Five thousand miles away, the President of the United States was in conclave with his security adviser, Poklewski, Robert Benson of the CIA, and a third man, Myron Fletcher, chief analyst of Soviet grain affairs in the Department of Agriculture.
“Bob, are you sure beyond any reasonable doubt that General Taylor’s Condor reconnaissance and your ground reports point to these figures?” Matthews asked, his eye running once again down the columns of numbers in front of him.
The report that his intelligence chief had presented to him via Stanislaw Poklewski five days earlier consisted of a breakdown of the entire Soviet Union into one hundred grain-producing zones. From each zone a sample square, ten miles by ten, had been seen in close-up and its grain problems analyzed. From the hundred portraits, his experts had drawn up the nationwide grain forecast.
“Mr. President, if we err, it is on the side of caution, of giving the Soviets a better grain crop than they have any right to expect,” replied Benson.
The President looked across at the man from the Department of Agriculture.
“Dr. Fletcher, how does this break down in layman’s terms?”
“Well, sir, Mr. President, for a start, one has to deduct, at the very minimum, ten percent of the gross harvest to produce a figure of usable grain. Some would say we should deduct twenty percent. This modest ten-percent figure is to account for moisture content, foreign matter like stones and grit, dust and earth, losses in transportation, and wastage through inadequate storage facilities, which we know they suffer from badly.
“Starting from there, one then has to deduct the tonnages the Soviets have to keep on the land itself, right in the countryside, before any state procurements can be made to feed the industrial masses. You will find my table for this on the second page of my separate report.”
President Matthews flicked over the sheets before him and examined the table. It read:
1. Seed Grain. The tonnage the Soviets must put by for replanting next year, both for winter wheat and spring-sown wheat ... 10 million tons
2. Human Consumption. The tonnage that must be set aside to feed the masses who inhabit the rural areas, the state and collective farms, and all suburban units—from hamlets, through villages, up to towns of less than 5,000 population ... 28 million tons
3. Animal Feed. The tonnage that must be set aside for the feeding of the livestock through the winter months until the spring thaw ... 52 million tons
4. Irreducible Total ... 90 million tons 5. Representing a gross total, prior to a 10 percent unavoidable wastage deduction, of ... 100 million tons
“I would point out, Mr. President,” went on Fletcher, “that these are not generous figures. They are the absolute minima required before they start feeding the cities. If they cut down on the human rations, the peasants will simply consume the livestock, with or without permission. If they cut back on animal feed, the livestock slaughter will be wholesale; they’ll have a meat glut in the winter, then a meat famine for three to four years.”
“Okay, Dr. Fletcher, I’ll buy that. Now what about their reserves?”
“We estimate they have a national reserve of thirty million tons. It is unheard of to use up the whole of it, but if they did, that would give them an extra thirty million tons. And they should have twenty million tons left over from this year’s crop available for the cities—a grand total for their cities of fifty million.”
The President swung back to Benson.
“Bob, what do they have to have by way of state procurements to feed the urban millions?”
“Mr. President, 1977 was their worst year for a long time, the year they perpetrated ‘the Sting’ on us. They had a total crop of one hundred ninety-four million tons. They bought sixty-eight million tons from their own farms. They still needed to buy twenty million from us by subterfuge. Even in 1975, their worst year for a decade and a half, they needed seventy million tons for the cities. And that led to savage shortages. With a greater population now than then, the state must buy no less than eighty-five million tons.”
“Then,” concluded the President, “by your figures, even if they use the total of their national reserve, they are going to need thirty to thirty-five million tons of foreign grain?”
“Right, Mr. President,” cut in Poklewski. “Maybe even more. And we and the Canadians are the only people who are going to have it. Dr. Fletcher?”
The man from the Department of Agriculture nodded. “It appears North America is going to have a bumper crop this year. Maybe fifty million tons over domestic requirements for both us and Canada considered together.”
Minutes later, Dr. Fletcher was escorted out. The debate resumed. Poklewski pressed his point.
“Mr. President, this time we have to act. We have to require a quid pro quo from them this time around.”
“Linkage?” asked the President suspiciously. “I know your thoughts on that, Stan. Last time it didn’t work; it made things worse. I will not have another repeat of the Jackson Amendment.”
All three men recalled the fate of that piece of legislation with little joy. At the end of 1974 Congress had passed a compromise trade-reform bill; its passage had been delayed by a controversial section that specified in effect that unless the Soviets went easier on the question of Russian-Jewish emigration to Israel, there would be no U.S. trade credits for the purchase of technology and industrial goods. The Politburo under Brezhnev had contemptuously rejected the pressure, launched a series of predominantly anti-Jewish show trials, and bought their requirements, with trade credits, from Britain, Germany, and Japan.
“The point about a nice little spot of blackmail,” Sir Nigel Irvine, who was in Washington in 1975, had remarked to Bob Benson, “is that you must be sure the victim simply cannot do without something that you have, and cannot acquire it anywhere else.”
Poklewski had learned of this remark from Benson and repeated it to President Matthews, avoiding the word blackmail.
“Mr. President, this time around they cannot get their wheat elsewhere. Our wheat surplus is no longer a trading matter. It is a strategic weapon. It is worth ten squadrons of nuclear bombers. There is no way we would sell nuclear technology to Moscow for money. I urge you to invoke the Shannon Act.”
In the wake of the Sting of 1977, Congress had, finally and belatedly, in 1980 passed the Shannon Act. This said simply that, in any year, the federal government had the right to exercise an option to buy the entire U.S. grain surplus at the going rate per ton at the time of the announcement that it wished to do so.
The grain speculators had hated it, but the farmers had gone along. The act smoothed out some of the wilder fluctuations in world grain prices. In years of glut, the farmers got prices for their grain that were too low; in years of shortage, the prices were exceptionally high. The Shannon Act ensured that if the government exercised its option the farmers would get a fair price but the speculators would be out of business. The act also gave the administration a gigantic new weapon in dealing with customer countries: the aggressive as well as the humble and poor.
“Very well,” said President Matthews, “I will invoke the Shannon Act. I will authorize the use of federal funds to buy the futures for the expected surplus of fifty million tons of grain.”
Poklewski was jubilant.
“You won’t regret it, Mr. President. This time, the Soviets will have to deal directly with your administration, not with middlemen. We have them over a barrel. There is nothing else they can do.”
Yefrem Vishnayev had a different opinion. At the outset of the Politburo meeting, he asked for the floor and got it.
“No one here, Comrades, denies that the famine that faces us is not acceptable. No one denies that the surplus foods lie in the decadent capitalist West. It has been suggested that the only thing we can do is to humble ourselves, possibly grant concessions that will reduce our military might and thereby delay the onward march of Marxism-Leninism in order to buy these surpluses to tide us over.
; “Comrades, I disagree, and I ask you to join me in rejection of the course of yielding to blackmail and betraying our great inspirator, Lenin. There is one other way—one other way in which we can obtain acceptance by the entire Soviet people of rigid rationing at the minimum-subsistence level, promote a nationwide upsurge of patriotism and self-sacrifice, and secure an imposition of that discipline without which we cannot get through the hunger that has to come.
“There is a way in which we can use what little harvest grain we shall cull this autumn, spin out the national reserve until the spring next year, use the meat from our herds and flocks in place of grain, and then, when all is used, turn to Western Europe, where the milk lakes are, where the beef-and-butter mountains are, where the national reserves of ten wealthy nations are.”
“And buy them?” asked Foreign Minister Rykov ironically.
“No, Comrade,” replied Vishnayev softly. “Take them. I yield the floor to Comrade Marshal Kerensky. He has a file he would wish each of us to examine.”
Twelve thick files were passed around. Kerensky kept his own and began reading aloud from it. Rudin left his unopened in front of him and smoked steadily. Ivanenko also left his on the table and contemplated Kerensky. He and Rudin had known for four days what the file would contain. In collaboration with Vishnayev, Kerensky had brought out of the General Staff’s safe the file for Plan Aleksandr, named after Field Marshal Aleksandr Suvorov, the great and never defeated Russian commander. Now the plan had been brought right up to date.
And it was impressive, as Kerensky spent the next two hours reading it During the following May the usual massive spring maneuvers of the Red Army in East Germany would be bigger than ever, but with a difference. These would be no maneuvers, but the real thing. On command, all thirty thousand tanks and armored personnel carriers, mobile guns and amphibious craft would swing westward, hammer across the Elbe, and plow into West Germany, heading for France and the Channel ports.
Ahead of them, fifty thousand paratroops would drop over fifty locations to take out the principal tactical nuclear airfields of the French inside France and the Americans and British on German soil. Another hundred thousand would drop on the four countries of Scandinavia to control the capital cities and main transportation arteries, with massive naval backup from offshore.
The military thrust would avoid the Italian and Iberian peninsulas, whose governments, all partners with the Euro-Communists in office, would be ordered by the Soviet Ambassador to stay out of the fight or perish by joining in. Within half a decade later, they would fall like ripe plums, anyway. Likewise Greece, Turkey, and Yugoslavia. Switzerland would be avoided, Austria used only as a through-route. Both would later be islands in a Soviet sea, and would not last long.
The primary zone of attack and occupation would be the three Benelux countries, France, and West Germany. Britain, as a prelude, would be crippled by strikes and confused by the extreme Left, which on instructions would mount an immediate clamor for nonintervention. London would be informed that if the nuclear Strike Command were used east of the Elbe, Britain would be wiped off the face of the map.
Throughout the entire operation the Soviet Union would be stridently demanding an immediate cease-fire in every capital in the world and in the United Nations, claiming the hostilities were local to West Germany, temporary, and caused entirely by a West German preemptive strike toward Berlin, a claim that most of the non-German European Left would believe and support.
“And the United States, all this time?” Petrov interrupted. Kerensky looked irritated at being stopped in full flow after ninety minutes.
“The use of tactical nuclear weapons right across the face of Germany cannot be excluded,” pursued Kerensky, “but the overwhelming majority of them will destroy West Germany, East Germany, and Poland—no loss, of course, for the Soviet Union. Thanks to the weakness of Washington, there is no deployment of either Cruise missiles or neutron bombs. Soviet military casualties are estimated at between one hundred thousand and two hundred thousand at the maximum. But as two million men in all three services will be involved, such percentages will be acceptable.”
“Duration?” asked Ivanenko.
The point units of the forward mechanized armies will enter the French Channel ports one hundred hours after crossing the Elbe. At that point, of course, the cease-fire may be allowed to operate. The mopping up can take place under the cease-fire.”
“Is that time scale feasible?” asked Petryanov.
This time, Rudin cut in.
“Oh yes, it’s feasible,” he said mildly. Vishnayev shot him a suspicious look.
“I still have not had an answer to my question,” Petrov pointed out. “What about the United States? What about their nuclear strike forces? Not tactical missiles. Strategic missiles. The hydrogen-bomb warheads in their ICBMs, their bombers, and their submarines.”
The eyes around the table riveted on Vishnayev. He rose again.
“The American President must, at the outset, be given three solemn assurances in absolutely credible form,” he said. “One: that for her part the USSR will never be the first to use thermonuclear weapons. Two: that if the three hundred thousand American troops in Western Europe are committed to the fight, they must take their chances in conventional or tactical nuclear warfare with ours. Three: that in the event the United States resorts to ballistic missiles aimed at the Soviet Union, the top hundred cities of the United States will cease to exist.
“President Matthews, Comrades, will not trade New York for the decadence of Paris, nor Los Angeles for Frankfurt. There will be no American thermonuclear riposte.”
The silence was heavy as the perspectives sank in. The vast storehouse of food, including grain, of consumer goods and technology that was contained in Western Europe. The fall like ripe plums of Italy, Spain, Portugal, Austria, Greece, and Yugoslavia within a few years. The treasure trove of gold beneath the streets of Switzerland. The utter isolation of Britain and Ireland off the new Soviet coast. The domination without a shot fired of the entire Arab bloc and Third World. It was a heady mixture.
“It’s a fine scenario,” said Rudin at last “But it all seems to be based on one assumption: that the United States will not rain her nuclear warheads on the Soviet Union if we promise not to let ours loose on her. I would be grateful to hear if Comrade Vishnayev has any corroboration for that confident declaration. In short, is it a proved fact or a fond hope?”
“More than a hope,” snapped Vishnayev. “A realistic calculation. As capitalists and bourgeois nationalists, the Americans will always think of themselves first. They are paper tigers, weak and indecisive. Above all, when the prospect of losing their own lives faces them, they are cowards.”
“Are they indeed?” mused Rudin. “Well now, Comrades, let me attempt to sum up. Comrade Vishnayev’s scenario is realistic in every sense, but it all hangs on his hope—I beg his pardon, on his calculation—that the Americans will not respond with their heavy thermonuclear weapons. Had we ever believed this before, we would surely already nave completed the process of liberating the captive masses of Western Europe from fascism-capitalism to Marxism-Leninism. Personally, I perceive no new element to justify the calculation of Comrade Vishnayev.
“However, neither he nor the Comrade Marshal has ever had any dealings with the Americans, or ever been in the West Personally, I have, and I disagree. Let us hear from Comrade Rykov.”
The elderly and veteran Foreign Minister was white-faced.
“All this smacks of Khrushchevism, as in the case of Cuba. I have spent thirty years in foreign affairs. Ambassadors around the world report to me, not to Comrade Vishnayev. None of them, not one—not one single analyst in my department has a single doubt that the American President would use the thermonuclear response on the Soviet Union. Nor do I. It is not a question of exchanging cities. He, too, can see that the outcome of such a war would be domination by the Soviet Union of almost the whole world. It would be the end of America as a s
uperpower, as a power, as anything other than a nonentity. They would devastate the Soviet Union before they yielded Western Europe and thence the world.”
“I would point out that if they did,” said Rudin, “we could not stop them. Our high-energy-particle laser beams from space satellites are not fully functional yet. One day we will no doubt be able to vaporize incoming rockets in inner space before they can reach us. But not yet The latest assessments of our experts—our experts, Comrade Vishnayev, not our optimists—suggest a full-blown Anglo-American thermonuclear strike would take out one hundred million of our citizens—mostly Great Russians—and devastate sixty percent of the Soviet Union from Poland to the Urals. But to continue. Comrade Ivanenko, you have experience of the West. What do you say?”
“Unlike Comrades Vishnayev and Kerensky,” observed Ivanenko, “I control hundreds of agents throughout the capitalist West. Their reports are constant I, too, have no doubt at all that the Americans would respond.”
“Then let me put it in a nutshell,” said Rudin brusquely. The time for sparring was over. “If we negotiate with the Americans for wheat we may have to accede to demands that could set us back by five years. If we tolerate the famine, we will probably be set back by ten years. If we launch a European war, we could be wiped out, certainly set back by twenty to forty years.
“I am not the theoretician that Comrade Vishnayev undoubtedly is. But I seem to recall the teachings of Marx and Lenin are very firm on one point: that while the pursuit of the world rule of Marxism-Leninism must be pursued at every stage by every means, its progress should not be endangered by the incurring of foolish risks. I estimate this plan as being based on a foolish risk. Therefore I propose that we—”
“I propose a vote,” said Vishnayev softly.