The Third World War (3 page)

Suddenly the world was full of express trains shrieking past. Enemy armour-piercing shot! He fired his smoke protective shells at once and changed direction, telling his platoon to conform, to seek the cover of a small copse ahead to the left. The sky appeared to fill with huge predatory helicopters bearing strange markings and, worse, with rockets issuing from their undercarriages. The Leopard next to him stopped, smoke pouring from it. One crewman scrambled out, another got to the turret and fell back, a shattered trunk. Of all absurdities, there occurred to Klaus at this very moment a phrase which had been hammered home to him and his classmates at the Panzerausbildungsschule so often and so emphatically. “The great thing about the Leopard tank, which makes it superior to all other Allied, as well as Soviet, tanks, is its agility. It gives you protection through speed.”

“Speed up,” he yelled through the intercom to his driver, “and jink for your life!”

Far from speeding up, the tank slithered to a halt as a shuddering jar smashed it sideways. Klaus glanced down into the turret. It seemed to 6e full of blood and roughly butchered meat. There was an ugly smell of burning.

“Protection through speed, eh?” thought Klaus. “Was fur Quatsch ist das!” What rubbish! He jumped to the ground and ran. A moment later the whole Leopard exploded in a shambles of twisted metal, equipment, human wreckage and the indescribable mess of war.

Accounts such as these show how powerful was the impact of the thunderbolt which came down in the early morning of 4 August on
NATO
ground forces in the Central Region of Allied Command Europe, and the fury in the air. It was so violent as to leave on most of those who first had to meet it a very deep feeling of shock. Its effect was stunning. Some of the ground troops who came through the first day unscathed were by the evening as dazed and disoriented as the survivors of a savage traffic accident.

Very few of the men now engulfed in the volcanic eruption of ground action on a modern battlefield had ever before been exposed to anything remotely like it. The thunderous clamour, the monstrous explosions, the sheets and floods and fountains of flame and the billowing clouds of thick black smoke around them, the confusion, the bewilderment, the sickening reek of blood and high explosives, the raw uncertainty and, more than anything else, the hideous, unmanning noise—all combined to produce an almost overpowering urge to panic flight. To men in forward units the enemy seemed everywhere. Their roaring aircraft filled the sky, ripping the earth with raking cannon fire. Their tanks came on in clanging black hordes, spouting flames and thunder. The fighting vehicles of their infantry surged into and between the forward positions of the Allied defence like clattering swarms of fire-breathing dragons. It looked as though nothing could stop the oncoming waves. There seemed to be no hope, no refuge anywhere.

Panic here and there was only to be expected. Some lately recalled reservists—and even long-service regulars—found this sudden exposure to gigantic stress more than they could bear. Occasionally, under the swift contagion of uncertainty and fear,
NATO
units simply broke and melted away—but not often. Men adjust quite quickly, even to the appalling conditions of the battlefield, particularly where there is a job to be done which they know how to do and for which they have the right tools, and above all when they do it under competent direction in the company of their friends. The first day was a nightmare—but it was far from a total disaster.

But why was all this happening? What had brought it about? How had the course of events developed to this point—and what was now to follow?

By the inauguration of the fortieth president of the United Slates in January 1985, the world was in transition from the old-fashioned conflict situations, based on military and political competition for power, towards the newer ones involving urban guerrilladom and a Third World manufacturing revolution’—though in some places this was going erratically’wrong. North-South had begun to overshadow East-West.

There were 180 governments in the world. As in 1977, at the time of President Carter’s inauguration, only about thirty-five of these could realistically expect their leaders to be replaced by a process of election. The most common way to change a government was by coup d’etat or by dictatorial succession.

But the frequency of coups was growing, and they were often bloody. Bureaucrats in some communist countries had reason to fear that the habit might spread to them. The more fearful apparatchiks included some in the Soviet Union, a country which had for so many decades normally changed its government not by violent overthrow but by cosy dictatorial arrangement. China, by contrast, was concentrating on becoming ‘a new Japan’ through economic expansion. There was already talk of a China-Japan co-prosperity sphere.

The new President-elect of the United States, Governor Thompson, was a southern (and therefore conservative) Republican. He had been quite unknown nationally two years before his election in 1984, just as his two-term predecessor, President Carter, had been two years before his own election in 1976.

Mr. Thompson had campaigned energetically against the ‘soft-centred international liberalism’ of the Democratic candidate, Vice-President Mondale. The President-elect was, however, worried by his own relative lack of knowledge of international affairs, and called two prestigious advisers in this field down to his South Carolina home the weekend after his election. One adviser was the director of the new United Universities Think-Tank. The other was a previous Secretary of State, always known as the Ex-Secretary.

The two were asked to set down a summary of their views about the main challenges that would face the Thompson Administration over (as it was assumed) the years 1985-93, and to compare these with the challenges that had faced the
USA
on President Carter’s Inauguration Day in 1977. The Think-Tank’s report was to concentrate on the “poor South’ of the world, the Ex-Secretary’s report on the Soviet Union and the ‘rich North’.

During the week after the ejection of November 1984, and therefore eleven weeks before his Inauguration Day in January 1985, Governor Thompson received these two reports.

The Think-Tank’s report displeased him. it seemed, he told his wife, to be ‘written by a computer with a bleeding heart’.

THE
THINK-TANK’S
REPORT
ON
THE
‘
POOR
SOUTH’.
NOVEMBER
1984

On President Carter’s Inauguration Day in January 1977 there were 4 billion people in the world, of whom two-thirds (or 2.7 billion) lived in countries with a median income below $300 a head, while one-third lived in countries with median incomes above $3.000 per head. About 55 per cent (or 1.5 billion) of the 2.7 billion people in very poor countries were below the age of twenty-one. That, indeed, is a major reason why they were such poor countries. They were. in 1977, nations of children, who produced pretty well nothing, and of teenagers, who produced little but riots.

The main change on your Inauguration Day in 1985 will be that those 1.5 billion people will be eight years older than they were in 1977. The main change oh your retirement day in i993 will be that they will be sixteen years older. As the 1.5 billion have moved up into the main chitdbearing age groups, world population has inevitably risen somewhat (to 4.5 billion), although fertility rates have luckily continued the decline they were already showing by early 1970s.

The poor countries of 1985-93 are no longer nations of children and of teenagers, but of under-employed cohabiting couples in potentially the most productive (and militarily effective) age groups, the twenties and early thirties.

The great majority of this unprecedented addition of 1.5 billion people to the world’s labor force since 1977 are non-white, and are as literate as, for example, the Turkish workers in Germany in 1977. when they had an earnings level of around an annual $5.000 in 1977 dollars. There is no reason why with a proper technostructure the additional population should not attain earnings of something like the same standard, bringing from those 1.5 billion young workers by far the biggest sudden increase in real gross world product the world has ever seen. The tragedy is that the technostructure is not in most places being provided.

The poor South of the world can today be divided into four groups;

1 A few breakthrough countries where real
GNP
is increasing at 7-12 percent per annum, but which have also maintained social cohesion. Apart from the People’s Republic of China, most of these are countries which have retained free-market economic systems:
e.g.
Brazil in South America;

Singapore, Malaysia and the Philippines in Asia. Many of them are in East Asia, however, and have therefore been aided by the remarkable economic growth in China since the death of Chairman Mao; even more by the coming together of the Japanese and Chinese economic miracles [see the Ex-Secretary’s report below]. Most of” these Asian’breakthrough’countries will want to remain neutral in any big power struggle, and continue to make money, as the United States did in 1914-16 and 1939-41.

2 A certain number of unstable right-wing countries:
e.g.
Mexico and Argentina in South America, the richer states of the former Union of South Africa and the capitalist half of the disintegrating Indian Union. These countries have free enterprise economic systems, and have generally had quite high economic growth rates in the period 1977-84. But they have been unable to handle the social problems of the proletarianiza-tion and urbanization of a sizeable part of their labor force, so urban guerrilladom, muggings in the overcrowded cities, and corruption in the civil service and police are rife. Their governments are sometimes unlovely rich men’s dictatorships, which proclaim loudly that they are loyal allies of the United States, though the United States should not always be pleased to have them.

3 A group of unstable left-wing countries:
e.g.
Egypt (and indeed most other African countries, including Zimbabwe), Bangladesh and the poorer states of the disintegrating federation of India, and also to some extent Pakistan. In these countries the governments are generally replaced by coups d’etat, and the ‘new class’ of government technocrats live in constant fear of these—

4 The only Moscow-communist countries left in the poor South of the world are now in the Caribbean—led by Jamaica and Cuba. But some of the ‘unstable left’ countries—of which the most important is Egypt—seem to be moving towards Moscow. The former communist small countries in East Asia (Vietnam, North Korea, etc.) still call themselves communist— as does Chairman Hua’s China—but with the Japanese-Chinese rapprochement they are merging into the East Asian co-prosperity sphere.

Significantly, the Asian republics of the Soviet Union itself are showing some signs of restlessness. Their peoples would gain if they could forge more independent ties with the China-Japan co-prosperity sphere and loosen their ties with Moscow, just as the states of the disintegrating Indian Union and former Union of South Africa have loosened their ties with Delhi and Pretoria.

‘The real
GNP
of countries in these four groups and their growth since 1977 clearly indicate that the ‘breakthrough’ and ‘unstable right-wing’ governments have made their peoples much more prosperous in the period 1977-84. In economic terms, the ‘unstable left’ countries (wholly) and the Moscow-communist countries (partly) have failed. It would be better for all the peoples of the world if more countries could be lifted out of the ‘unstable left’ class into either of the first two categories.

Yet the four most likely flashpoints of trouble in the poor two-thirds of the world, at this beginning of your presidency, are connected with possible attempts by either ‘unstable left’ or Moscow-communist countries to seize or subvert power in ‘unstable right’ countries. We would judge that these four most probable flashpoints are:

I In the Middle East. The conclusion of peace with Israel. under the Geneva settlement during Mr. Carter’s presidency. has allowed the Arabs even more freedom for their internal quarrels. Since the new unstable left government in Egypt remembers the food riots with which its own supporters overthrew the former President Samdi, there is a strong temptation for Egypt to go for the oil of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf. This could be by means of internal subversion followed by proclamation of a new and immensely rich United Arab Republic (including Saudi Arabia and Kuwait) which would sponsor a new hard line in
OPEC
. Egypt has been angling for some time for Soviet support for such coups d’etat in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf, but so far this has been refused. It is quite possible that a ‘United Arab’ coup d’etat would win popular support among young men in the Gulf, since many of them regard their free-spending sheikhs as effete pooves, like the rulers of the old Ottoman Empire. If a new
UAR
of this kind were ever proclaimed, some people would say that the consequent threat to world oil supplies would, of itself, justify US military intervention in the area. We would not advocate this, but the choice between peace and war, even nuclear war. might conceivably lie outside American hands. The only stable right-wing (indeed, ‘breakthrough’) country in the area—the Shah’s Iran—might not sit idly by. And Iran now probably has a nuclear capability based on French technology even though it has never tested a weapon.

2 The communist Caribbean (in which Jamaica is now the leader, rather than Cuba) and unstable governments of Central America might try to initiate a coup d’etat in Mexico, whose dynamic new president deserves US support.

3 Black African forces from the ‘unstable left countries of Zimbabwe and Namibia, supported by Cuban and Jamaican and maybe even Soviet ‘volunteers’ landed in Angola and Mozambique, might attack those states of the former Union of South Africa which have developed right-wing governments, sometimes ‘unstable right-wing’ ones. By far the richest of these states are, of course, the three ‘white tribes’ homelands’ of Southern Cape Province, Eastern Natal and Krugerland (Pretoria-Johannesburg). But a real prosperity is also being attained by those black-ruled states and cantons of the former Union of South Africa who have struck up successful (although so-called ‘Uncle Tom’) economic relations with the three white homelands. If there is an actual invasion of this area from the north, the dilemmas set for your Administration wiil be: (a) economic, because benign growth spreading from the dynamic area of former South Africa appears to be Africa’s only hope for a non-oil economic growth area this century; and (b) military-moral, because the white tribes in South Africa agreed under the treaty of Pretoria of 1982 that neither they nor the black tribes in former South Africa should have substantial military forces, but that there would be reliance on UN troops on the northern border (most awkwardly, now Mexican, Polish and Indian troops) and perhaps some hopes, however ill based, of intervention by US troops.