Armageddon Now

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American MX missile surfaces from underground bunker I am not old enough to remember the Cuban missile crisis or the Berlin Wall episode in any detail.

But I do recall my parents and family anxiously watching the television reports of these events.

Their fear of war-of nuclear war-was transmitted to me then. Twenty years later the same unease and helplessness under the threat of anonymous destruction is in the air once more.

1980 however is not 1963. History is not repeating itself exactly.

In the early sixties the United States was the bustling symbol and prop of the great post-war boom in the capitalist west.

Its economic success went hand in hand with its diplomatic and military superiority over the entire globe. Today US imperialism is immeasurably weaker.

Every newspaper headline of the past two decades has screamed out its decay and defeat: Vietnam, economic recession, energy crisis, doliar crisis, Watergate, Angola, Iran and now Afghanistan.

Setbacks

Pardoxically each setback for the United States and the capitalist world must make war with the Soviet Union to recover lost markets and regain dominance of the world more. and not less, likely. And that is the subject of this book.

Its chief author, General. Sir John Hackett, was commander in chief of the British Army of the Rhine and commander of NATO forces in the Northern army group in West Germany.

However, he is not simply a soldier but perhaps one of the first of the new breed of Kissinger-like military leaders with a strong grasp of strategic aims, political considerations-and methods.

So General Hackett is novice entering the political arena. Some years ago in a famous letter to the Times he pointed out the weakness of NATO and demanded a rapid rearmament programme.

For this breach of the rule' preventing • the armed forces taking part in political debate he was firmly rapped across the knuckles with a feather duster by the then Wilson government.

Now, freed from the 'constraints? of the service, Géneral Hackett writes this book representing the feeling, and using the anonymous contributions of, the British and NATO military staffs.

It has a significance as a political weapon, written in a popular futurist torm to appeal to and influence middle class opinion.

Immediate history

Thus it was written in 1978 as if it is 1987 and an immediate history of the Third World War fought in 1985.

• The Warsaw Pact has been defeated-just by virtue of superior technology and a last minute rearmament programme begun in 1979.

And this is the message Sir John wants to get over-that preparations must start now if the Western Alliance is to win the next World War.

By 1984 Hackett's world is broadly divided into three power centres: the capitalist West; the Soviet Union and its satellites; and the China-Japan alliance.

Pro-Moscow

Egypt is under a pro-Moscow regime, and threatens to amalgamate with Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States by encouraging the overthrow of their corrupt feudal regimes, thus controlling the oil supplies of the West.

In Hackett's view the vital ally of the US in the area and the policeman of western interests is the Shah's Iran! (So much for crystal ball gazing. But it you reverse the names on the scenario, the 1980 Middle East situation is still , roughly described. Strategic Gulf oil reserves are slipping from the western sphere of influence under the threat of volatile Iran and Soviet-occupied Afghanistan. ' In Egypt, Sadat courts the and are met by an amphibious brigade of US Marines. US and Soviet troops clash openly.

On 4 August 1985 at dawn the Warsaw Pact offensive is launched against the whole frontier of the Federal Republic of Germany. After three weeks of intensive fighting, expending men and munitions at a rate, and on a scale not seen before in conventional warfare, the NATO lines hold.

The advance of the Warsaw Pact armies is checked. This event is enough to loosen the grip of the unstable Stalinist bureaucracies on their peoples. • Nationalist forces reappear. The old Polish flag is hoisted. Troops refuse orders from Moscow, and stop fighting:

In order to restore. the balance, the Soviet leadership plays the nuclear option and attacks Birmingham, England, with a hydrogen bomb. A million casualțies are caused.

Retaliation

NATO retaliates almost instantly with the destruction of Minsk by submarine-launched missiles. The Soviet ploy fails and after a violent change of leadership the Soviet Union breaks up into its component republics and loses its hold of Eastern Europe.

An armistice is declared and the 'Free World' is saved.

In deseribing the possible course of the war on land and in the sea and air and in covering all major theatres, the book draws a picture of the present balance of forces and advocates those changes necessary to defeat the Warsaw Pact in each area of conflict.

The analysis includes detailed comparisons of the levels of training, strategy. and tactics as well as the weaponry involved.

Undoubtedly this has been Date by the war games played OUi military statts and defence planners on their computers in recent years.

General Hackett's authority is shown by the closeness of the rearmament timetable he has soldiers leaving the army as a rapid response reserve.

There can be no doubt that since the book was first published in 1978 rearmament has got under way and detente is under great strain.

Cruise missiles are being deployed in West Europe and Britain, the SALT talks have broken down, the draft in the United States may be reintroduced and conscription has been discussed in Parliament.

In his January State of the Union' speech, President Carter openly threatened the use of military force in defence of US strategic interests.

Thatcher

In Britain under the Thatcher government military spending has become a top priority.

Hundreds of millions of pounds are earmarked for new programmes to develop antisubmarine torpedoes, nuclear warheads and a replacement for the Polaris missile.

Later this year, in the biggest troop movement from Britain since D-Day, the entire Territorial Army is to be mobilised and shipped to Germany as ment operationrtime reinforce However, the smooth run up to war with the Soviet Union as advocated by The Third World War' will not occur.

General Hackett assumes that the rearmament programme can procede without opposition.

In fact such a programme can only be financed in Britain by massive cuts in the welfare services and nationalised industries, and is already running into bitter opposition from the working class-(as seen in the steel strike.

More specifically it is unthinkable that hostilities can begin after a period of tension without the development in the West of a huge popular antiwar movement.

Undoubtedly, as in the Vietnam conflict, such a movement would spill over into the armed forces (especially in those NATO states which rely on conscription) and open the possibility of war against the Soviet Union being turned into a revolutionary war against the capitalist class.

Pershing missile So in answer to that paralysis in the face of the war threat sensed by many individuals, revolutionaries must state that the most powerful force on the earth today is not the imperialist military machine but the working class of the world.

Every nut, bolt and nuclear warhead is produced by the labour of the working class and production of every bolt, nut and warhead can be stopped by the concerted action of the working class.

Every conscript soldier is a potential revolutionary soldier.

Vietnam showed that even in the late twentieth century the most modern and powerful armed forces cannot defeat an armed and determined working class.

And the Bolshevik experience of 1917 demonstrated that this enormous latent force in the working class can be fully unleashed only if given a Marxist revolutionary party.

Hell on earth

War is hell on earth. Its source and the source of all organised human conflicț is the class struggle.

Finally only the seizure of power by the armed working class and the abolition of the capitalist class as a class can resolve the struggle and end war.

The most sobering thought in this book is the realisation that General Hackett knows this last point.

His projected war and victory against the Soviet Union is not the 'war to end all wars'.

He concludes:

"America and China-Japan will face eachother-across the Pacific Ocean. The Pacific basin will become more important to each of them than the Atlantic Here, then, are the seeds of the fourth imperialist world war.