The World

On 15 November 1982, at Brezhnev’s traditional kitsch funeral, attended by Castro, Assad, Mengistu and Indira Gandhi, the coffin-lowering mechanics failed and the coffin fell into the grave beside the Kremlin Wall with a loud crash that caused the assembled mourners led by Vice-President Bush to struggle to conceal their laughter. It was the sound of an empire dying. Yet a sinking power is more dangerous than a rising one, and it was now that the world came close to cataclysm.

The red imperium was as atrophied as the furry arteries of Brezhnev’s successors. Andropov, disturbed by Reagan’s deployment of Pershing II nuclear missiles in Europe, believed that the US president was keen on ‘unleashing nuclear war’, a hankering that ‘isn’t just irresponsible, but insane’. As he monitored NATO exercises and the increase in encrypted communication between Reagan and Thatcher, he ordered heightened vigilance and instant counter-strike.

On the night of 31 August/1 September 1983, this trigger-happiness led Soviet defences to shoot down a South Korean airliner, killing 269. Andropov mocked his ‘blockhead generals’. At midnight on 26 September, Stanislav Petrov, a lieutenant-colonel in Air Defence Forces, was on duty in a bunker near Moscow when he was informed by satellites that a missile was approaching; Petrov questioned this since a single missile seemed unlikely. Then the system identified four more missiles, still too little for a massive American attack. Petrov believed the new computers were unreliable. While he did not have the authority to launch a counter-strike, he had seven minutes to report a missile attack to Andropov, but the ruler was incommunicado on a dialysis machine.

Petrov delayed and did not report the missile: he was right. The computers were actually reacting to a rare synchronicity of sunlight and cloud. ‘I think that this,’ said Petrov, who was not rewarded since he had revealed technical failings in a Soviet system, ‘is the closest our country has come to accidental nuclear war.’ Weeks later, Andropov believed an Anglo-American exercise with tactical nuclear weapons codenamed Able Archer 83 might cover a real attack; the generals waited in their bunkers.

Thatcher and Reagan shared a vision even if their styles were very different. Thatcher was abrasive and haughty – the Soviets called her the Iron Lady, while the French president Mitterrand admired ‘the eyes of Caligula, the mouth of Marilyn Monroe’. She was certainly unafraid of confrontations with supercilious colleagues, rioting unions or Irish terrorists. On 12 October 1984, while she was staying at the Grand Hotel in Brighton for the Conservative Party conference, the IRA tried to assassinate her, blowing up the hotel. Five were killed, but Thatcher reacted with the sangfroid she shared with Indira Gandhi.

‘It doesn’t matter to me,’ said Indira, a few days later on 30 October, when she faced increasingly alarming death threats from the Sikhs of Punjab, ‘if I live or die.’ The next day, wearing an orange sari, the prime minister kissed her granddaughter Priyanka, told her grandson Rahul to be brave when she died and walked from the family residence towards her office, approaching two of her Sikh bodyguards, who reached for their guns.

The Sikh challenge was played out in her own house. Her relationship with Sanjay’s feisty widow Maneka, twenty-five, swiftly deteriorated. Maneka, a Sikh general’s daughter who aspired to succeed her husband, defied Indira’s orders to refrain from politics; Indira threw her out of the house, telling her, ‘You’re not taking anything out apart from your clothes.’ As Maneka was leaving, the two women screamed at each other and Indira tried to keep hold of her baby grandson. ‘It’s alien to Indian culture to kick your daughter-in-law out,’ Maneka declared. Indira insulted Maneka’s Sikh family – ‘You came from a different background …’

The Sikhs – some of them campaigning for an independent Sikh homeland – had already led the opposition to Indira’s emergency. Now Indira, hoping to split the Sikh Akali Dal party, promoted a Sikh leader, Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, but she had chosen an extremist and he quickly spun out of her control, arming his followers, demanding the creation of a Sikh state and fortifying the Akal Takht, the second most holy shrine of the Golden Temple at Amritsar, while sending gangs of killers to terrorize his enemies.

On 3 June 1984, Indira ordered the army to storm the complex. The ferocious fighting that followed destroyed the Akal Takht, killing 780 militants and 400 troops. Sikhs swore vengeance against Indira, who responded, ‘India has lived a long long time – thousands of years – and my sixty-six years hardly count …’