Margaret Thatcher scowled half-heartedly at her Defence Secretary.
Tom Harding-Grayson coughed again.
This time he coughed loudly.
“While I was most interested to hear of Willie’s proposal,” he nodded to William Whitelaw, “to send a squadron of our most modern conventionally powered submarines down to the South Atlantic to persuade the Argentine to mend its ways, I don’t think we ought to allow ourselves to be distracted from the main thing. The Mediterranean.” He let this hang in the air for a few moments. “As in classical times the Mediterranean ties everything else together; the modern World lies to the west and the old to the east. The blocking of the Suez Canal at Ismailia already presents ‘the West’ with insuperable difficulties; everything that comes to us from the near east and Asia Minor must now travel thousands of miles around the Cape of Good Hope adding six to eight weeks to transit times. Overnight, the nuclear strike on Ismailia in February altered the strategic balance of the region because it made it impossible, for example, for us to speedily reinforce and re-equip our garrisons in Arabia and the Persian Gulf in the event of some unforeseen threat arising in that area…”
“That’s hardly likely, Tom,” James Callaghan observed lugubriously. But he had said it more as a question than an outright objection.
“Ah, now that’s the thing,” Tom Harding-Grayson retorted mildly. “Back in the good old days when I was locked away in a Foreign Office room so far from away from Foreign Secretary that he and I lived and worked in practically separate time zones,” he continued, very much in the manner of an exasperated schoolmaster addressing a bunch of cavorting teenagers in the middle of a lesson, “I was the bane of my then masters not just because I consistently advocated a relationship with the United States based on a rational understanding of our own national interest, but because I also had an irritating habit of positing worse case scenarios,” he sighed, “several of which have now actually come to pass.”
Margaret Thatcher gave her Foreign Secretary a very hard look.
“Yes, well this is hardly the time for reminding Cabinet that you ‘told us so’, Tom!”
The grey dapper, studious looking man seated to her right beyond the Deputy Prime Minister, James Callaghan, took this put down in his stride. He went on as if she had not opened her mouth.
“For the record I posited two relevant scenarios both of which would be disastrous not just to the long-term interests of this country, but to those of the United States also, Prime Minister. One of those scenarios was that of a nuclear war fought without meaningful operational planning and co-ordination between America and ourselves. Such a war happened and was fought in the way that it was fought because the United States looked — as it saw it — to its own national geopolitical strategic interests before those of its European Allies, of which we were only one among many and essentially, in the bigger picture, expendable. For what it is worth faced by an impossible situation in which he probably believed a massive Soviet first strike was imminent, in my opinion President Kennedy responded in the only rational way that he could have responded.”
Nobody said a word.
“That is ancient history,” Tom Harding-Grayson continued, blandly as if he was making polite conversation. “I don’t claim to have predicted every aspect and consequence of the October War. Frankly, I was surprised the British Isles escaped so lightly and that so many of us were left alive to worry about the future. Be that as it may, we are where we are. Presently, it is my second doomsday scenario which is exercising my mind, and I think, ought to be exercising the mind of everybody around this table.”
Margaret Thatcher was viewing her friend with quivering impatience. She and the Foreign Secretary had been together at Balmoral Castle at the time of the attempted assassination of the Queen and her family. They had formed a strong bond of mutual respect in the aftermath of surviving the nightmare and ever since then they had seemed to be on similar wavelengths. Until now; presently, she was finding Tom Harding-Grayson’s scholarly air of understated moral superiority very nearly intolerable and was asking herself if he really was as clever as he thought he was why had he not seen yesterday’s catastrophe coming?
“Well, don’t keep us in suspense, Tom!”
“Before I explain, Prime Minister,” her friend returned, spreading his hands in apologetic supplication. “I confess that I put the particular doomsday scenario I am about to describe to bed, as it were, after the October War because at the time it seemed that the Soviet Union was a spent military force.”
“The Soviet Union is a spent military force!” The Prime Minister snapped imperiously. Several of her colleagues flinched; the Foreign Secretary smiled self-deprecatingly and asked an inconvenient question.
“Do we actually know that, Prime Minister?”
“Of course we do, Tom!”
Airey Neave sensed the temperature of the room chill another degree. In common with many of his old friends in intelligence circles he had been more than a little dubious about American claims of ‘total victory’ after the October War. Just because the Soviets had stopped fighting back after a few hours was not evidence of an inability to continue to fight. In the seventeen months since he had waited, and waited and finally given up waiting for the completeness of the Soviet annihilation to be confirmed. The West had sleep-walked into Armageddon once; now it was not beyond the bounds of possibility that history was about to repeat itself.
All eyes focussed on the handsome face of the Chief of the Defence Staff, Admiral Sir David Luce the First Sea Lord.
“I don’t know,” he said dully. “A few months ago I would have, and in fact, frequently did give a conditional ‘yes’ in reply to the question of whether the Soviet Union was a militarily spent force. At that time I would have been confident of the veracity of that reply at a strategic, if not a local, tactical level. However, in the last few weeks we have seen significant ‘former’ Soviet assets engaging with and inflicting heavy losses on our forces in the Mediterranean. Given this evidence, it is not that great a stretch of the imagination to envisage a situation in which other, as yet unidentified or suspected, ‘significant’ former Soviet military assets survive elsewhere deep within the boundaries of the USSR. It may be also be the case that we have been mistaken in describing these assets as ‘former Soviet’ assets. It will be instructive to discover what may be learned from the large number of Russian parachutists and the small number of Turkish seamen thus far captured after the Battle of Malta. What we learn may materially alter our view of, for example, whether such a thing as the ‘Soviet Union’ actually still survives beyond the Ural Mountains or in the Trans-Caucasus.”
Margaret Thatcher’s angry eyes viewed her senior military advisor with atypical suspicion and mistrust.
“And you’ve just thought to tell me this now, Sir David?”
The First Sea Lord brushed past the accusative threat in her voice.
“It is my job to inform and advise you on the basis of what I know and what I think may be true. It is not my job to advise you of every piece of intelligence community gossip, careless tittle-tattle and most likely, misinformation, that comes into the hands of my staff, Prime Minister.”