Direct ground-launched anti-satellite missiles were also considered but discarded, even though the United States did have some initial success in early trials in the Pacific. As with the anti-ballistic missile (ABM) system permitted under the SALT 1 Treaty, the problems of target tracking and split-second missile-aiming from the ground proved too complex and costly as a practical proposition. Another possibility was to offset inaccuracy by the use of nuclear warheads in space but this risked some very unattractive consequences in escalatory effects. Anyway, the 1967 Outer Space Treaty banned nuclear weapons from being orbited in space and, although the treaty might not have held in war, it put an effective brake on trials and development in peacetime.
Much science fiction has proved strikingly prophetic, but space-age tales in the pre-war years in which men promenaded weightlessly in space with death-ray guns found no echoes in the real space war. Colonel Wentworth and his crew in Enterprise 101 were put out of action by a Soviet I/D and he was blinded by a laser beam. But it is now known that this was an experimental chemical laser system of limited range and application. The damage done to Enterprise 101’s engine nozzles, power supplies and flight controls was almost certainly caused by small minelets exploded near the orbiter by the Soviet interceptor.
Fiction and fantasy are one thing and scientific intelligence is another and their relationship is a curiously close one. There was another matter brought to public notice from time to time that caused understandable anxiety and doubt. This was, quite simply, the ‘charged-particle beam’. The theory of charging, or ‘exciting’ atomic particles to concentrate great energy in a narrow beam had been well understood by physicists for a number of years. A charged-particle beam would make short work of any earth satellite — but what was more important, it could almost certainly detonate and destroy incoming ballistic missiles if the tracking and aiming problems could be solved. But like fusion energy — so long heralded as our liberator from the bondage of fossil fuels — while the equations were understood the engineering was not.
It was a Soviet scientist — Gersh Budker — who set the ball rolling in 1956 by demonstrating that once the gases in a magnetic field had attained a certain velocity they could become self-accelerating. With broad parity in strategic and space systems between the superpowers in the 1980s there was much to be said for sitting firmly on the lid of this Pandora’s box. It was thought none the less that the USSR was perversely assigning large scientific resources to trying to prise it open, though there was some dispute within the US intelligence community over the extent of the Soviet programme, the timescale within which an operational system could be expected to appear, and what the United States should be doing to develop such a system.
We now know that charged-particle beams were not employed in the war, but international scientists have recently inspected the great Soviet research complex near the Sino-Soviet border that was dedicated solely to this area of physics. We do not know their full findings but it is clear that Soviet scientists were still some way from being able to reduce the cyclotrons used in this research to a size where they could be used in a ground-based system, let alone one in space.
A less well advertised skeleton in the space cupboard was what the scientists called ‘electro-magnetic pulse’ (EMP). In its simplest terms this was the effect caused by gamma rays hitting the atmosphere suddenly after a nuclear explosion in space. The scientists calculated that the associated electro-magnetic surge would destroy or disable electrical and electronic systems across a wide area of the earth’s surface. Furthermore the ‘footprint’ could be controlled and directed to contain the area of impact. All of this could happen without any of the normal blast and radiation effects on earth of a nuclear explosion in the atmosphere. If this was true (and some unexpected side effects in Hawaii after an American nuclear test in the Pacific in 1962 suggested that it might be) the whole system of command and control of a modern war machine could be paralysed.
Because of the 1963 Partial Test Ban Treaty, the observance of which was well monitored from ultra-high satellites, the EMP theory could not be tested even on the smallest scale. That and other restraints, such as the risk of confusion with nuclear strike, kept this genie firmly in its bottle. All that could be said to the claim of a science correspondent in the London Times on 4 December 1981 that two nuclear explosions in space would immobilize NATO was that if the theory was correct then another two could immobilize the Warsaw Pact as well. There was certainly no general defence against this possible danger when the war started in 1985; but at least some protective measures had been adopted by the industrialized countries in the widespread modernization of their communications in the early 1980s. In broad terms this amounted to the hardening of input circuits in key electronic equipment and the increasing use of fibre optics in the main systems for the distribution of power and information. It is quite possible that the communications for waging war could have been seriously damaged by EMP; but it would not have stopped the war and for reasons of calculated strategic advantage neither side was moved to put the theoretical opportunities of EMP to the practical test.
VITAL PERIPHERIES
Chapter 16: The Elephant Trap; Central America
In the last three years before the world war, Central America was an elephant trap and a ticking time bomb. The United States very nearly fell into the one and detonated the other.
At the lowest stage of America’s fortunes in early 1984 a Vietnam-style war seemed in process of exploding right across the threshold of America’s southern backdoor. It looked like being a war that the United States would lose and that communist Cuba and Sandinista Nicaragua would win, although Cuba’s and Nicaragua’s own economic experiments were proving an unmitigated disaster for all their peoples. It was a war that started in El Salvador, but then spread also to the four other non-communist countries of Central America — militarist Guatemala and Honduras, troubled Panama, even democratic Costa Rica.
The crisis was made suddenly worse because it seemed that America’s ally, Christian Democrat Venezuela, was going to become embroiled in war with Cuba-leaning Guyana; and there were absurd dangers that all of the important countries of the Caribbean (Trinidad-Tobago, anti-colonialist Grenada, Jamaica) might find themselves to some degree on Guyana’s side.
The crisis was averted in the most unexpected manner; partly because the United States engaged in eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation with Cuba, but also because Venezuela (at first to America’s horror) went Social-Democratic in December of 1983. Thereafter a Venezuelan-Mexican alliance became an important stabilizing force in the region, and in the nick of time brought peace and compromise to it. If it had not, if at this juncture the Caribbean had become a Soviet lake and Central America a Soviet base area, the Western Alliance would almost certainly have gone down in the Third World War.
For all elephants that need to tread delicately in this post-war world, possibly as dangerous and unstable now in 1987 as at any time in living memory, the story carries disturbing lessons. It also carries a message of hope.
As the decade of the 1980s opened, the forces of change in Central America were not all revolutionary or Cuban-supported. There were also moderates and reformists trying both to stop the revolutionary tide and to implement reform in countries that had for generations been oppressed by too few rich families and too many soldiers, and where there were some of the lowest per capita incomes in the world.