The Third World War - The Untold Story (47 page)

Man’s activities in space in peacetime, therefore, tended to be stable, both scientifically and politically. Indeed there was considerable co-operation. Sometimes this was even political, as when the USSR advised the United States that South Africa looked to be preparing for a nuclear test in the Kalahari Desert. This intelligence was extracted from Soviet
Cosmos
satellites manoeuvred over the Kalahari in July and August 1977.

Although the methods chosen by the USA and USSR to get into space differed widely in technical ways, the comfortable feeling generally enjoyed by the uninitiated in the West was that the USA must surely be in the lead. This was not obviously so, and in different respects each was ahead of the other. The US put an enormous effort into the
Apollo
‘man on the moon’ programme. The USSR, with less fuss, put their
Salyut
space station into orbit, and by changing crews rotated some forty astronauts through it on different research tasks. Both those ‘men in space’ programmes were very remarkable but they were very different achievements.

Telemetry enables information gained by optical and electronic sensors in space to be transmitted instantly to earth. In the war these systems were jammed, partially or completely, by both sides, using earth and space jamming stations. Space photography, which involved complicated systems of ejecting the film and sending it back to earth for processing and interpretation, was fine in peacetime but took too long in war. On the other hand, the transmission earthwards of its product in this way could not be jammed. The satellite communications system, which had been well established before the war, was invaluable in keeping political and military centres in touch and in the control of a war moving at an unprecedented pace. But here too the effectiveness of the system was degraded by jamming and other interference.

Satellites were destroyed or damaged by limited rather than widespread counter-satellite action; the numbers of I/D satellites was limited on both sides and they were reserved for high-value targets. In the main, these were the electronic intelligence (ELINT) satellites which gained key information about the enemy’s electronic systems and above all his operating frequencies. Some of the satellites knocked out were replaced by new ground launches, but when this was done great care was needed to ensure that the direction of launch, and the location of the site, involved no risk that the launch of the rocket would be confused with an inter-continental ballistic missile (ICBM) attack. This very sensitive and vital discrimination was well within the state of the art and the facilities available for rapid computer analysis; it was also part of the tacit understanding between the superpowers that such a process of replacement would need to go on in war. As space was well stocked with satellites of all types in the months before the war, replacement launchings were not numerous. In consequence, the much slower launching rate of the US system, with its big satellites and big rockets, did not turn out to have the great disadvantage that some of its pre-war critics had forecast.

Destruction or jamming of the ELINT satellites hurt the West much more than it did the USSR. This was because NATO placed such great reliance on electronic counter-measures (ECM) and ECCM (in which they proved to have a substantial but not overwhelming lead) to offset the numerical inferiorities and unfavourable starting deployments they would have at the beginning of a war. Because of this, the ELINT effort in space, the heavy initial Allied air losses, the congestion in the intelligence system, and what we have recounted in chapter 6 as the story of the Gdansk incident were all tied together. It is also why the events in that particular tale, with its interesting human overtones, were so important at the beginning of the war.

With the strategic and military opportunities that spaceflight offered, it was inevitable that the superpowers would turn their attention to counter-satellite systems. They did so as early as the mid-1960s. The Soviet Union demonstrated its ability to make a rendezvous between satellites during their
Soyuz/Cosmos
programme in 1967 and the US did the same somewhat earlier in the
Gemini
series. By the second half of the 1970s it looked as if the USSR was firmly committed to a system whereby the interceptor would approach its target in a similar orbit from below to launch minelets at it or to close with the target and then blow itself up. The war showed those deductions to be correct and both methods were used effectively. Satellites are in essence ‘soft’ targets and very little in the way of impact or explosion is needed to put them out of commission. The principal US system depended on a quite low relative speed collision between the interceptor and the target. These interceptors were launched into space from beneath the wings of F-15
Eagle
fighters flying at very high altitude in the atmosphere. Both sides used infra-red homing for the terminal stages of the interception.

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.

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.

To the left of centre among these moderate reformists was the Socialist International, closely related to the social democratic parties in Venezuela, Costa Rica and Mexico, and influential with groups in El Salvador. It had at one time also been influential with the rulers of Nicaragua, but Sandinista Nicaragua was slipping under communist control. To the right of centre was the Organizacion Democrata Cristiana de America (ODCA), presided over by a Venezuelan (Aristides Calvani) and influential with President Duarte of El Salvador and with several political parties in the Caribbean.