-Secretary’s report below]. Most of these Asian ‘breakthrough’ countries will want to remain neutral in any big power struggle, and continue to make money, as the United States did in 1914-16 and 1939-41.

2 A certain number of unstable right-wing countries: e.g. Mexico and Argentina in South America, the richer states of the former Union of South Africa and the capitalist half of the disintegrating Indian Union. These countries have free enterprise economic systems, and have generally had quite high economic growth rates in the period 1977-84. But they have been unable to handle the social problems of the proletarianization and urbanization of a sizeable part of their labor force, so urban guerrilladom, muggings in the overcrowded cities, and corruption in the civil service and police are rife. Their governments are sometimes unlovely rich men’s dictatorships, which proclaim loudly that they are loyal allies of the United States, though the United States should not always be pleased to have them.

3 A group of unstable left-wing countries: e.g. Egypt (and indeed most other African countries, including Zimbabwe), Bangladesh and the poorer states of the disintegrating federation of India, and also to some extent Pakistan. In these countries the governments are generally replaced by coups