The Third World War: The Untold Story

US would be induced by the difficulties of the European allies in wartime to initiate a central attack on the Soviet Union. If the willingness of any American president to invite the appalling reprisals this would produce would be questionable (as it could hardly fail to be), what could be done to find an acceptable alternative? Thus was born, out of European uncertainty whether the USA could be relied upon to accept truly appalling damage at home on behalf of allies abroad, the debate on TNF and their modernization, a debate which did much to throw the Alliance into disarray and to offer the Soviet Union opportunities it did not fail to exploit.

The introduction into service by the USSR of the SS-20 ballistic missile and the Backfire bomber (to use the NATO term) in the late 1970s gave the Warsaw Pact new options for an attack on Western Europe, although Soviet military thinking saw this as only a continuance of an established line of policy. It was now possible, given the SS-20’s range of 3–4,000 miles (as against 1–2,500 for the SS-4 and 5 it was replacing), for the USSR to attack almost any major target in Western Europe from inside its own territory. None of NATO’s land-based missiles in Europe could reach beyond Eastern Europe into the USSR itself and the few nuclear- capable aircraft possessed by the Alliance, even if of just sufficient range, could not confidently count on penetration. There were, it is true, 400-odd Poseidon SLBM warheads assigned to the Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR), but the use of any of these would be likely to invite Soviet attack on the continental United States itself, while attack by ICBM from the US, of course, would be certain to do so.

European concern over the imbalance in theatre nuclear capabilities led to NATO’s decision in December 1979 to install on the territory of European allies, through the next decade, 572 American missiles of greater range and accuracy than those at that time available. Thus 108 Pershing II intermediate-range ballistic missiles would replace the Pershing I-A stationed in Germany, giving about 1,000 miles more range and, with their terminal radar guidance system, far greater accuracy. At the same time, 464 ground-launched cruise missiles (GLCM) would be installed, with a range of some 1,500 miles and a highly accurate terrain contour-matching guidance system known as TERCOM. Of these, 160 would be located in the UK, 96 in the Federal Republic of Germany, 48 each in Belgium and the Netherlands, and 112 in Italy. This decision, unanimously arrived at in the NATO Council, was accompanied by a proposal to negotiate with the USSR for the reduction of theatre nuclear systems. The deployment decision and the arms control proposal were seen as one package.

To the West the installation of these modernized weapons would do no more than correct a critical imbalance. To the Soviet Union, however, as Brezhnev had already warned, in an unsuccessful effort in October 1979 to avert the impending NATO decision, it was clearly seen as an attempt to change the strategic balance in Europe and give the West a decisive superiority. This would lie in affording the USA an option not hitherto available of attack upon the Soviet homeland (always an interest of paramount importance for the USSR) without using central strategic forces and so inviting attack on the American continent.

An immediate offer to halt the deployment of SS-20s would have cut the ground from under NATO’s feet. They were already being installed and would reach a total of some 250 by mid-1981, with a final total of 300 in 1982. Since in Soviet eyes this did no more than improve the effectiveness of an already established policy, no need was seen to depart from it and the offer was not made. The SS-20, the argument ran, was only replacing less efficient SS-4 and 5, with a greater range which would, as a bonus, enable all China to be targeted from inside the Soviet Union as well. The NATO move, however, was seen by the Soviet Union as a new and threatening departure, even though none of the modernized missiles would be ready before 1983 at the earliest.

The TNF decision also began to generate a heightened public uneasiness in Europe. The greater range, flexibility and accuracy conferred by the introduction of Pershing II and GLCM was seen as raising the possibility of actually fighting a nuclear war in Europe which could leave the USA unscathed. There was concern that US military thinking might be moving towards the concept of a containable or limited nuclear war, which would clearly, of course, be a war contained in Europe.

The proposal made by NATO that negotiations should begin upon limitation of TNF was followed up by preliminary discussions between the USA and the USSR in Geneva in the autumn of 1980, which had to be abandoned when the US Administration changed. Little was achieved other than a slightly clearer definition of positions, though it was at least agreed that the talks should remain bilateral and include continental systems based in Europe, though the Soviets were still hoping to bring in the so-called forward-based systems (FBS) as well, including SLBM and nuclear-capable aircraft on aircraft carriers in European waters.

The new US Administration made no attempt to restart the negotiations and the prospects for them were not greatly helped by Brezhnev’s offer at the 26th Party Congress in February 1981 of a moratorium on new medium-range missiles as soon as effective talks began. The SS-20 deployment programme was at that time nearing completion, with one missile coming into service every five days. The NATO deployment was still two to three years off.

Though many in the West saw in Brezhnev’s offer no more than blatant cynicism, it did reflect a genuine distinction made by the Soviets between what they were doing, which was much the same as before, and what NATO proposed, which to the Soviet way of thinking introduced an entirely new principle. It was also symptomatic of the unsettled state of public opinion in Western Europe at the time, that the Brezhnev proposal was welcomed by some (including the opposition Labour Party leadership in Britain) as a helpful concession.

The circumstances which more than anything else had led to President de Gaulle taking France out of NATO in 1966 looked now like being reversed. One of his chief objections was that in the Atlantic Alliance Europe was too closely linked with the United States. The Alliance, in fact, looked like becoming no more than a structure for the projection of American interests in Europe. Now, at the beginning of the eighties, there was a tendency to uncouple the defence interests of the United States from those of Europe and set up a situation which might have been rather more to de Gaulle’s liking. There is little doubt, however, that this tendency was seen by many thoughtful people in the West as presenting a serious threat to the Alliance and to world peace.

To prevent this diversion of interest from growing dangerously great it was imperative that the modernization of theatre nuclear weapons should be very closely associated with negotiations between the USSR and the USA for their reduction.

It was made abundantly clear to the US Administration (perhaps this had not been taken as seriously in Washington before now as it should have been) that uneasiness among the European allies and the highly vocal expression of popular discontent in which it was being manifested must be allayed, and this could only be done by what was seen to be a genuine move on the part of the United States to enter into serious negotiations with the Soviet Union on arms control.

In September 1981 the new US Secretary of State and the Soviet Foreign Minister met in New York to discuss a resumption of TNF talks which could start at the end of November in that year. There were still considerable reservations in Europe as to whether the United States was wholly serious in its stated intention to reach an agreement. It was only through strenuous efforts on the part of the US Administration that public opinion in Europe was eventually persuaded, at least in part, that real progress was being made. The process that was eventually to result in what came to be known as the START Treaty of 1984 was none the less truly under way. Its culmination in the summit meeting in January of that year might, it was thought, have had as much to do with the coming presidential campaign as with the conclusion of the business of negotiations.

An arms control treaty is an advantage to a conservative in an election year though an encumbrance to a liberal. This point was underlined by the fact that the ratification process in the US Senate was complete by the summer. The negotiations had been difficult but (though the outcome failed in differing ways, but to about the same degree, to satisfy both sides) not as difficult or as protracted as was expected, and the work that had gone into the abandoned SALT II Treaty of June 1979 saved much time in the formulation of definitions and of types of limitation.

The new treaty justified its descriptive acronym of START, Strategic Arms Reduction Talks. The term, proposed by the Americans at the outset of the new negotiations, was only accepted with misgivings by the Soviets, not so much because they rejected the explicit aspiration to reduce armaments, but because they wished to preserve continuity with the established SALT process. The substitution of ‘reduction’, however, for ‘limitation’ had such wide popular appeal, in Warsaw Pact countries scarcely less than in Western and even (to the limited extent that this was possible) in the USSR itself, that its acceptance was inevitable.

Unlike the SALT II agreement, which would only have lasted for five years, the START Treaty was to be of indefinite duration. In addition to this and the actual achievement of cuts, the key feature of START was that it also