The Third World War: August 1985

"Let me make a small digression. I first read this in a tent at Land’s End in 1979. I was on a walking holiday with a friend in the days before mobile phones. We got to Land’s End a day before my father was due to come and collect us. It was pouring with rain and, with nothing else to do, I bought this in a bookshop. I read it literally in a day. I couldn’t put it down. And I’ve re-read it since. One of the reasons I think this book is still worth reading, even though it’s now well out of date, is that, firstly, it’s probably still one of the very best examples of a whole genre of books where a war is imagined , and how it would happen. There’s a contemporary book by General Sir Richard Shirreff, a very high-ranking British military officer just retired, who wrote a book called 2017: War with Russia , which is about a Russian invasion of Ukraine and how that drags in NATO. And in that, he himself pays respect to John Hackett, who imagined this way of thinking before. There are several books of this sort, in which a World War occurs, and people with expertise imagine how it might play out. Mostly though, I mean, it’s gripping. It’s very convincing as well—thinking back to the circumstances when it was written. You could well imagine the developments he describes actually occurring. He explains how in the Soviet Union there was a deliberate provocation against the NATO powers in Europe. In addition, Soviet sympathetic states around the world in Africa and Latin America are also prompted to undertake action against western interests. So you have, taking off all at the same time, a war in Yugoslavia, a war in southern Africa, a war in the Gulf, and then a Warsaw Pact invasion of West Germany. It calls NATO into action. The reason it’s particularly good on NATO is that all the dry description you might find in an academic or military publication about nuclear strategy—conventional deterrence, the different ways in which the Allies would interact—is all brought to life. He describes the manner in which British, French, German, American, Canadian, Dutch, Danish, Norwegian forces are mobilised. Effectively, NATO wins, but it’s pretty ugly. I work in Birmingham, England; unfortunately, in this book, there’s a nuclear strike against Birmingham. Then NATO, through the US and UK, retaliate with a nuclear strike against Minsk in Belarus. And that leads to an end of the war. The Soviet Union admits defeat. And the nuclear strike against Minsk leads to a collapse of the Soviet Union, which was also very prescient because the Soviet Union did collapse, ten or so years after the book was written—though not through a nuclear strike, through internal division, which is partly explained here. I could go on. It has some great descriptions about the way in which NATO works. Without NATO as a framework, the individual efforts of the alliance would have been much less effective in the aggregate. That’s a very good way of understanding NATO; the contribution of the allies, though incompletely coordinated, add up to far more than the sum of their parts. So, even now, so many years after, it’s still a very enjoyable read even though the subject matter is pretty grim. One can learn a lot about the alliance and the circumstances in which it would have had to have fought in the Cold War. Yes, NATO’s nuclear doctrine was exactly as you said: massive retaliation—a single strike from the Soviet Union would give rise to a potentially devastating attack on the Soviet Union. There would be escalation very early. The idea behind that was to compensate for the Soviet Union’s conventional superiority. NATO had to make good on that imbalance through a nuclear doctrine that implied massive retaliation in order to deter the Soviet Union exploiting this superiority. That changed in the mid- to late-1960s, because it was recognised that a massive retaliation against the Soviet Union would in turn lead the Soviet Union to respond in kind against the West. So it was mutual suicide. The NATO approach became known as ‘flexible response’; in other words, the allies would seek to fight the Soviet Union first with conventional weapons, and would go nuclear if and when it was necessary. So let’s assume the Red Army, the Warsaw Pact, occupied all of West Germany, invaded France, occupied the Netherlands and Denmark and was threatening the UK. NATO may decide to go nuclear to prevent any further advance, but perhaps a small strike. It was flexible in the sense that the point at which nuclear weapons would be used was not specified, either at what point of the ladder of escalation and the extent to which it would occur. I could bore you to tears with the doctrine that lay behind that, and the politics, because it was very controversial. West Germany saw this as a lack of resolve on the part of the United States. They wanted massive retaliation to stay as a sure sign that America was committed to the defence of West Germany. Others saw flexible response as a way by which the United States would fight a limited nuclear war in Europe. In other words, they would tolerate the destruction of Europe in order to save America from being hit by a nuclear weapon from Russia. And so on. So it was very controversial. But what is interesting about it is that a version of flexible response is still NATO’s doctrine to this day. That hasn’t really changed. It can get quite nerdy, this sort of stuff, but it’s very, very important."