The Third World War: August 1985

CHAPTER 24: The Nuclear Decision

As the Soviet offensive ground to a halt in Europe and the war at sea emphasized not only the geographical disadvantages of the Soviet Union as a naval power but also the misdirection of its efforts to overcome them, various signs of political instability began to appear, both inside and outside the Kremlin. The purpose of the war had after all been largely political — to exploit the conventional weakness of the West in order to humiliate the US and to re-establish absolutism in Eastern Europe as the only safeguard against dissidence and fragmentation. The very statement of these war aims demonstrated the hollowness and imbalance of Soviet power. The military machine had been built up to an unparalleled size to buttress a political performance which was almost uniformly unsuccessful. The Soviet Union had been unable to take part in genuine detente

because the appeal of Soviet communism to the masses either inside or outside the Soviet Union had proved mainly negative. Force, or the threat of force, had been necessary to counter the greater political attractiveness of the West and fissiparous tendencies within the Warsaw Pact. Political cohesion had failed to develop in Eastern Europe. Even the approach to power of communist parties in the West had not increased Soviet influence there; it had merely set an example of dissidence for communist countries in the East.

In 1956 in Hungary and in 1968 in Czechoslovakia Soviet military power had sufficed to restore political situations which were escaping from Soviet control. In 1985 the Soviet military machine proved just inadequate to extend Soviet political control in south-east Europe and over West Germany. One of the major objectives of this effort had been to master the general unease and insubordination of the governments and peoples of Eastern Europe. The attainment of this objective would have required quick and decisive victories in Yugoslavia and in Germany. The check which in fact occurred was enough, even without actual defeat, to allow pent-up political forces to burst out. The leaders of the former satellite countries, and very soon the leaders of the Soviet Union itself, began to realize that military force no longer provided a sovereign remedy for political dissent. Military stalemate would not only allow the greater potential resources of the West to be mobilized; it would also foster revolution in the East, just as it had in 1917.

Foreseeing the dangers of disintegration in the Warsaw Pact and disaffection at home, the Soviet policy-makers split once more: the hawks became cataclysmic, the doves were for return to Mother Russia. The former argued that while the conventional battle had not gone quite according to plan this had always been only one element in the total strategy. The nuclear weaponry remained intact. Better to have some mutual destruction than creeping political decay and forcible decolonization. The very backwardness of large areas of the Soviet Union would allow it to survive better than the USA after a nuclear exchange. Besides, there were enough warheads to target some on China as well and so put off that menace for another generation, with negligible risk of Chinese retaliation. Also, if they were really prepared to go to these lengths there was a good chance of a deal with the United States before the major destruction took place. They could, for example, carry out one or more nuclear attacks on targets in Europe to show they meant business, and at the same time propose to the United States a bilateral status quo

and the division of the world into two spheres of influence. The two superpowers had more interests in common than either had with its allies. It would pay each of them for Europe to stay divided and for the Middle East to be kept in order by both, acting together. Either could deal with China, provided the other kept out.

It was a persuasive picture, but reports from Eastern Europe and from the constituent republics of the Soviet Union, which were growing in volume, were already lending support to a contrary thesis put forward by the doves. The Poles as usual led the way. With the outbreak of war the Soviet Union had re-imposed its own control in Poland, working through the Polish ministries and the apparatus of the police. This only served to stimulate resistance, which is a natural habit of mind in a people who have been oppressed for 200 years by larger neighbours.