The Kremlin then dusts off its contingency plan to convert summer war games in East Germany into a full-scale invasion of West Germany. Writing in 1987, the British survivors sum up:

The purpose of the war had after all been largely political”€”to exploit the conventional weakness of the West in order to humiliate the U.S. and to re-establish absolutism in the Eastern Europe as the only safeguard against dissidence and fragmentation.

Instead of coming through the Fulda Gap toward Frankfurt, the heart of American power, the Warsaw Pact drives across the North German plain held by the British, Belgian, Dutch, Canadian, and German units that Hackett once co-commanded.

As in 1914, when the German chancellor assumed Britain would sit out the war, the Soviet strategy depends heavily upon French neutrality. But the French go to war alongside NATO. (Hackett correctly anticipated that the socialist Francois Mitterrand would prove more anti-Soviet than his Gaullist predecessor.)

Still, within a week the Red Army’s tanks have smashed across the Rhine and into the Netherlands. But when the Soviets try to roll down the west bank of the Rhine, that proves a bridge too, just as the same region did for Brigadier Hackett in 1944.

With French ports and airfields welcoming the colossal resupply effort from America, NATO launches a counteroffensive into the flanks of the Warsaw Pact supply lines. With the Red Army staggered, the Poles rise up. In a few days the Kremlin’s prospects deteriorate from control of Europe all the way to the English Channel to the loss of the empire, including even Czarist acquisitions such as Ukraine and Kazakhstan.

The Kremlin hawks then see their salvation in a deal with the Americans to abandon Western Europe in return for no intercontinental nuclear exchange. To prove their utter seriousness, the Soviets nuke Birmingham, England, while proposing “to the United States a bilateral status quo and the division of the world into two spheres of influence. The two superpowers had more interests in common than either had with its allies.”

But the American president, Sunbelt conservative Governor Thompson (i.e., Reagan), and the British Prime Minister, Mrs. Plumber (i.e., Thatcher), instantaneously order a joint counterstrike to annihilate Minsk in what’s now Belarus. The Soviet republics revolt against Moscow’s rule and a coup leads to the breakup of the Soviet Union (as happened in 1991).

The book’s limited nuclear exchange has often been criticized as implausible, but Hackett and his fellow Brits appear to have had a very specific concern”€”that of the Soviets successfully driving a wedge between North America and Western Europe”€”that their ending was designed to forestall in the real world by depicting the NATO allies utterly refusing to consider a separate peace.

Going nuclear first had been a money-saving NATO policy in the 1950s when the US was technologically dominant, but as the Soviets developed their capacity to slam the American homeland as hard as the US could hit Russia, the almost unmentionably unsettling thought emerged in Western European minds: Why in the world would America fight a strategic nuclear war for Western Europe? After all, would we Western Europeans choose to endure nuclear destruction to save America? Not bloody likely.

In the Second Punic War between Rome and North Africa’s Carthage, Hannibal and his elephants had famously invaded Italy by way of the Alps and defeated the Romans in three battles. But even the great general could not convince enough Italian cities to join him to ultimately win the war. Italian villagers reasoned that someday the Carthaginians would go home to their own continent, while they would be stuck in Europe with the angry Romans. Similarly, the US had its own perfectly nice continent, so how confident could the Western Europeans feel that the Americans would start a nuclear war to save their continent for them?

But if the US wouldn’t go nuclear to save Europe, what would be the point of fighting a losing conventional war? Why not negotiate the best Finland-style deal possible with the Soviets during peacetime?

Hackett explains this insidious logic in an Author’s Note:

This is not to suggest that a war is bound to happen, or even that it is likely. If, however, there could be no question that, in the event of war, the Warsaw Pact would win, the free countries of the West would be in no position to withstand political pressure from the USSR, which would enjoy the fruits of a military victory without having to fight for it.

For partisan reasons, distrust of the US was mostly articulated during the Cold War on the European left. But some independent-minded men of the right, such as the intensely rational Enoch Powell, came to similar conclusions. Most notably, the conservative nationalist Charles de Gaulle withdrew France from NATO in 1967.

The way out of this conundrum, Hackett suggested, was for the NATO countries to outspend the Warsaw Pact on conventional arms. And that’s exactly what happened. The NATO partners each agreed to boost defense spending three percent annually from 1979-1986, and the Reagan Administration greatly exceeded that promise. This proved so successful that the Soviets gave up without a fight.

While not a wholly accurate prophecy (fortunately), The Third World War turned out to be one of the more effective books in history. As Karl Marx said, and General Hackett might have agreed: “Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.”€