Free The Third World War by John Hackett

credible forward defence with non-nuclear forces or to sustain a tactical nuclear engagement, and the near certainty that a breakthrough would not be at once followed, as the British seemed to hope, by strategic nuclear action on the part of the United States, set up a dangerous situation. To help correct it two US brigades were deployed in the sector of the Northern Army Group (which had hitherto had no US formations under command) where NORTHAG’s reserves might have been located, had there been any.
    In Britain, the implications of this did not at first sink in. When it was more widely realized that the Americans were doing for the British what the British had been too idle, too apathetic or too parsimonious to do for themselves, a trace of public uneasiness was discernible which would almost certainly not have been evident a year or two before. It was by no means inconsistent with what some observers saw as a reawakening of a sense of national identity. This was to have considerable influence on British defence policy.
    As the current of public concern over national security began to flow in Britain at the end of the seventies, it became increasingly clear that the reductions in defence expenditure to which all political parties had from time to time inclined—some, it must be said, more consistently than others—and which it had become part of the ritual liturgy of radicalism always to demand, no longer wholly conformed to the wishes of the people. The restoration of cuts, and even some increases, hesitantly begun in the financial year 1978-9, were seen to meet with public approval-Greater national affluence helped them to be more easily borne. By 1983 the ceiling imposed on defence expenditure five years before, regarded then by many as immutable, was already being exceeded by more than two-thirds.
    The points at which improvements in provision for the national defence were seen to be most needed, and where improvements were in fact made the earliest, were three.
    There was a reversal of the suicidal tendency to weaken NATO on land by erosion of the British Army of the Rhine; more attention was paid to the no less critical situation of the air defence of the United Kingdom; and improvements were last set in hand to the country’s ASW (anti-submarine warfare) defences and its maritime air forces.
    This outline of developments in the United Kingdom, seen as an indicator of a trend, widespread if uneven, in European countries of the Atlantic Alliance at the end of the seventies, is amplified, in some of its more important aspects, at the end of this book in Appendix I. It is enough to say here that a sharper awareness of the threat to peace from the growing military strength and the persistent political intransigence of the USSR , on the part of some (but not all) of the European Allies, was leading, in varying degree, towards improvements in their contribution to the defence of the West. The consequent condition of NATO , as the point of decision approached, will be reviewed in Chapter 12.

CHAPTER 5
Unrest in Poland
    The Third World War was said by many to have broken out in the same country as the Second, in Poland, on 11 November 1984, the sixty-sixth anniversary of the end of the First World War. it did not seem like an outbreak of world war at the time. In fact, many put the blame for the initial workers’ riots in Poland on what was no more than an incident during the US presidential election campaign.
    During the Thompson-Mondale television debates, both candidates had been asked whether they regarded the present Polish government as a satellite of the Soviet Union. Mindful of the Polish-American votes that President Ford had lost in Chicago and elsewhere through giving a soft-on-communism answer to that same question in 1976, Governor Thompson had been careful to keep his answer on what might be called the hawkish side of Mr Mondale’s-One of his aides evidently feared that he had been too hawkish, and shortly