Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties (134 page)

The new strategy was the work of Admiral Gorshkov, whose
writings constituted a body of doctrine comparable to Admiral Mahan’s, and whose advocacy of a huge submarine fleet plus a global surface force became established policy in the early 1960s.
⁹⁰
In the fourteen-year period following the missile crisis, Soviet Russia built a total of 1,323 ships of all classes (compared to 302 American), including 120 major surface combat ships, eighty-three amphibious and fifty-three auxiliaries. By the same date (1976), Gorshkov had accumulated a fleet of 188 nuclear submarines, forty-six of them carrying strategic missiles.
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In the late 1970s, the first genuine Soviet carriers appeared. The impact of the new Soviet navy on geopolitics became undeniable in the 1967 Arab—Israeli war, when a large Soviet naval presence in the Eastern Mediterranean was established on a permanent basis. By 1973, during the Yom Kippur war, the position of the American fleet in this theatre was described by one of its commanders as ‘very uncomfortable’ for the first time since the destruction of Japanese naval power.
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By this point the Soviet navy, already predominant in the North-East Atlantic and North-West Pacific, was ready to move into the South Atlantic and the Indian Ocean.

Naval power was one element in the Soviet descent on black Africa which was a major feature of the later 1970s. The other was the use of Cuba as a satellite-mercenary. In the 1960s Soviet Russia bought Cuban allegiance comparatively cheaply: less than half a billion dollars a year. In return it got verbal support: Castro loudly defended the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. By the early 1970s the Cuban economy was degenerating fast and in 1972 there was an agonizing reappraisal of Soviet—Cuban relations. The Cuban debt to Russia now stood at nearly $4 billion, and Brezhnev saw no alternative but to defer all interest and principal payments to 1986 and in the meantime bail Cuba out.
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The cost to Russia rose first to $8 million, then $10 million and (by the early 1980s) $12 million a day: nearly $4.5 billion a year. In return, however, Brezhnev acquired a valuable instrument for the penetration of sub-Saharan Africa. Soviet Russia had of course been active in Arab Africa since the Nasser deal in 1955. But Soviet military and economic missions had often made themselves unpopular; and, being white, were easily accused of ‘imperialism’. As one of the Arab premiers, Mahgoub of the Sudan, put it, Arab states got ‘obsolete machinery’ from Soviet Russia in return for primary products, ‘a form of barter’; and the Soviet bloc ‘often resold the raw materials obtained from us to the capitalist West’ at below-market prices, with ‘disastrous effects on our countries producing the raw materials’.
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One of the many advantages of using Cuban surrogates was that, by an inexplicable paradox, Cuba was a member of the ‘non-aligned bloc’, though in
fact the most vociferously faithful of the Soviet client-states. Cuban soldiers, being non-white (in many cases black), were not easily presented as imperialists. Castro had already earned his keep by defending Soviet Russia from the charge of imperialism at the 1973 Algiers Conference of the non-aligned. Where, he asked, were Russia’s ‘monopoly corporations’? Where its ‘participation in the multinational companies’? ‘What factories, what mines, what oilfields does it own in the underdeveloped world? What worker is exploited in any country of Asia, Africa or Latin America by Soviet capital?’
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Now he was asked to go further and provide non-imperialist invasion forces. In December 1975, under Soviet naval escort, the first Cuban troops landed in Angola. In 1976 they moved into Abyssinia, now in the Soviet camp, and into Central and East Africa. As far back as 1963, the old colony of French Congo proclaimed itself the People’s Republic of the Congo, the first Marxist-Leninist state in Africa. It did not always behave like one. European political categories did not always translate into African realities.
⁹⁶
But by the end of the 1970s there were ten such African states, providing Soviet Russia, in varying degrees, with diplomatic and propaganda support, economic advantages and military bases. And in 1979, in Nicaragua, Cuba acquired the first satellite of its own, in Central America.

The extension of the Cold War, during the Seventies, to virtually every part of the globe, gave the decade the air of chronic insecurity so characteristic of the Thirties – the same syndrome of unemployment, economic decay, armaments and aggression. Soviet policy was by no means the only factor. America was in part responsible for the drift to violence. To offset the drop in arms purchases with the end of the Vietnam war, American industry moved into international arms sales on an unprecedented scale. In 1970 America sold $952 millions worth of arms abroad. The figure had jumped to over $ 10 billion by 1977–8. But others were in the race. In the 1960s and 1970s, French arms sales multiplied over thirty times. Soviet arms-exports increased even faster than America’s. In 1979–81 America ceased to be the leading arms-exporter, falling into third place behind Soviet Russia and France (with Britain a poor fourth). By the early 1980s, international arms sales were approaching an annual value of about $70 billion, nearly all of them negotiated at a state-to-state level. One Soviet tank factory alone covered twenty square miles and exported to thirty countries, most of them poor. The old free enterprise Merchants of Death looked innocent by comparison with modern states, competing to sell destruction by the megaton.

It is true that none of the great powers sold nuclear weapons. But they failed to prevent their proliferation. In the 1950s, well-meaning scientists spread the notion that plutonium for ‘peace’ reactors was
not normally suitable for bombs. On this quite fallacious assumption, America launched ‘operation candour’ in December 1953 with the ‘Atoms for Peace’ programme. It released over 11,000 classified papers, including details of the Purex method of producing the pure plutonium vital for big explosions.
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Some of the details of the assistance programmes were sloppily drafted, so that when a clear breach took place – for instance when India exploded a bomb in 1974 – American officials could pretend that it had not. The Non-Proliferation Treaty negotiated by America, Russia and Britain in July 1968, quickly ratified by forty other powers, really made little difference since even countries which signed it could, under its rules, get very close to a nuclear capability and attain it rapidly after the three-month notice of withdrawal under Article Eleven.

In fact nuclear powers did not multiply as fast as pessimists predicted. In 1960 it was calculated twelve new countries would go nuclear by 1966.
⁹⁸
But nuclear umbrella alliances, such as
NATO, SEATO
and
CENTO
, tended to discourage states from independent ventures. Proliferation occurred as a result of antagonistic ‘pairing’. China’s bomb in 1964 was a function of her quarrel with Russia; India’s 1974 bomb was the direct result of China’s: Pakistan’s putative bomb was the offspring of India’s. Both Israel and South Africa became covert nuclear powers in the 1970s, largely because they were not members of reliable military pacts which included nuclear coverage. Israel’s bomb provoked an Iraqi nuclear-weapons programme, frustrated in 1981 when Israeli aircraft destroyed Iraq’s French-built ‘peaceful’ reactor.

There was also a tendency for advanced powers to drift into nuclear weapons programmes. This was what happened in France under the Fourth Republic, long before de Gaulle took the decision to make bombs. As one official put it, ‘the manufacture of an atomic bomb … welded itself into our public life as a sort of by-product of an officially peaceful effort’.
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That was the most likely route West Germany and Japan, hitherto encouraged to remain non-nuclear by American guarantees, would pursue towards the bomb. By the end of the 1970s, Japan had developed a large and innovatory space industry and was in a position not merely to produce nuclear warheads very fast but to develop an advanced delivery system on the lines of the American Trident. But to become a first-class nuclear power involved by this stage developing protection, counter-detection and second-strike capabilities, all dauntingly expensive.
¹⁰⁰
Barring a retreat by America into isolation, Germany and Japan looked unlikely to join the club. The danger lay, rather, in a ragged development of marginal nuclear capacity by unstable Arab powers or states which, for one reason or another, felt themselves insecure
and inadequately protected by alliances, such as Brazil, Argentina, South Korea, Taiwan and Indonesia. By the early 1980s, twenty-two powers (in addition to Israel and South Africa) were in a position to develop nuclear weapons at comparatively low cost and over a one-to four-year time span.
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In practice, however, the world was less disturbed during the 1970s by the possibility of nuclear war than by the growing reality of other forms of violence. More than thirty conventional wars were fought in the decade, most of them in Africa. Less costly in human life, but politically and psychologically far more disturbing for the world, was the growth of international terrorism. Many historical strands went into this new phenomenon. There was the Muslim tradition of politico-religious terrorism, going back to the Persian–Sunni sect of the Assassins in the Middle Ages. It was born again in the Arab—Israeli struggle in inter-war Palestine, taking final shape in the Palestine Liberation Organization, which in the Sixties and Seventies was the largest, richest, best-armed and most active of all terrorist groups, with its own training camps of which many other, quite unrelated terrorist movements took advantage.

Secondly there was the Russian tradition, transmuted by Lenin (who repudiated individual terrorism as a form of ‘infantile Leftism’) into state-terrorism, both for internal use and for export. Throughout this period Soviet Russia maintained a terrorist training scheme, directed from the military academy at Simteropol in the Crimea, from which foreign ‘guerrillas’ and ‘saboteurs’ graduated for service in the Middle East, Latin America and Africa. Most
PLO
experts and instructors benefited from this course.
¹⁰²

Thirdly there was the European, chiefly German, tradition of intellectualizing violence as a moral necessity. The first large-scale modern phase of political terrorism took place, as we have seen, in Germany 1919–22, when right-wing killers murdered 354 people. It was the failure of society to bring these people to book which prepared the way for the state terror of Hitler. This took many forms, including kidnapping, practised by the Brown Sisters of the ss, who scoured concentration camps for blond, blue-eyed children under six. The German terrorist tradition found philosophical expression in Existentialism, popularized in the post-war period by Sartre, who remained fascinated by violence throughout his life and whose pupil, Franz Fanon, published in 1961 the most influential of all terrorist handbooks,
Les damnés de la terre.

Fourthly, there was the non-political tradition of Mediterranean piracy, going back to the second millennium before Christ. Pompey had ended piracy in the first century
BC
, and it was a sinister sign of Rome’s fading power when the pirates returned in force in the
middle of the third century
AD
. In the eighteenth century the British navy eliminated piracy on the oceans, but the Barbary menace remained until 1830, when the French occupied Algiers. For the next 130 years, the age of colonialism, large-scale piracy and kidnapping virtually ceased to exist. It rapidly returned as the imperialist tide receded, especially in its traditional centres, Algiers and Tripoli, with the end of the Algerian war and Gadafy’s 1969
coup.
But it now had a distinct political coloration, with the Algerian leaders in the 1960s, and Gadafy in the 1970s, providing money, arms, training facilities, refuges and orchestration. These four strands, coming together in the 1970s, made the problem of terrorism immensely complex and difficult to define. It could not be seen as a simple Soviet conspiracy to destabilize legitimate states. In fact the democratic state most seriously damaged by terrorism in the 1970s, Italy, was the victim more of commercial violence, especially kidnappings which netted $100 million in the years 1975–80, than of purely political terror.
¹⁰³

Yet there was no doubt that individual terrorist movements, such as the Baader-Meinhof gang in West Germany, the
IRA
in Ulster, the Red Brigades in Italy, Basque separatists in Spain, the
PLO
and perhaps a score of other Arab, Latin-American and black African terror groups, benefited from an international radical network, whose moving spirits, such as the Venezuelan assassin known as ‘Carlos’, were all Communists.
¹⁰⁴
Two incidents, selected from scores, illustrate the international and Marxist character of the movement. The massacre of twenty-six pilgrims, mostly Puerto Ricans, at Israel’s Lod airport in 1972, was carried out by Japanese Marxists, trained by the
PLO
in Lebanon, armed with Japanese weapons delivered to them in Rome by Carlos himself. Again, the Basque killers who murdered a Spanish admiral in 1974 had been trained in Cuba and the South Yemen by East Germans, Palestinians and Cubans, and used explosives acquired from
IRA
gangsters who first met the Basques in Algiers, under the auspices of the
kgb.
¹⁰⁵

It is significant that, during the Seventies, as relative American power declined, and Soviet power rose, international terrorist incidents (explosions, bombings, assassinations, hostage-taking, kidnapping, etc) increased steadily, from 279 in 1971 to 1,709 in 1980. The number of assassinations, in which the
KGB
and its antecedents had always specialized, increased spectacularly, from seventeen in 1971 to 1,169 in 1980.
¹⁰⁶
Totalitarian societies, with all-pervasive secret police permitted to arrest and imprison without trial, to torture and to practise judicial murder and assassination themselves, had little to fear from terrorism. Liberal-democratic societies had a great deal. The lesson of the Seventies was that
terrorism actively, systematically and necessarily assisted the spread of the totalitarian state; that it distinguished between lawful and totalitarian states in favour of the latter; that it exploited the apparatus of freedom in liberal societies and thereby endangered it; and that it sapped the will of a civilized society to defend itself.
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