This increased the difficulty for the Americans in persuading their allies to join in a counter-offensive against Soviet Russia and the Warsaw Pact through East Germany, Poland and the Ukraine. In a final attempt to resolve the argument the President of the United States called for a summit meeting to be held in London and attended by the heads of Government of the Atlantic Allies.
The discussion revolved round three topics:
1. The advantages of finishing off the job and so guaranteeing peace in our time.
2. The risk that a Western attack would trigger nuclear war.
3. The German problem.
The Americans argued that they had once again saved Europe by their exertions; three times was enough. The only way to make sure it didn’t happen again was to push the Soviet Union back out of Europe. The Russians were not mad enough to prefer nuclear destruction to the loss of their East European satellites, even if they also lost some of their territory. Limited war aims would be announced, giving them the assurance of a continued secure existence in their own heartland, but not of dominion over others. The German problem was for the Germans to solve. Even if they chose to unite, there would be so much repair and reconstruction to be done after the war that they could hardly constitute a threat to the other West Europeans, whose territory had escaped comparatively lightly and so left them with less rebuilding.
The West German leaders, still divided among themselves and conscious of continuing army pressure to move forward, kept a low profile in the discussion. The British, French, Beneluxians and Scandinavians were unimpressed by the American arguments and repeated their fears of nuclear attack and of a future united Germany. Moreover, the march of events in the Soviet Union was rapidly leading to collapse even without any further Western attack. It was much easier and less costly, as the German General Staff had argued in 1917 when they smuggled in Lenin, if defeat came about from internal disintegration rather than from external invasion. Any future Soviet attempt to arouse nationalistic passions against the foreigner and regain lost positions would be much less plausible if no foreign armies had invaded Russian soil.
The Americans, with the more hawkish elements of the German armed forces, considered moving in alone. Who knows what might have been the outcome if they had? A new dramatic shift in the debate in Moscow removed the necessity to reach a conclusion.
The ‘nuclear’ party in the Kremlin hierarchy, recognizing that time was against them, staged a secret meeting with the President and Secretary General from which their opponents were excluded at gun point. They insisted on an immediate move towards the threat of nuclear action. A single atomic attack on a Western target would be enough to demonstrate their determination. A simultaneous message would be sent to the US proposing the immediate withdrawal of all foreign forces in Africa and the Middle East and bilateral negotiation to establish US and Soviet spheres of influence throughout the world. It would be appropriate to attack a target in England while the Western summit was in session there, to bring home to everyone the dangers of any other course than that proposed by the Soviet Union. London itself should not be the target. The effect on national feeling of the destruction of the British capital would be enormous; it would almost certainly result in a hardening of Allied opposition and determination to a degree that would render the attack counterproductive. Birmingham would do. It was a great industrial concentration and a centre of the armaments industry, and near enough to the capital for London to feel the blast without being razed to the ground. President Vorotnikov had no choice but to agree.
It was important to make it absolutely clear to the Americans that this was a single attack to demonstrate what might happen if they refused Soviet demands. It was not to be seen as an immediate prelude to a general nuclear offensive. It had to be expected that some retaliation would occur, but if the signals were understood this should be limited to a more or less comparable strike. In spite of hostilities, the Moscow-Washington hot-line had never been closed down. The plan was worked out in detail. The timing had to be very precise. The ballistic missile early warning system (BMEWS) would give only a few minutes’ warning of the missile launch before its impact. The American President had to know just before this that there was only one missile on its way, and where it was going, but not long enough before for any counter-measures to be taken.
A warning message was sent via Washington to the President in London that the Soviet President would speak on the hot-line at 1020 hours GMT on the following day, 20 August. In London and Washington the intervening hours were spent in a fevered guessing game on what the message would be. One thing was fairly clear and brought relief. It could hardly be to announce a full-scale nuclear offensive, since surprise would be an essential element in any such action. Most views were fairly near the truth so far as a proposal for negotiation was concerned, but few guessed that this would be accompanied by a Hiroshima-type demonstration, or that the timetable would be as narrow and as threatening as it turned out to be. For when the Soviet President spoke, after announcing the single missile launch, he demanded that the US should send representatives within one week to negotiate on the Soviet proposal, failing which further selective strikes would be carried out. If there were any thought of preventing this by a pre-emptive general nuclear attack, President Thompson was reminded of the Soviet Union’s significant second strike capability.
CHAPTER 25: The Destruction of Birmingham
In the main control room of the great BMEWS station on Fylingdales Moor in Yorkshire the day watch had been on duty for a couple of hours and it was just coming up to ten o’clock in the morning. The station looked out over beautiful misty moorland, but the controller and his staff did not — there was plenty else for them to do as the giant radars swept some 3,200 kilometres out into space. They were searching and sifting the 7,000 pieces of orbiting debris and satellites that man had projected into inner space since his first invasion of it in 1957.
The control staff were of course well abreast of the war situation and they knew that, in political terms anyway, the threat of a nuclear attack was small. But they were not there to make judgments of that sort. Warning of an attack rested with the automated system coupled to the scanning and tracking dishes in the great radomes. Anything detected that was not immediately reconciled with the ever-growing catalogue of known objects was subject to an instantaneous analysis in spherical trigonometry by a battery of computers. These would assess the probability that the radar return indicated a missile and, as further radar tracking information came through, discard, decrease or increase the assessed degree of probability in the threat. If things ever went as far as that, the computer and the cathode ray consoles would show, in a somewhat academic way it might be thought, the estimated point of impact of each missile and the seconds to go before its strike.
A system that had to have the highest reliability that man’s ingenuity could devise was inevitably hyper-sensitive, and operators highly trained in monitoring the auditory and visual responses grew instinctively to feel the computer’s mood. Occasionally, even in peacetime, the alerting bell would sound as particles or atmospheric conditions produced a response from space that the computer took longer than usual to analyse. When it was identified as innocuous the computer would apologize seconds later and explain its over-eagerness.
This was the way it was meant to work, and it was the pattern to which the controller and his staff were accustomed. During the last two weeks at Fylingdales and its sister stations in Alaska and Greenland bells had sounded frequently as the Soviet rockets launched more satellites into orbit to maintain their space activities. There had been plenty going on.