Bang!: A History of Britain in the 1980s (40 page)

Within days of this scare, Warsaw Pact forces were put on full alert when, on 2 November, a massive NATO exercise, codidd Able Archer, was assessed – incorrectly – not as the
practice drill it claimed to be but as potentially the cover for a full-scale attack. A cause for particular suspicion was that the exercise involved a simulated nuclear response and the active
participation in the procedure of Margaret Thatcher and West Germany’s Chancellor, Helmut Kohl, using new launch encryptions. Not until the exercise finished ten days later did the Soviet
high command breathe a sigh of relief.
²
Of Petrov’s dilemma, the West – as the United States and its allies were then collectively known
(when not calling themselves the ‘Free World’) – learned nothing until the 1990s when the collapse of the USSR brought forth a gush of disclosures. Through Britain’s KGB
double agent, Oleg Gordievsky, Ronald Reagan did, however, learn just how dangerously twitchy the Soviet Politburo had been while Able Archer went through its paces.
³
The revelation left the president, according to his national security adviser, in a state of ‘genuine anxiety’.
⁴
It
was a state felt by millions across Britain, Europe and beyond who, while in ignorance of the particular incidents of September and November 1983, feared that the mistaking of a rare cloud
formation for incoming missiles or military manoeuvres for the real thing was precisely the sort of dangerous mishap that made the world an unsafe place, when its fate was in the hands of two
superpowers with sufficient nuclear weapons to blow up the planet but insufficient trust in each other to be sure what the other intended. Indeed, there was not only a lack of trust but a breakdown
of communication. Apart from an unofficial visit to Moscow by the 91-year-old former wartime ambassador to the USSR, W. Averell Harriman, in June 1983, Andropov did not hold a single serious
discussion with a senior American official during his fifteen months as leader. Reagan was in his second term of office before he met his Soviet counterpart.
⁵

The non-meeting of minds was one thing – but, as a consequence, Margaret Thatcher believed that if anything had prevented a third world war, the missiles had done so. Although its MAD
acronym was unfortunate, ‘mutually assured destruction’ explained why the Soviet Union would think hard before attacking the West, whether with nuclear or conventional arms, given the
threat of being wiped out by nuclear retaliation. The Soviets may not be trustworthy, but Thatcher gambled that they were not suicidal. Her views on social issues and economic policies changed and
developed over the course of her parliamentary career, but she resiliently clung to her certainty that the only language the old men of the Politburo understood was strength – and that the
chief danger would come from uncertainty, especially if they thought they could get away with probing NATO’s resolve. The
sober reality of the Cold War was one of the
constant, unchanging features of the world as she understood it, and in the new US president, Ronald Reagan, she believed she had an ally with a similarly steadfast view as to where the main threat
resided.

It was because of the seemingly immutable nature of the Cold War that for most of the 1980s the politics of ‘defence’ in public discourse was all but shorthand for ‘nuclear
weapons’. The Falklands War had been a wholly unexpected incident which demonstrated to Britain the value of sizeable conventional forces and the continued possession of the world’s
third-largest fleet (even though it was the Royal Navy that fared least well out of the three services from government spending priorities during the Thatcher years, despite defence secretary
Michael Heseltine’s reversal of the worst of the cuts planned in 1981 by his predecessor, John Nott). Yet for all its drama and ‘lessons’, the war in the South Atlantic did not
reverse the East of Suez decision of 1967, which effectively acknowledged that Britain’s role was to guard the North Sea and defend Western Europe from potential Soviet attack, not to
maintain a presence all over the globe. In this sense, the Falkland Islands were an exception – made so by the fact that they were populated by British kith and kin. In other circumstances,
Thatcher was – in the language of a previous age – more a proponent of the ‘Continental Commitment’ than the ‘Blue Water School’. Her government had the same
priorities as the Callaghan government it replaced: to maintain Britain’s role as second in command of NATO and to station a sizeable British Army of the Rhine (BAOR) in West Germany, ready
to stand in the way of a Soviet attack there. The third priority was one that Callaghan also shared, but had yet to take the final decision on when he fell from office. That was the policy to keep
and modernize the British independent nuclear deterrent. This last, exceptionally expensive, spending commitment, which saw Polaris replaced by Trident, was to prove highly contentious. However,
while scrapping it was a goal of those campaigning for unilateral nuclear disarmament, it was not the British nuclear arsenal but rather the siting of American ground-launched, nuclear-armed cruise
missiles on British soil that became the principal focus of popular alarm. The result was the extraordinary phenomenon of the women’s peace camp at Greenham Common and the dramatic rise in
support for the previously all but moribund Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND).

In 1979, CND had scarcely three thousand members. The popularity it had enjoyed in the six years that followed its foundation in 1957 – when its ‘Ban the Bomb’ marches between
Trafalgar Square and the nuclear research establishment at Aldermaston had attracted great attention and widespread support among intellectuals, clergymen, journalists and commentators – had
almost entirely ebbed away. From 1980 onwards, however, it enjoyed a
dramatic and remarkable resurgence. By 1982, its membership had risen tenfold, to forty thousand, and
this figure greatly underestimated the strength of its support by excluding the tens of thousands more associated with it through affiliated peace groups. During 1983, CND’s membership
reached 100,000. The popularity of its monthly magazine,
Sanity
, was such that it was sold in branches of W. H. Smith alongside the
New Statesman
and the
Spectator
. CND’s
chair, Joan Ruddock, and general secretary, the Catholic clergyman Monsignor Bruce Kent, became nationally recognized figures. Nor was it the sort of organization whose members supported it quietly
and discreetly. At a time when wearing lapel badges was back in fashion, the distinctive, circular CND badge quickly became the adornment of choice for those committed to the cause, as well as
signifying a more general youthful statement of distrust of authority. On 1 April 1983, just two months before the general election was to be held, seventy thousand people formed a 14-mile-long
human chain between the nuclear establishments at Aldermaston and Burghfield and the airbase at Greenham Common, where cruise missiles were expected to be deployed later in the year. Then, on 22
October, on a day of massive peace protests across Western Europe, where the collective number of participants was calculated in millions, CND organized its biggest demonstration in Britain with
well over a quarter of a million supporters bringing central London to standstill.

The movement’s most strategically significant victory was the conversion of the main opposition party to its cause. Delegates at the 1982 Labour Party conference had committed Labour to
unilateral nuclear disarmament – scrapping Britain’s independent nuclear weapons and ‘closing down all nuclear bases, British and American, on British soil or in British
waters’,
⁶
regardless of whether the Soviet Union did likewise. While this stance appeared to have been one of the many factors that had
contributed to Labour’s drubbing in the 1983 general election, the possibility that the party might win a subsequent general election on the back of other issues and then implement its
unilateral strategy as soon it came to power clearly disturbed those who saw the weapons as a deterrent. Michael Foot’s departure as Labour leader changed little. His replacement, Neil
Kinnock, reaffirmed his party’s commitment to British unilateralism.

The re-emergence of the anti-nuclear campaign caught the government by surprise and, scrambling to counter it, Thatcher chose one of her Cabinet’s most able communicators, Michael
Heseltine, as her new defence secretary in January 1983. He was certainly adept at news management. On the day the Greenham–Aldermaston–Burghfield human chain was formed, he contrived
his own publicity spoiler, arriving back just in time from West Berlin where, he announced, he had seen the real peace-keepers at work facing the barbed wire, watchtowers, machine-gun posts and
concrete slabs of the
Berlin Wall. Heseltine was soon the human lightning conductor in the storms that followed. With political activism returning to the campuses, he found
himself regularly bundled around the country’s university lecture halls while anti-nuclear protesters (as well as other groups) tried to prevent him from addressing Conservative students by
jostling, throwing eggs, a brick and even, on one occasion, swinging a baby in front of his fast-moving police support car.
⁷
For students coming to
applaud rather than harass the new defence minister – who quickly attracted the nickname ‘Tarzan’ – his assailants seemed at best naive and at worst all but fellow
travellers. The Federation of Conservative Students helped distribute both its own posters and those designed and funded by other ‘pro-defence’ organizations. One showed the CND symbol
breaking up and morphing into the Soviet hammer and sickle. Heseltine arranged for the links some leading CND activists had with far-left and Marxist organizations to be publicized – an
action that was met with fury but no litigation. In 1983, MI5 began tapping the telephone of John Cox, who was both one of CND’s vice chairmen and a member of the national executive of the
Communist Party of Great Britain. The warrant for the tap was revoked in 1985 when it became clear to the security service that ‘members of the CPGB were not manipulating CND or exercising
decisive influence within it’.
⁸

CND’s resurgence was driven by the deteriorating relations between the two superpowers. The period of détente between Washington and Moscow which had accompanied the long-drawn-out
strategic arms limitation talks (SALT II) had effectively collapsed even before Ronald Reagan became president in January 1981. What was to be dubbed the ‘Second Cold War’ began on
Christmas Eve 1979, when Soviet forces invaded Afghanistan. Then, on 13 December 1981, the communist regime in Warsaw imposed martial law, plunging Poland into a state of emergency which lasted
until 1983. At the time, the actions of Poland’s General Jaruzelski were presumed to be motivated by fear that unless he cracked down on the Solidarity trade union, the first in Eastern
Europe to be free of state control, the Soviet Union would invade Poland and restore a firmer totalitarian grip – though later archival revelations suggest that, in fact, Jaruzelski may
actually have invited a Soviet invasion. Regardless of whether Jaruzelski was trying to head off or encourage Soviet repression, East–West relations rapidly deteriorated. All means of
communication between Poland and the outside world were severed, the phone lines cut, the borders sealed and curfews imposed during which transgressors risking being – and were – shot.
Dissidents, including the Solidarity leader, Lech Wałęsa, were imprisoned without trial. For the moment, it appeared that Polish resistance had been broken, though Wałęsa was
aware that, morally, he was winning the showdown just by enduring it. ‘This is the moment of your defeat,’ he assured the secret
policemen who came to arrest him.
‘These are the last nails in the coffin of communism.’ For nothing had stirred the Polish conscience more deeply than the elevation of the Polish Karol Wojtyła as the first
non-Italian pontiff for four hundred and fifty years. On his triumphant return to his officially atheist homeland in 1979, vast crowds, chanting ‘We want God! We want God!’, had greeted
the new pope, John Paul II. He urged them not to be afraid. It was a dangerous message for, on 13 May 1981, he was shot in St Peter’s Square. Only six weeks earlier there had been an attempt
on Reagan’s life and, as with the pope, the subsequent course of events was profoundly affected by the successful removal of the bullet. But while Reagan’s would-be assassin was a
deranged 26-year-old with a perverse notion of how to express his unrequited love for the teenage actress Jodie Foster, the motive behind the Turk sent to murder the pope was suspected to be
altogether more political. Mehmet Ali Ağca appeared to have links to the Bulgarian intelligence service and through it – it was widely assumed, though never proven – to Moscow.

In these months of trepidation, the greatest causes of tension – and of protest in Britain – came from two interlinked decisions taken before either the Soviet invasion of
Afghanistan, the crackdown in Poland, or the assassination attempts on the US president and the pope. The first was the Soviet deployment of the SS-20, an intermediate-range nuclear missile. It was
aimed at targets across Western Europe and it was especially difficult to track its deployment because the missiles could be moved around on trucks and hidden in forests. The second decision
followed in December 1979, when NATO ministers decided to respond by basing 464 cruise and 106 Pershing II intermediate-range nuclear missiles in Britain, West Germany, Italy and the Netherlands.
These missiles were so fast and so accurate that they were designed – at least in theory – to pinpoint and destroy the Soviets’ nuclear command system before it had time to launch
a retaliatory strike. The intention was that Britain would become America’s ‘unsinkable aircraft carrier’
⁹
– home to 160
cruise missiles, each of which would have four times the destructive power of the atomic bomb that levelled Hiroshima.

Until these new missiles arrived in 1983, the only European-based nuclear weapons that could hit the Soviet Union were air-launched from an ageing and far from invulnerable fleet of British
Vulcan bombers and US F-111 jets. Of course, long-range intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) could be fired all the way from the United States, but this raised the question of whether an
American president would risk turning his own country into a target for massive nuclear retaliation if the limited-range SS-20s were only raining down upon selected targets in Western Europe. Thus
cruise (and the shorter-range Pershing II, which was deployed in West Germany) were intended to send a signal to the Kremlin that it could not attack Western
Europe without
the certainty of nuclear retaliation, and that NATO could respond at whatever level and scale the Warsaw Pact chose: battlefield nuclear weapons would be met with battlefield nuclear weapons,
medium-range missiles with medium-range missiles, ICBMs with ICBMs. What was more, if the forces of the Warsaw Pact were to invade Western Europe using only conventional weapons, their vast
advantage in numbers, and a three to one superiority in tanks, would likely ensure their success. However, while NATO promised it would not attack first, it pointedly refused to promise that, if
attacked, it would not be the first to respond with nuclear weapons. The medium-range nuclear arsenal was therefore deemed imperative to make up for Western Europe’s shortfall in conventional
forces. Efforts by the Kremlin to offer significant arms reductions in return for cancelling the cruise and Pershing deployments were destined to fail for this reason – as well as because the
Soviet offer did not include longer-range SS-20s, some of which were based beyond the Urals and could reach Western Europe while remaining beyond the range of a pre-emptive strike by cruise and
Pershing. Prior to the cruise and Pershing deployment, Soviet nuclear missiles outnumbered NATO’s in the European theatre by a margin of three to one. Neither Thatcher nor Reagan – nor
any of the other major European leaders – was greatly tempted by a Soviet offer that, while reducing the absolute numbers on both sides, essentially left the imbalance in place. What Reagan
offered, in a proposal he announced in November 1981, was the complete removal of all Soviet and US intermediate-range nuclear missiles from Europe: the intention to deploy cruise and Pershing II
would be cancelled in return for Moscow scrapping its SS-20s as well as its SS-4s and SS-5s. This initiative, for what promised to be the abolition of an entire class of nuclear weapons, was
labelled the ‘zero option’. But with the Kremlin’s refusal to consider so comprehensive a deal, Britain prepared for the arrival of cruise.