The Third World War - The Untold Story

by Sir John Hackett

  An hour later he called again. She had not yet been able to bring herself to touch the set.

  “Janet, bad news. There’s only one rocket left that can get up there before the life support systems run out. The Joint Chiefs have ordered that shot to be used to replace a critical reconnaissance satellite taken out by Soviet interception.”

  “You mean - they’re going to let Slim die, out there, when they could save him?”

  “They have only one space shot left,” was the reply, “until Enterprise 103 can be pushed out again. That will take at least three days. With the damage done in the Soviet attack the systems in Slim’s ship won’t last that long. The only shot they have ready to go at Vandenberg is already set to take up the reconnaissance satellite they have to have there and I am afraid there is no way of changing that. The TV set they have brought you will bring in Slim. You can see him and talk to him. Turn it on - but you are going to have to be brave.”

  “But. . . but. . . the newsman said a rescue mission was being urgently prepared and would soon be on its way. He said that.”

  “I am sorry, Janet, truly sorry. That’s only PR to allay public anxiety. You have to be told the truth.”

  Janet was silent for a moment.

  “What about the others in the crew out there?” she almost whispered. “What about them and their families too?”

  “That’s being taken care of,” was the reply. “But time is running on. You can switch on the set now and pick up Slim.”

  She did so. There on the screen was Slim, her beloved Slim, one of the only three people in her whole world who really mattered. He was in the cabin of the spacecraft surrounded by all the gadgetry but blundering about in his spacesuit even more than usual and uncertain in his movements. His eyes looked strange.

  “Slim!” she said.

  “Hello, love,” he said. “My eyes aren’t so good and I can’t see you but my God it’s good to hear you. How are things?”

  “Good,” she lied. “Nicholas and Pamela are here. Say hello to daddy, children.”

  “Hello, daddy,” came up in chorus.

  “That’s great,” was the reply.

  Janet watched a weightless, sightless spaceman fumbling about in the cabin. The voice was the same. That was Slim’s voice.

  “Janet,” it said, “I love you.”

  “Oh, Slim ...”

  “It can’t last long now, perhaps an hour or so, perhaps only minutes. I love you, Janet, I love you dearly and I am switching off.” The image vanished.

  Janet, in her much loved and lived in home, sat down upon a sofa, dry-eyed and too stricken even for grief.

  Suddenly a wail came from deep within her as from a dying animal.

  “I hate you all!” she shouted and then in a flood of tears snatched the children to her and held them close.

  When the war ended, a space mission recovered the orbiting bodies of the Captain and crew of Enterprise 101 and brought them back to earth for burial with military honours in Arlington National Cemetery. The occasion was made an important one. The President sent an aide. Janet Wentworth stayed away.”*

  * Mary McGihon, Women in War (Dutton, New York 1986), p. 348.

  In the three decades before the war, with vast investment and marvellous inventiveness from the superpowers, space technology and its applications raced ahead. Apart from well-publicized programmes for peaceful purposes, there was a strong military thrust behind this effort. All space activity had some military significance but at least 65 per cent of the launches before the war were for military reasons only. By January 1985 the Soviet Union had made 2,119 launches compared with 1,387 by the United States. The latter generally used bigger launching rockets with heavier payloads and their satellites had longer lives and wider capabilities.

  Among the military tasks performed by unmanned satellites were reconnaissance, by photographic, electronic, radar and infra-red means; the provision of communications, early-warning, navigational and meteorological stations; and finally there were the interceptor/destroyer (I/D) counter-satellites. Manned vehicles like the orbiter Enterprise 101 were reserved for combinations of tasks which were interdependent or where the opportunity might be fleeting or variable. China, France and Britain also had modest space programmes and put up satellites for research and communications. France and China used their own launchers while the British, who were considerable designers and manufacturers of satellites, depended on US launchers, as of course did NATO, which had a three-satellite communications system.

  Before the war ordinary people around the world had little idea of what was going on far above them. This was principally because much of it was shrouded in secrecy, but it was also because their attention was only drawn to space sporadically when people were shot up into it and the TV cameras followed their progress. As things turned out, heroic exploits in space did not figure much in the war. Human beings were needed in space for certain tasks and especially so in the early days of the research programme. When it came to military applications they were usually more of an encumbrance than an advantage. There were notable exceptions when multiple tasks needed direct human judgment and control. Colonel Wentworth’s tragic flight in Enterprise 101 was a dramatic example. But in the main space was best left to the robots.

  To appreciate what happened in space during the war a little understanding of the governing science is helpful. Man-made earth satellites have to conform, as do natural planets, to laws discovered in the seventeenth century by the German philosopher/scientist Johann Kepler. What is probably most significant in the context of this book is that the plane of an earth satellite (or planet) will always pass through the centre of the earth. Under the inexorable discipline of this and the other laws, the movement of satellites is inherently stable and predictable. They can only be manoeuvred by the thrust of ‘on-board’ propulsive forces, usually in the form of liquid or solid fuel rocket motors. These manoeuvring engines and their fuel have of course to be carried up from the earth in competition with all other payloads. As the fuel is quickly exhausted, manoeuvrability is limited. It has in any case to be paid for at the price of other payloads.

  The amount of electric power available to activate the satellite’s systems is another limiting factor. Solar cells can convert the sun’s rays into electricity quite readily but there are early limits to the power that can be generated and stored in this way. That is why satellite radars, which played such an important role in the war, were at some disadvantage. Radar hungers greedily for electric power. It was for this reason that the Soviet Union made use of small nuclear reactors as power generators in its radar reconnaissance satellites. It may be recalled that it was a Soviet satellite, undoubtedly engaged in ocean surveillance, that caused worldwide concern in 1978 when it went wrong and scattered radioactivity over northern Canada as it burnt up on falling back into the atmosphere.

  Even without such mishaps a satellite’s useful life does not last for ever. It is largely determined by the height of its orbit and the endurance of its power supply. The exhaustion of its power supply sets an obvious limit to its functional life as distinct from the life of the vehicle. The lives of satellites range from days and weeks to (theoretically) thousands of years, depending on their orbits. Generally speaking, the lower the orbit the shorter the life and vice versa. The height of the orbit is determined by the characteristics of the satellite’s launch and is set to suit the tasks it has to perform. Photographic satellites are usually the lowest and are set as low as 120 kilometres from the earth. At the other end of the scale, the United States nuclear explosion detection VELA (velocity and angle of attack) satellites were pushed out as far as 110,000 kilometres into space in the war.

  Although space enables man-made objects to move at fast speeds over great distances in near perpetual motion, everything that moves in space is a captive of Kepler’s laws. Once a satellite is in undisturbed orbit it will turn up precisely on time in its next predicted position above the earth. Manoeuvring ca
n change the height or the plane of the orbit but at the end of the manoeuvre the satellite - unless it is brought back into the atmosphere - settles once again into a predictable orbit. So although the exact purposes of some of the earth satellites were not always known in the years before the war, space was very ‘open’ and all the satellites, old booster rockets and other debris orbiting the world, were monitored, numbered and registered in computers at scientific agencies like the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough, England. Indeed, under a widely accepted United Nations convention (with the USSR among its signatories), countries were obliged to notify the launch and leading parameters of every satellite. Within broad limits this was done.

  Satellites can be seen by the naked eye at night when they reflect the sun’s light, but more scientifically they are tracked by telescopes, radar, and electronic means. Space activity is so open to observation and deduction that the news that Plesetsk, in the north of the USSR, was the Soviet Union’s major launch complex first came to the knowledge of the world from Kettering Boys’ School in England. A group at the school under the leadership of an enthusiastic science master kept a continuous watch on space and periodically released details of earth satellites that had newly arrived in orbit.

  Among many advantages that flowed from pre-war space programmes was the acceptance by the superpowers (because of its scientific inevitability) of the concept of ‘open space’. This removed one of the difficulties in the strategic arms limitation and reduction negotiations (SALT and START), in that numbers of launchers and missile sites could be so easily verified from space reconnaissance. Verification by ‘national technical means’ was the euphemism adopted in protracted negotiations over satellite surveillance. Both sides knew exactly what it meant. Such reconnaissance had its limits: it could not count reserve missiles kept concealed, nor could it penetrate the secrets of the multiple re-entry vehicles within the nosecones of the missiles themselves.

  Man’s activities in space in peacetime, therefore, tended to be stable, both scientifically and politically. Indeed there was considerable co-operation. Sometimes this was even political, as when the USSR advised the United States that South Africa looked to be preparing for a nuclear test in the Kalahari Desert. This intelligence was extracted from Soviet Cosmos satellites manoeuvred over the Kalahari in July and August 1977.

  Although the methods chosen by the USA and USSR to get into space differed widely in technical ways, the comfortable feeling generally enjoyed by the uninitiated in the West was that the USA must surely be in the lead. This was not obviously so, and in different respects each was ahead of the other. The US put an enormous effort into the Apollo ‘man on the moon’ programme. The USSR, with less fuss, put their Salyut space station into orbit, and by changing crews rotated some forty astronauts through it on different research tasks. Both those ‘men in space’ programmes were very remarkable but they were very different achievements.

  Telemetry enables information gained by optical and electronic sensors in space to be transmitted instantly to earth. In the war these systems were jammed, partially or completely, by both sides, using earth and space jamming stations. Space photography, which involved complicated systems of ejecting the film and sending it back to earth for processing and interpretation, was fine in peacetime but took too long in war. On the other hand, the transmission earthwards of its product in this way could not be jammed. The satellite communications system, which had been well established before the war, was invaluable in keeping political and military centres in touch and in the control of a war moving at an unprecedented pace. But here too the effectiveness of the system was degraded by jamming and other interference.

  Satellites were destroyed or damaged by limited rather than widespread counter-satellite action; the numbers of I/D satellites was limited on both sides and they were reserved for high-value targets. In the main, these were the electronic intelligence (ELINT) satellites which gained key information about the enemy’s electronic systems and above all his operating frequencies. Some of the satellites knocked out were replaced by new ground launches, but when this was done great care was needed to ensure that the direction of launch, and the location of the site, involved no risk that the launch of the rocket would be confused with an inter-continental ballistic missile (ICBM) attack. This very sensitive and vital discrimination was well within the state of the art and the facilities available for rapid computer analysis; it was also part of the tacit understanding between the superpowers that such a process of replacement would need to go on in war. As space was well stocked with satellites of all types in the months before the war, replacement launchings were not numerous. In consequence, the much slower launching rate of the US system, with its big satellites and big rockets, did not turn out to have the great disadvantage that some of its pre-war critics had forecast.

  Destruction or jamming of the ELINT satellites hurt the West much more than it did the USSR. This was because NATO placed such great reliance on electronic counter-measures (ECM) and ECCM (in which they proved to have a substantial but not overwhelming lead) to offset the numerical inferiorities and unfavourable starting deployments they would have at the beginning of a war. Because of this, the ELINT effort in space, the heavy initial Allied air losses, the congestion in the intelligence system, and what we have recounted in chapter 6 as the story of the Gdansk incident were all tied together. It is also why the events in that particular tale, with its interesting human overtones, were so important at the beginning of the war.

  With the strategic and military opportunities that spaceflight offered, it was inevitable that the superpowers would turn their attention to counter-satellite systems. They did so as early as the mid-1960s. The Soviet Union demonstrated its ability to make a rendezvous between satellites during their Soyuz/Cosmos programme in 1967 and the US did the same somewhat earlier in the Gemini series. By the second half of the 1970s it looked as if the USSR was firmly committed to a system whereby the interceptor would approach its target in a similar orbit from below to launch minelets at it or to close with the target and then blow itself up. The war showed those deductions to be correct and both methods were used effectively. Satellites are in essence ‘soft’ targets and very little in the way of impact or explosion is needed to put them out of commission. The principal US system depended on a quite low relative speed collision between the interceptor and the target. These interceptors were launched into space from beneath the wings of F-15 Eagle fighters flying at very high altitude in the atmosphere. Both sides used infra-red homing for the terminal stages of the interception.

  Direct ground-launched anti-satellite missiles were also considered but discarded, even though the United States did have some initial success in early trials in the Pacific. As with the anti-ballistic missile (ABM) system permitted under the SALT 1 Treaty, the problems of target tracking and split-second missile-aiming from the ground proved too complex and costly as a practical proposition. Another possibility was to offset inaccuracy by the use of nuclear warheads in space but this risked some very unattractive consequences in escalatory effects. Anyway, the 1967 Outer Space Treaty banned nuclear weapons from being orbited in space and, although the treaty might not have held in war, it put an effective brake on trials and development in peacetime.

  Much science fiction has proved strikingly prophetic, but space-age tales in the pre-war years in which men promenaded weightlessly in space with death-ray guns found no echoes in the real space war. Colonel Wentworth and his crew in Enterprise 101 were put out of action by a Soviet I/D and he was blinded by a laser beam. But it is now known that this was an experimental chemical laser system of limited range and application. The damage done to Enterprise 101’s engine nozzles, power supplies and flight controls was almost certainly caused by small minelets exploded near the orbiter by the Soviet interceptor.

  Fiction and fantasy are one thing and scientific intelligence is another and their relationship is a curiously close one. There was another m
atter brought to public notice from time to time that caused understandable anxiety and doubt. This was, quite simply, the ‘charged-particle beam’. The theory of charging, or ‘exciting’ atomic particles to concentrate great energy in a narrow beam had been well understood by physicists for a number of years. A charged-particle beam would make short work of any earth satellite - but what was more important, it could almost certainly detonate and destroy incoming ballistic missiles if the tracking and aiming problems could be solved. But like fusion energy - so long heralded as our liberator from the bondage of fossil fuels - while the equations were understood the engineering was not.

  It was a Soviet scientist - Gersh Budker - who set the ball rolling in 1956 by demonstrating that once the gases in a magnetic field had attained a certain velocity they could become self-accelerating. With broad parity in strategic and space systems between the superpowers in the 1980s there was much to be said for sitting firmly on the lid of this Pandora’s box. It was thought none the less that the USSR was perversely assigning large scientific resources to trying to prise it open, though there was some dispute within the US intelligence community over the extent of the Soviet programme, the timescale within which an operational system could be expected to appear, and what the United States should be doing to develop such a system.

  We now know that charged-particle beams were not employed in the war, but international scientists have recently inspected the great Soviet research complex near the Sino-Soviet border that was dedicated solely to this area of physics. We do not know their full findings but it is clear that Soviet scientists were still some way from being able to reduce the cyclotrons used in this research to a size where they could be used in a ground-based system, let alone one in space.

  A less well advertised skeleton in the space cupboard was what the scientists called ‘electro-magnetic pulse’ (EMP). In its simplest terms this was the effect caused by gamma rays hitting the atmosphere suddenly after a nuclear explosion in space. The scientists calculated that the associated electro-magnetic surge would destroy or disable electrical and electronic systems across a wide area of the earth’s surface. Furthermore the ‘footprint’ could be controlled and directed to contain the area of impact. All of this could happen without any of the normal blast and radiation effects on earth of a nuclear explosion in the atmosphere. If this was true (and some unexpected side effects in Hawaii after an American nuclear test in the Pacific in 1962 suggested that it might be) the whole system of command and control of a modern war machine could be paralysed.