The Third World War: August 1985

CHAPTER 26: A Devastating Response

A few minutes after the detonation of the nuclear weapon over Birmingham, as the huge damage from blast was being followed by swiftly spreading fire, and as millions throughout the British Isles reacted in dumb horror to the emergency transmissions on their television screens and on the radio, the President of the United States was speaking to the British Prime Minister. The time was 1035 hours Greenwich Mean Time, 0535 Eastern Standard Time. It was at once agreed that immediate retaliation was necessary, if only to avoid a catastrophic decline in civilian and military morale. The French President was called and gave his instant concurrence. As the other Allies were being informed instructions were already on their way to two SSBN, one American, one British, to launch two missiles each, targeted on the city of Minsk. The epicentre was to be directly over the middle of the city, at 3,000 metres. Each submarine reported a trouble-free launch, exactly on time, and the multiple warheads from the four missiles, tailored exactly to their task, detonated on target in quick succession. The effect was cataclysmic. It was the horror of Birmingham repeated, only many times worse, scarcely mitigated at all by civil defence precautions. There was no TV or radio reporting of the attack. The news spread nonetheless like wildfire round the world. Its impact was everywhere enormous but nowhere more so than within the Soviet Union and its satellites.

The hot-line was used again, to tell the Soviet leaders that this was a limited attack ordered as an inevitable reprisal and that a reply about negotiation would be given in three days. In the event this proved unnecessary.

This nuclear exchange, carried out on the Soviet side with no pretence of consultation with their subject allies let alone with the regional republics of the USSR, proved to be the trigger which set off the smouldering nationalist explosion. The growth of disaffection and resistance in Asia and in Eastern Europe has already been described. Its causes were the check to Soviet arms in Europe and elsewhere; the fundamental contradiction in the Soviet system as a revolutionary empire — forcing its own subject nations to fight wars of national liberation in Africa while denying them national freedom at home; offers of external help, from China to the Central Asians and from the West to the European satellites; now finally the realization that Russia might well have initiated a nuclear war which could engulf them all unless they immediately separated themselves from Russian control. The outbreaks were quicker and more violent in the East, more subtle but more decisive in Europe.

The Council of Ministers of the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic started the ball rolling by securing the adoption by their local Supreme Soviet of a proclamation of secession from the Soviet Union and of independence and non-commitment. The new regime was at once recognized by China, who instituted large-scale military manoeuvres on the frontier. The Soviet commander at Alma Ata prepared to attack the Supreme Soviet building, now guarded by the local police and militia, but, being unaccustomed to taking local initiatives, asked Moscow for instructions and authority. The Kremlin, plunged into preparations for nuclear war and still torn by internal disagreement, was too busy to reply, and the tactical moment was lost. Enthusiastic crowds filled the streets carrying banners proclaiming their friendship for the Russian people and calling on the Russian troops to return peacefully to their own country. The Chinese threat appeared even more dangerous than the local ‘disturbance’, and the general took himself and most of his garrison off to reinforce the frontiers.

Proclamations of independence were equally successful in other republics which bordered on Chinese or Iranian territory and where military activity on the frontier diverted Soviet troops from their internal security role. In the Uzbek republic, which did not have this advantage, however, the Soviet forces in Tashkent took bloody reprisals against the nationalist leaders and temporarily halted the independence movement. They might in the end have been able to re-establish the situation in other territories, but meanwhile there was more serious trouble in the West which finally gave the coup de grace to the crumbling edifice of Soviet rule.

The annihilation of Minsk also precipitated events on the western borders of the Soviet Union. It was a well- chosen target, close to Poland on the west, capital of the theoretically autonomous republic of Byelorussia, and Ukraine’s neighbour on the north. Both Poland and Ukraine were quick to draw the necessary conclusion that it could be their turn next unless they took steps to change the course of history. In preparation for such an occasion the Polish defence authorities, still able to call on great signals expertise such as the Enigma disclosures had revealed, had secretly arranged direct links to their commanders, separate from the Soviet-controlled Warsaw Pact network. They now activated these links and instructed all Polish units to stand firm in their positions and resist any, repeat any, other orders to move and any attack on their positions, from whatever quarter. At the same time they made contact with the underground (in typical Polish fashion the authorities and the underground had known perfectly well how to get in touch with each other for some time past) and arranged for them to send urgent messages on their clandestine radio to London, reporting what had been done, asking for confirmation that no Allied attack would be made on Polish positions, and requesting air drops of supplies of essential foodstuffs and communications equipment. A positive and encouraging reply was received and the Polish government quietly prepared a declaration of withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact and the isolation of Russian units still on Polish territory.

The really crushing blow came from an unexpected quarter, however. Soviet policy had always been at pains either to suppress or to appease any symptoms of independence of mind on the part of the Ukraine. Its enormous contribution to Soviet food supplies, its position in the front line of Soviet territory facing the West, bordering on Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Romania, and its vast hydro-electric potential, had made it, after Russia proper, the most vital component of the Union. It had suffered more than any other republic from the actions of the Soviet state to obtain food supplies by force after the Revolution and from the subsequent persecution of the wealthier peasants. It had been rewarded after the devastation of the Second World War by being given, with Byelorussia to the north, a privileged but fictitious autonomy as a separate member of the United Nations.

Ukrainian nationalist sentiment had been repressed in 1966 in the Kiev trials of intellectuals and members of the Ukrainian Workers and Peasants Union. Their main crime had been to promote the idea of secession from the Soviet Union, a right enshrined in the Soviet Constitution. Repression had only diverted this sentiment into more powerful channels underground. Its modern exponents understood the axiom that successful revolutions begin at the top. They determined to make use of the one important freedom left to the inhabitants of the Ukraine — the access of individual Ukrainians to positions of power in the central apparatus of the Soviet Union. There had been several successful generals; now the favourite son of the Ukrainian nationalists was in the unlikely guise of a secret policeman.

After graduating from the police academy at Kiev in 1960, Vasyl Duglenko had been recommended to Khrushchev by some of the latter’s Ukrainian cronies, and transferred to the KGB headquarters in Moscow. Being still in a junior post he had managed to survive Khrushchev’s fall, and climbed up the precarious ladder of power to be Deputy Commandant, with special responsibility for the security of the Kremlin. He had retained close links with the nationalist cells in the Communist Party of the Ukraine and he had naturally placed a good number of fellow Ukrainians in suitable positions in the KGB, particularly in the Kremlin section.

So a powerful mechanism was in place, and the Minsk explosions provided the opportunity, and the necessity, for its use. Duglenko and his friends in the Ukrainian Party machine had no wish to take part in the last act of a Russian Gotterdammerung. Although they vaguely knew what was about to happen in Poland they saw no sure future in a separatist movement confined to the Ukraine. The central keep of the Soviet system had to be attacked.

At the centre they could join forces with the group of ‘doves’ already referred to in Chapter 24, whose influence had spread, with the worsening news from East and West, even among sections of the command of the armed forces. It would be vital to have some friends there if a coup was to survive its first dangerous hours.

This army group, small at first and of necessity conspiratorial, had decided even before the attack on Birmingham that nuclear war was not going to achieve Soviet objectives in the West, nor restore order in the East. Moreover, in the ensuing destruction of organized life in the Soviet Union the armed forces themselves were likely to disintegrate. A deliberate return of army units to the Russian heartlands offered better hope for a future system of orderly government in which the armed forces would have an effective role, and its commanders a tolerably secure life. Their ideas probably did not include so radical a break-up of the Soviet Union as the Ukrainians secretly envisaged. They would have been in closer agreement on the need to relax the dead hand of centralized control on the economic life of the country, not in the interests of laissez-faire, but in order to restore efficiency and come nearer to matching the agricultural and industrial productivity of the West, not to speak of China-Japan.