Word: wars
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Even in the handful of months since its conception, Hackett's book has become laughably dated. The military details of tank strengths and armor-piercing capabilities Hackett keeps under rigid command and control, but the basic premises that lead him to conclude a European land war is conceivable fall out of his influence even as he tries to marshal them...
Nitpicking aside, flaws like these cast doubt on the most basic premise of his book. The Third World War is a call to rearmament, a shrill blast of the trumpet for Western governments to boost their military expenditures now, before it's too late and the crawling armies of Bolshevism engulf what Hackett calls "the free nations of the Western world." He believes the advent of "flexible response" military policies in the sixties--abandoning automatic massive nuclear retaliation in favor of both conventional and nuclear forces--makes land war in Europe a distinct possibility over the next decade...
...tactical nuclear weapons. No fighting force in history has ever believed it should not make full use of all available weapons, and battlefield nuclear equipment is abundantly available to both sides. Hackett avoids considering what effect the use of tactical nukes would have on the land war, on international public opinion, and on escalation to full-scale strategic nuclear war...
Hackett really loses his credibility, though, when he shyly evades the issues which should be at the core of any "third world war" scenario. Nuclear deterrence is a distasteful and outmoded phrase to General Sir John. In his rush to prove that "flexible response" makes a 1980s European land war a possibility, he conveniently forgets that this policy evolved to meet Soviet threats, real or perceived, in odd corners of the world. Places like Vietnam, not West Germany. European strategic thought should still be based firmly on the existence of nuclear stockpiles on both sides. If Hackett represents a style...
Some glimmer of literary understanding must have penetrated the fog of war in Hackett's brain, enough anyway for him to understand the need to place some human beings among the Phantoms and stereotyped initative-lacking Soviet junior officers in his narrative. Every so often he clumsily inserts a phony "personal recollection," most embarrassingly in a letter home from an American sailor...