Book of the Month: Red Storm Rising

Soviet Victor-class nuclear submarine

This week I celebrate my 48th birthday. I'm still astonished, every year, that I'm even over 40. When I was still at school, in the bad old days of the 1980s, I was convinced that war with the Soviet Union and an eventual exchange of strategic nuclear weapons was an inevitability. I think that only thanks to the efforts of a very small number of individuals, among them John. F. Kennedy, Mikhail Gorbachev, Ronald Reagan and Oleg Gordievsky, was that conflict avoided.

Red Storm Rising was one of Tom Clancy's earlier novels, written before he became more established with books like The Hunt For Red October or Patriot Games (although Red October itself first came out in 1984), and their central character CIA analyst Jack Ryan (now the subject of a new series on Amazon Prime). Red Storm Rising is a techo thriller, published in 1986, and written with Larry Bond, one of the authors of the Harpoon modern naval miniatures rules.

It is an epic book, and authored by those with a background in naval operations and wargaming (Bond served six years in the US Navy, including four years on a destroyer).  Red Storm Rising charts a hypothetical conflict between NATO and the USSR in 1985, caused by a terrorist incident in Azerbaijan, when saboteurs destroy a big slice of the USSR's oil and gas infrastructure. It looks at the war that ensues from the perspective of several combatants, including major roles for, among others, a US Air Force officer in Iceland, an American submarine commander and a destroyer captain, a Russian general, and the commander of a Soviet airborne division.

There are also lesser roles for a supporting cast of characters involved in different aspects of the war - for example, early on, the Spetznaz commando operations in West Germany against NATO targets, or later efforts by the USAF to shoot down Russian spy satellites with missiles. At the time, the advent of ground breaking stealth technology was still a rumour, but this is encapsulated in Clancy's Operation Dreamland, the use of Stealth fighters to take out the Warsaw Pact's AWACS (Airborne Warning And Control System) planes in a pre-emptive strike over East Germany, resulting in massive losses for the Soviet air force in the first day of the war.

Operation Dreamland

The Russians have their own cards to play, naturally, including a surprise attack on Iceland, which provides them with the air base at Keflavik and shuts down the NATO SOSUS sonar network between Greenland and the UK.

It is a gripping read. There is a bias towards naval operations, although the fighting in Germany gets the occasional look in, mainly from the perspective of the leader of a US armoured platoon and the Soviet headquarters in Germany, grappling with its own logistical and leadership problems, not the mention the unrealistic demands of their masters in Moscow.

Clancy and Bond look at the typical scenarios that might have been fought out in the 1980s, including convoy operations in the Atlantic, missions to track down Russian submarines, air raids on Iceland, and the tactical Stealth missions at low level in East Germany.

The Russian characters are not card board cut outs by any means: the first 15% of the book looks at the reasons behind the war, the decision making process, including at Politburo level, the KGB's maskirovka tactics, and the Red Army's military planning. There's a great scene where the army general staff meet in a sauna in Moscow to discuss their plans without being recorded by the KGB (the steam makes it impossible to bug them).

If you are interested in a gripping read, with plenty of technical detail, but not enough to get bogged down in, then Red Storm Rising is a good choice. It is becoming quite dated now, and the period it is set in over three decades in the past, but for the Cold War military enthusiast it remains a classic.