The Third World War - The Untold Story (61 page)

At the Defence Council meeting, which went on to 3 am without agreement, Malinsky, who still opposed the use of nuclear weapons on the grounds that at this stage it would be premature and on balance do far more harm than good, had been in a minority, with two members strongly against him, Aristanov and Nastin both arguing for a full-scale nuclear offensive at once, using all weapons, while the other two members remained undecided. It was Malinsky who succeeded in causing the full Politburo to be called. This was duly summoned for 8 am. In between meetings the General Secretary, advanced in years, clearly unwell and seen by some to be visibly failing (though they could hardly say so) summoned both sides separately. One was for using all, the other for using none. He himself, it appears, was in favour of one powerful strike on a prominent Western satellite nation, a European member of the Alliance with influence in Europe. The target would not be the capital: that would be needed in the future and its destruction might in any case be counter-productive for the purpose in mind. This was to issue a dramatic warning to the world, while at the same time inviting the US to immediate discussion of a ceasefire.

Neither Aristanov nor Malinsky, though they could hardly discuss it, thought much of this. They were both, in the last resort, men who would back all or nothing and reject half measures.

At the meeting of the Politburo the General Secretary steered discussion towards the conclusion he had chosen. The Chief of the General Staff was invited to advise on a country and a target. After a short adjournment to consult advisers he came back to propose attack on Birmingham in England. On the strong representations of Aristanov and Malinsky, for once in agreement, the matter, before the issue of any executive order, was taken back by the General Secretary for further consideration by the Defence Council, which was ordered to meet in an hour's time. When the Supreme Party Ideologist and Chairman of the KGB turned up for the meeting they found the door closed and two of the General Secretary's personal security guard, automatic pistols in hand, barring the way. It was apparent that they were not wanted. Inside, the General Secretary had no difficulty in arriving at a joint decision to carry out a single warning strike and the President of the Soviet Union was then informed of what was expected of him.

A very precisely detailed plan was made to allow him to warn the President of the United States over the hot line immediately the strike had been launched that one, and only one, missile was on its way and to indicate its target. He was to emphasize that this was in the nature of a warning to the Alliance, a warning which, it would be noted, though severe, was being given without doing any harm to the United States. It was not the initiation of an inter-continental exchange, in which, he was to remind the other President, the Soviet Union disposed of a very powerful second-strike capability. President Vorotnikov would hope and most earnestly urged that the US would now agree to very early discussions. Otherwise there could be further selective strikes.

The hot line conversation, amid frantic speculation on the Allied side, was arranged for 1020 hours Greenwich Mean Time (1320 local time) the next day, 20 August. President Vorotnikov duly delivered his message.

At 1030 hours GMT exactly, the one megaton warhead launched by the USSR detonated at 3,500 metres above Winson Green, in Birmingham, with results which we have recorded elsewhere.*

At 1035 hours GMT the British Prime Minister and the President of the United States agreed on instant reprisal. The French President gave his concurrence and the Allies were all informed, even as instructions were on their way to two nuclear submarines, one each of the United States and Royal Navies. As a result of these the ancient and beautiful city of Minsk was totally destroyed, in a devastating attack even more dreadful in its power and its appalling results than that on Birmingham, and the events were set in train which were to tear the imperial structure of the Soviet Union apart and leave the world in general bewilderment, with parts of it in total chaos.

* See Sir John Hackett and others, op. cit., chapter 25, 'The Destruction of Birmingham', pp. 287 ff.

The hideous and gigantic doom which descended upon the unsuspecting city of Minsk in the early afternoon of 20 August stunned the world. Following hard upon the disaster which had overtaken the city of Birmingham in England less than an hour before, it did much to alter the outlook of people in our time with, beyond any doubt at all, a powerful impact on history in time to come. Is it possible, people ask, and will go on asking, that human beings can allow themselves to be driven into situations in which they find no alternative to this?

The four missiles, each of between 200 and 300 kilotons, which detonated over the centre of the city of Minsk at 1350 local time (1050 GMT) on 20 August at 3,000 metres, set up a towering fiery beacon which would be seen nearly as far off as Moscow, 600 kilometres away. The missiles did not, as distant observers noted, all. detonate at once. One exploded, then almost immediately two more, and after a second or two the fourth. Ground zeros were all within a circle, as subsequent investigation has established, of a radius of roughly 1,000 metres.

The fireball of the first soared up in dreadful majesty alone from its point of detonation at 3 kilometres to a height of nearly 12, a beacon of light more searing than the sun. The next two, very near to each other in time and space, closely pursued the first, the fireballs of all three merging into one gigantic, blinding pillar. The fourth and last followed a few moments later and did not rise so high, reaching up some 10 kilometres into the base of an immense and growing mass of cloud. What seemed about to form huge mushrooms was now writhing in promethean patterns, turning, twisting and whirling, beginning within one minute of the first explosion to form a single colossal cloud rising to a height of some 25 kilometres across a span of 30 or 40 and now spreading in one single blanket across the sky. The blinding light from the central pillar lasted a full twenty seconds even in the clarity of an August afternoon sky.

The unbelievably fierce effect of the downward heatwave was felt first. At a range of over 15 kilometres from the epicentre people clad in ordinary summer clothing in the open received burns which demanded immediate medical attention if they were not to prove fatal. Such attention was almost never forthcoming. The epicentre of the attack, above which the missiles had been set to detonate, was the grandiose building of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Belorussia, built in the late 1930s in the style then current to emphasize the power, extent and modernity of socialism. In front of it stood a full-size statue of Lenin. Within a few seconds of the first detonation this immense structure was no more than a great pile of rubble. Somewhere in there the statue of Lenin, the principal architect of all this huge disorder, lay pounded into dust. Up to some 5 kilometres from the former Communist Party headquarters, everything combustible was immediately set on fire. Fires were also springing up further out from the centre but the heat pulse was followed in a few seconds by blast waves of terrific power which extinguished many of the fires raging in the centre itself. The huge pressures developed by blast crushed everything immediately below, so that within 5 kilometres of the centre everything above ground level, of whatever construction, was brought crashing to the earth. The effect of the blast wave declined as it travelled outwards and some buildings of stouter construction still remained standing, if badly damaged, further out, though structures more lightly built, if not immediately destroyed by blast, were often torn apart by the hurricane winds that followed it. As far out as 12 kilometres from the city centre railway trucks were hurled from the permanent way, oil tanks were split asunder and their contents spread, while overhead wiring everywhere came down.

The noise of these explosions, in a continuous roar, lasted for more than thirty seconds at Dzerzhinsk, for example, some 30 kilometres away to the south-west and an important centre of local administration with a key railway station, as it also did at Borisov, about the same distance away from Minsk on the direct railway line to Moscow in the north-east. Damage at this range was relatively slight, though very many windows were broken, but the terrifying burning fiery furnace, with its stupefying noise, stunned all who saw it, even those who saved their sight by turning away.

The attack came quite without warning and though there were shelters available for at least a part of the population, very few people were in them. Of the one and a quarter million inhabitants of the city of Minsk, some 50,000 were killed almost instantly. Some, so badly burnt in the first thermal pulse as to have no hope of survival, were mercifully killed in the blast wave which almost immediately followed, while many were buried alive in the piles of masonry from buildings thrown down by the shock.

Something that could be seen from near Moscow, some 600 kilometres' distant, was even more clearly manifest in important places nearer to Minsk itself. It was visible in Riga, capital of Latvia to the north-west, in Kiev in the south-east and in Warsaw some 450 kilometres to the south-west. The pillar of fire was seen and the rumble of the detonations clearly heard at Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, only 170 kilometres away, while in the important Lithuanian city of Kaunas, 100 kilometres further off, the disturbance in the sky was also clearly visible and the rumble of the bursts was plainly heard. The inhabitants of Bobruisk, also in Belorussia and only 150 kilometres away from Minsk, were shocked and terrified. Much was seen and heard in Smolensk, Vitebsk, Gomel and Brest, on the Belorussian/Polish border. In all these important places, each with its own political interests, there was confusion and uncertainty and everyone was gripped by a fear approaching panic as to what might happen next.

In the suburbs of Minsk, where there were still wooden buildings, something approaching a firestorm was developing, generated in the tremendous currents of air caused by the impact of the blast wave. It was scarcely possible that any living thing could survive in the inner part of the city and if any did it could not be for long. On the outskirts burnt and blinded people, many bleeding badly from the effects of flying glass and other debris carried through the air by winds approaching hurricane force, all in a severe state of shock, were stumbling about in a forlorn search for parents or children and for medical assistance of which there was no hope at all. Others whose injuries prevented movement or who were pinned in wreckage from which there was no possibility of their rescue lay where they were in a state of stunned despair.

Soviet provision for civil defence had been held up in the early 1980s as something to admire and imitate. It is true that there were in the neighbourhood of Minsk concentrations of civil defence expertise and equipment at places like Borisov, Bobruisk and Baranovichi. All available resources were mobilized and moved in towards the disaster area. The authorities, however, were less concerned with the alleviation of personal distress than with the control of the movement of refugees, pathetic crowds of people who came pouring out from the outskirts of Minsk and its neighbouring regions along the roads towards Orsha and Bobruisk, people still alive, unlike those in the city, but suffering greatly from burns, injuries from falling masonry and a thousand other sources of distress. Almost all came on foot. By the outbreak of war the private ownership of motor vehicles in Minsk was at the level normal in Soviet cities, that is, at about that found among black South Africans. The few that there were had, of course, at once been requisitioned. Here and there in this heart-rending horde there would be a military or official motor vehicle, or one seized by force. For the most part the crowd just stumbled hurriedly on, carrying bits of household gear or food or bedding, wheeling perambulators, or handcarts upon which old or injured people sometimes lay. They only wanted, for the most part, in their state of stunned stupor, to get away.

The problem of controlling their movement, daunting though it might be, was in the Soviet fashion fairly easily solved, at least in the first instance. The USSR had raised more than 1,000 KGB battalions in the process of mobilization. It was not difficult to put a barrage round Minsk at a distance of some 12 kilometres from the centre and shoot anyone not belonging to the Party structure or the military who wished to come further.

At a distance of some 30 kilometres (in front of Borisov for example) a further ring of KGB troops was established. It was their business not to shoot down anyone attempting to get through but simply to send them back, with the exception of any individuals who could prove an official connection.

The headquarters of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Belorussia had moved out from Minsk on the outbreak of war and was established, together with the headquarters of the Belorussian Military District, in Orsha. These two centres of power, the military and the civil acting jointly, with the military commander technically in charge but the Party First Secretary as his deputy the real source of authority, now faced a truly frightening task of relief and reorganization. It was quite beyond the resources of the republic of Belorussia. It was formidable even for the USSR and could hardly be contemplated without despair.