The Third World War (33 page)

In the late seventies the US programme seemed to have reached a plateau of development, while the
USSR
continued with frequent manned launches on research tasks, the exact purposes of which were not always evident to Western observers. It was, however, pretty well authenticated that they were developing a counter— satellite capability employing, in addition to jamming, certainly lasers and other high energy beams. 1 n 1985 both sides had some counter-satellite capability, but it was suspected that the
USSR
was well in the lead. It refrained from making use of this capability until the early hours of 4 August for fear of still further conceding the advantage of surprise but, as recorded elsewhere, as soon as the offensive was launched in the Central Region it made an all-out effort in space.

This immediately degraded Allied communications, but it was a degradation that could at least in part be compensated for by switching to atmospheric systems as soon as space circuits went out. When the history of the space war comes to be written the part played by the communications managers in the US control centres will be seen to have made a remarkable and decisive contribution to the Allied war effort.

On NATO’s declaration of alert in July 1985,
NASA
, together with the Department of Defense, urgently reviewed the launch schedules for the space shuttle Orbiter vehicles. Of the five in service, one was available. Of the others, one was on long turn-round for replacement of its thermal tiles; one was having its undercarriage renewed for a heavy landing at Vandenberg AFB; one was on a thirty-day refit and one was in orbit recovering a satellite. The European Space Laboratory was on the ground and not scheduled to be relaunched until later in the year.

At 0600 hours Eastern Standard Time on Friday 2 August the available orbiter (Enterprise 101) was launched from Cape Kennedy with a four-man crew and Colonel ‘Slim’ Wentworth.
USAF
, in command. 4t was a multi-purpose mission in which priorities might need to be changed, and a manned craft was the best way of preserving flexibility. Photography and full range of electronic reconnaissance was required from its regular passes over Soviet Russia and Eastern Europe. In addition it was ready with specially prepared tapes in over a dozen languages for propaganda broadcasts, but these would only be ordered if political developments during the mission made it propitious to do so.

As tension heightened towards the end of July the two Big Birds were so manoeuvred as to photograph the likely dispersal sites for the Soviet SS-16 mobile
ICBM
(inter-continental ballistic missiles). At the same time the Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff ordered the readying of two further Big Birds as replacements forany damaged satellites, with priority going to maintaining the electronic surveillance which would be so vital to the Allied
ECM
campaign if war broke out. He and his colleagues had also ruled that three supplementary navigation satellites should be placed in geostationary orbit 30,000 kilometres up over the Atlantic. This was the system that gave such an astonishing navigational capability and allowed USAF’s F-lll aircraft to be immediately capable of reading out a ground position to an accuracy of twelve metres. It was not thought that these high satellites would be at much risk. They were very difficult to get at, and there must surety be more cost-effective ways of disrupting the system than by days of satellite manoeuvring in order to effect close-range interference. Some corroboration of that view came on 2 August when the
FLEETSATCOM
(fleet satellite communications) tracking and control station on the eastern seaboard suffered major damage from an undetected saboteur. The very disturbing feature of this was that the damage was done by electronic means and could only have been inflicted by someone with an intimate knowledge of the station and its technology.

The war in space was very much a matter of move and counter-move and the outcome was fairly evenly balanced. The US were all the time concerned to husband their limited number of launchers. On the other hand, their satellites had much more comprehensive and versatile capabilities in space than those of the
USSR
. Furthermore, with doubling and tripling up of systems they were very resilient to interference and could accept extensive damage on occasions and still usefully carry on their tasks. The key information on Soviet electronic emissions in the Central Region battle area was in fact extracted very rapidly and early on in the war to the great advantage of the Allies. Ballistic missile warning from high satellites was also preserved completely throughout the war. The Soviet system suffered heavily from US interterence and from the random effect of its own inherent unreliability and the short life of its vehicles. By dint of frequent replacements the Russians kept up good coverage of the Atlantic and the United States itself, but in the event this was not to give them the same practical advantage that the Allies obtained from their own electronic reconnaissance.

None of this accorded very closely with popular ideas gleaned from the bookstalls and the cinemas, and it was not to be expected that it would. However, there was one incident that came quite near to the science fiction fantasies, and for what it may presage for the future it may. be worth recounting here.

Enterprise 101 had been in orbit for forty hours by midnight on 3 August. All her systems were working excellently and she had been discharging regular canisters of exposed film back into the atmosphere for recovery and processing. Colonel Wentworth had not been ordered to start the broadcasts but his spacecraft had been under close observation by the Soviet Union; her missions, on which the Russians were well informed from their own sources in the States, were highly unacceptable to them. Apart from the very real strategic disadvantages to the Soviet Union of this space mission, the Politburo and military alike found it intolerable that four Americans should be able to sweep across their country with impunity ten times a day when they were on the brink of war. But they were well prepared, and had already laid plans for putting Enterprise out of business if they could.

In the early hours of 4 August a Soyuz 49 mission was launched with a two-man crew, and on its fourth orbit the Soyuz craft was manoeuvred to within 150 metres of Enterprise. Wentworth was keeping a visual look-out at that time, and when Mission 49 made its first beam sweep across Enterprise the laser traversed his line of sight and blinded him. The Enterprise crew therefore had plenty on their hands, both in alerting space control as to what was going on and in coping with a blinded and weightless commander. Captain Jensen of the US Navy took over command and ordered an immediate check for further damage. The craft had in fact been subjected to other high energy beam sweeps and the damage check brought gloomy news; their five engine nozzles and their elevens had been damaged, and there was now no possibility of a successful controlled re-entry into the atmosphere. Worst of all, their solar cells seemed to have suffered and electric power generation had ceased. They had a large battery capacity, but Jensen immediately ordered a reduction of all electrical services to the minimum required for life support and for communication with space control.

Space control were reassuring; after a five-minute pause they announced that Enterprise 103, which was now safely back at Vandenberg with her recovered satellite, would be readied with all possible haste and sent up to recover them. Jensen and his crew knew very well that it normally took several days to get one of the orbiters ready for flight again, and they wondered quietly to themselves whether their own batteries would be able to maintain their life support’functions until the relief mission could arrive.

But the war was now on, and damage and interference to US surveillance required the two waiting Big Birds to be placed in orbit without delay. Grimly, the Joint Chiefs decided that when Enterprise 103 was ready she must be held for priority satellite replacement. Colonel Wentworth and his crew had left the earth before hostilities started. They spent the duration of the Third World War orbiting in space, and their bodies were recovered on a solemn mission at the end of August 1985. They were the first casualties of the war in space and are buried in Arlington National Cemetery.

For some years after the Second World War the UK maintained a high level of air defence. The Berlin crisis and the airlift in 1948, and then the Korean War in 1950, did much to offset the idealists’ beliefs that alt arms could be laid aside at once, and while the threat was possibly not very great in those days wartime memories of 1940 were still vivid. As a result Fighter Command’s resources up to the first half of the 1950s remained considerable. Indeed, in 1957 it boasted some 600 jet fighters and a sufficiency of airfields and radars to support them.

But in 1957 there was a major shift in policy that was to leave the country denuded of adequate air defence for nearly twenty years. Evaluation of the nuclear missile threat from the
USSR
in the early fifties, at a time of overwhelming strategic nuclear power in the
USA
, had led to the contemporary strategy of trip-wire and

263

p.

retaliation. In 1957 it was decided, with impeccable logic, that all that was needed was a fighter shield to protect our nuclear-armed V-bomber bases to ensure that they could get into the air on their retaliatory missions just as soon as the ballistic missile warning system indicated that they must go. (For a discussion of this phase of British defence policy see Chapter 4.)

Whether or not the policy of trip-wire and massive retaliation was appropriate to the circumstances of the time, it was later to demonstrate a fatal flaw. As Soviet missile strength grew and the retaliatory strategy had to give way to the flexible response, with its emphasis on the ability to fight with conventional as well as nuclear weapons, so the basic assumption on which this minimal air defence was predicated disappeared. But by then the demands on government spending from many quarters left no room for the costly rebuilding of a comprehensive air defence system to counter the growing Soviet capability to attack the UK in a phase of conventional war.

By the time intelligence assessments had finally (and rather belatedly) recognized the conventional air threat it was not just a matter of numbers of aircraft—though heaven knows they were short enough; it was also a matter of numbers of men in the air and on the ground. Both were difficult to come by with the competing attractions of industry and commerce in an affluent society. Radar communications and control centres were also insufficient in capacity or availability for the changed situation. The shortage of airfields gave particular concern. By the end of the 1939-45 war there had been an airfield every fifteen to twenty-five kilometres throughout most of the country; now there were only a handful—all the others had gone back to the plough or had been handed over to municipalities or other users for a variety of purposes. The shortage of airfields was critical.

In the seventies it was necessary to think of air defence on an immeasurably larger canvas than that on which the Battle of Britain was portrayed. Not only did the stand-off weapons of an attacking force require the defences to be pushed out hundreds of kilometres if the launching aircraft were to be destroyed in time, but the areas to be defended now reached across the Eastern Atlantic, where it was necessary to protect shipping which would no longer have air cover from large fleet carriers in the Royal Navy. In addition to the central task of the defence of the United Kingdom and its base facilities, SACLANTand
SACEUR
assigned air defence responsibilities to the British in “an area that extended from the Channel to the North Norwegian Sea in the north and out very nearly to the coast of Iceland in the west. It was a tall order. If the worst
NATO
fears were ever to be realized then the air resources available in the mid-seventies would be decidedly inadequate, for in those circumstances the United Kingdom—as a rearward base for
SACEUR
and a forward base for
SACLANT
, roles decided by the strategic geography of the British Isles rather than by defence planners—could not hope to escape the close attention of the Soviet Air Forces.

To
SACLANT
, apart from affording air defence and anti-submarine air patrols for shipping in the Eastern Atlantic and Channel, the UK was a critically important base from which to mount flank support for his Strike Fleet as and when it had to fight its way against Soviet sea and air opposition into the North Norwegian Sea. And in war this was assuredly what the Strike Fleet would have to do. For
SACEU
R, the U K would be the mounting base for much of the deeper air effort behind the forward edge of the enemy’s battle area on the Continent. It would also be to the UK that any aircraft and crews held in reserve would be likely to be withdrawn. And then there was the air bridge: the endless belt of heavy-lift jumbo-sized aircraft that would carry most of the human reinforcements and much of their equipment from the
USA
to Europe as soon as full mobilization plans were put into effect. Given a rudimentary air-to-air missile system, even early generation long-range aircraft could wreak havoc with this flow if they got into that great aerial procession. They must not do so—and it was the task of the British Air Defence Commander to see that they did not. If that officer appeared, with the resources available to him in the mid-seventies, a preoccupied man, no one could say he had no cause.

Nevertheless, by 1977 things were beginning to improve, even if, in the view of the Royal Air Force, nothing like quickly enough. Some measurable progress had been made with the addition of two extra air defence squadrons provided by extending the life of some of the Lightning interceptors; the F-4 Phantoms were now the backbone of an interceptor force and had greatly raised its capability at all levels, as well as its resistance to electronic jamming; Bloodhound surface-to-air missiles (
SAM
) had been reintroduced to give low-level area defence in the southeast of England, white mobile squadrons of the British Rapier
SAM
provided point defence to vital airfields in the north. More improvements were in the pipeline: the Tornado air defence variant was due to replace the Phantom in the eighties; Nimrod airborne early warning (
AEW
) aircraft were on order; and a major rationalization and modernization plan was in train to streamline the heterogeneous and unwieldy radar communications and control systems that had grown up piecemeal through the years as the
RAF
struggled to improve its air defence under the parsimony of British defence policy. Looking further ahead, airfields were to have hardened protection for their aircraft, while a particularly flexible and jamming-resistant new data communications system, the United Kingdom Air Defence Ground Environment (
UKADGE
), would link the lighters, control centres, airborne early warning systems and airfields by the early 1980s.