This meant that Soviet aircraft could now range into the Atlantic and attack targets throughout NATO Europe’s rear areas, including the United Kingdom — targets that hitherto the West had considered immune from serious air threat. Moreover, they had the combat range for evasive and tactical routing, and for feint attacks. The air generals had been the architects of a vast, balanced air arm that had now significantly narrowed the West’s previous qualitative superiority. It almost goes without saying that in numbers it went far beyond what could conceivably be needed purely for defence. If things continued to go its way the generals could look forward to a not too far distant time when they could confidently challenge Allied air power and its ability to protect the strategic deployment of NATO’s reserves in an emergency. This would be a war winner. It was a professionally satisfying prospect.
With equal satisfaction they watched and listened throughout the seventies as military men and informed commentators in Western Europe tried to warn their countries about the critical part that air power had to play in defence of Allied security and the way the reassuring margin that had so long shielded the Alliance was all the time being narrowed. ‘None so deaf as those who will not hear’ might well have been their cheerful comment, until 1979 when the United Kingdom embarked on major measures to expand the Royal Air Force and especially to increase its air defence component (see Appendix 1). Most of the Allies were similarly engaged in stepping up their defence effort, but the RAF air defence interested the generals particularly because the United Kingdom had a special place in their strategic plans. Its expansion programme was not welcome to the Kremlin or to the Soviet air generals, but they consoled themselves with the thought that they had really had a splendid run while the West, of its own deliberate choice, was looking the other way. Furthermore, their own experience, over many years, of the huge industrial and training effort needed to build up or increase a modern air force, caused them to wonder if the British government might not be in for a surprise when it found how long its plans would take to mature.
In the realm of space the Soviet Air Forces had recognized the military application of space vehicles for communications and reconnaissance from the earliest moments of their space programme. The USSR-USA competition initiated by the Soviet Sputnik some thirty years earlier had been a long-playing space spectacular for all the world to watch. Although the engineering approach of the superpowers was often different, and US reliability was always superior, in general terms the Soviet Union had acquired capabilities which matched those of the USA. These had proved very valuable in peacetime and it now remained to see what their importance would be in war.
There was another vital matter, upon which little of much significance was said in the Red Army, perhaps because so very little was known about it. It concerned the very nature of nuclear warfare. Though the recent tendency in Soviet military thinking had been to accept that a major war might open with non-nuclear operations, and that these might even be prolonged, it must be emphasized again that nuclear and non-nuclear warfare had never been regarded in the Red Army’s philosophy as alternatives. Each fitted in as an element in a total war-fighting capability, to be exploited as policy and occasion demanded. As we have clearly seen, the Western concept of ‘escalation’ out of conventional warfare into nuclear, and of further ‘escalation’ from battlefield nuclear action into strategic, had no real equivalent in the Soviet Union, still less the notion of a ‘firebreak’ between successive steps. Though a non-nuclear variant had been studied and fully prepared for, it had never ceased to be widely expected that a major campaign against NATO would probably open with massive attack in depth by nuclear or chemical weapons, or both, to be followed by swift and violent exploitation by formations (which would be largely armoured) attacking off the line of march. With nuclear weapons, penetration was expected to reach a depth of some 120 kilometres in a 24-hour period. Equipment in Red Army divisions was designed for action on an irradiated or chemically dangerous battlefield. Outside the combat zone, if a strategic response from the other side brought the homeland under attack with nuclear weapons, there was at least provision — not total but far greater than any until quite recently seen in the West — for the protection of some of the more important elements in the population, for the maintenance of essential services and for the continuance of the war.
If, on the other hand, advantage were to be seen in a non-nuclear offensive, if Western battlefield nuclear weapons could be smothered or blinded and important results could be obtained even before NATO, without the stimulus of their use on the Warsaw Pact side, could reach inter-Allied agreement on the release of such weapons, this possibility too would be considered. Apart from the reduction in scale of the threat to the homeland and the absence of collateral nuclear damage in the theatre (which might or might not have its advantages), the principal effect of a non-nuclear opening to the land battle would be a slowing up in the rate of advance. Instead of covering 110 to 120 kilometres in a day the assaulting formations would be doing well if they managed forty.
But whatever was said, planned or done about nuclear operations of war, whether by hard-headed realists in the East or by commentators in the West ranging from homespun tacticians to far-out philosophers, one thing was universally true. Nuclear weapons of war had never yet been used on the battlefield and nobody, anywhere, knew what would happen if they were. Even within an integral concept of total war-fighting, using all means at choice, the decision to use this one would need very careful consideration indeed. The harder-headed the realists having to make the choice, the more carefully would they be inclined to reflect on the possible — but completely unpredictable — consequences. The West’s increasing preparedness to defend itself was throwing an even harsher light upon this very important consideration.
CHAPTER 14: The Stage Is Set
Shortly after 0400 hours on Sunday, 4 August, it became clear to the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, and was at once made known throughout a world waiting in an agony of suspense, that the Warsaw Pact had opened a general offensive against the forces of the Atlantic Alliance. The invasion of Western Europe had begun.
To some the news brought a curious sense of relief. At least the uncertainty was over. For many others, particularly in the governments and armed services of Allied countries, it raised the anxious question as to whether enough had been done for NATO’s defences since the seventies to repair the damage of the locust years. Could the West, in fact, survive? To most who heard the news, at least in Europe, it brought only grim and unhappy forebodings.
The Soviet intervention in Yugoslavia, and the swift and forceful response to it from the United States, that conjunction of miscalculation and mischance in which could now be seen the spark which set off the general explosion, seemed almost to be forgotten. More important things were at stake. The very future of the human race might now become the issue.