The invasion of the Falkland Islands - 9 April 1982

We have to go back more than twenty-five years to the British-French-Israeli invasion of Egypt, the so-called Suez Crisis, for any news story out of Britain that has had quite as much coverage over here as the British response to Argentina’s seizure of the Falkland Islands.

At first, there was a moment of disbelief, barely short of hilarity. A Washington expert in geopolitical warfare, seconds after the news of the seizure came in, could hardly believe his own words when he said aloud, “Imagine an old-fashioned naval battle, a war between two civilised nations, perhaps with even a declaration of war, and, later, a peace conference. Wow!”

The ordinary Americans I spoke to, non-experts in any kind of warfare, had the same initial feeling of waking up in the wrong decade - a feeling strangely reinforced by echoes out of the British press that recall the days after Dunkirk, if not the Siege of Mafeking: cries of Britain shamed and a tin-pot dictatorship.

Well very soon this feeling passed. It enjoyed one final nostalgic moment when President Reagan, after an appeal from Mrs Thatcher and a quick cram course in what was or might be involved, got on the telephone to the President of Argentina and implored him not to invade. It did no good, which prompted a snorting response from several congressmen. One of them said, “Eisenhower spent only five minutes on the phone with Anthony Eden and the British called off Suez.”

Now before the Falklands were seized - and I ought to say that the whaling incident in South Georgia was barely noticed here - before the Falklands were seized, there were two stories, two themes at the back of my mind, which were pushed into the front of it by the decision to order the British taskforce to set sail from Portsmouth.

I want you to indulge me for a few minutes with these two themes because they are not only relevant to the decision to risk a naval battle. They could make an encounter in or off the Falkland Islands a dry run of the sort of warfare we could become engaged in in the 1980s.

One story is the spread to this country and all over this country of the anti-nuclear protest movement, and the Reagan administration’s belated recognition that this groundswell could become a landslide as massive as the protest movement against the war in Vietnam.

It’s now not only the Democrats but old hawks in Mr Reagan’s own party who are challenging the thesis or the hypothesis held to so stubbornly by the President and Secretary of State Haig, which is that the Russians are dangerously ahead in nuclear power.

These challengers are not saying that the Russians are behind. Coming out into the open at last is the admission that the growth of nuclear weapons on each side is difficult, perhaps impossible, to equate, because the growth is not of things equal in kind. Mr Reagan looks at the undoubted Russian superiority in Europe of land based medium range missiles. Mr Brezhnev looks at the American superiority in floating or submarine warheads, and adds to that the British and French capabilities which Mr Reagan doesn’t mention.

Nobody seems able to strike a fair balance between the weapons in place, the intercontinental missiles at the ready, and the weapons of one kind or another that are now being manufactured.

Well Mr Reagan, in spite of his conviction that this country must build many more nuclear weapons before parity would justify a freeze, he’s taken to saying nobody can win a nuclear war.

Old hawks are saying it. It’s an old line, but it’s said now with a new and despairing conviction because we’ve all been reading or hearing the reports of the meetings of the International Committee of Doctors and of a newly formed Committee of American Doctors who have been - one in Cambridge, England, the other in Berkeley, California - drawing appalling pictures of the results of a first strike by one or other of the two superpowers, never mind the possible effect of a first response in which many millions are dead, more millions are radiated to the point of envying the dead, and other millions on the fringe, all emotion blasted out of them, wander around like mobile vegetables in a landscape without hospitals, antibiotics or doctors. And now four distinguished former diplomats have begged the administration to announce it will never be the first to strike.

One of the oldest hawks appearing on a popular television panel cried out, “We simply cannot use these things. Nobody can. We have to begin to catch up on the old weapons.”

And that outcry leads to the second story I had in mind, which is the administration’s decision to bring out of the mothballs and make ship-shape four old battleships that saw famous service forty years ago in the Second World War.

Battleships? Didn’t, as only the most lurid example, didn’t the Japanese prove off Singapore and again at Pearl Harbour that ordinary marmos (ph) ended the long day of the battleship? “Might as well,” said one senator, “reactivate the cavalry.”

However it was, it is a former air force fighter pilot of all people who, after years of studying tactical warfare, convinced the administration that in a situation of what the Navy calls “forcible entry” - landing combat troops on hostile territory and giving them continuous protection - nothing can guarantee it like long range naval gunfire.

So the United States (months before the Falklands incident) decided that this was a kind of war it might get into, and it yielded to the proofs of this old fighter pilot and is reactivating the moth-balled battleships. The administration is incidentally surprised and pleased to learn that you can do this for the cost of building a dozen or two new aircraft.

These two movements have brought us full circle back to the South Atlantic. A possible battle of the Falklands has a sudden special fascination for the chiefs-of-staff and for the armed services committees of the Senate and the House. I have not seen this written about.

What is however spilling over the newspapers and the networks is the political aspects of this British Argentine conflict, and especially in the past day or two the political and possibly military dilemma it is forcing on the United States.

First - and so far as I can see the still unsolved - is the mystery of the Argentines’ motive for the invasion. The question of sovereignty over the islands has been disputed well practically since 1764 when the French set up a colony there and then ceded it to Spain.

Throughout the 18th century, they went back and forth to Spain, to Britain, to Spain, then were abandoned by both of them till Argentina took over in 1822 and was ousted a year later by Britain. Since when the Argentine claim has never been dropped. But why assert it now?

We’re told by recent visitors to Argentina that the Junta, having made an alarming mess of the economy, decided that a rousing dose of jingoism was what was needed to unite the people. Tierra del Fuego was picked on as the first distraction, but both a British and a papal commission ruled that it belonged to Chile, so perhaps the challenge to the British Navy eight thousand miles from home would perform the jingo trick.

I must say that it has the sound to me of an unreal political pretext unless the Falklands have more to offer than the humiliation of eighteen hundred shepherds and fishermen.

Well not much has been said about the report three months ago of a well offshore from the Falklands pumping five thousand barrels a day. That’s hardly worth a full-blown naval battle. But at the same time, an energy study predicted that within the next ten years a new field between Argentina and the Falklands would be producing two million barrels a day.

William Safire, once a White House aide and now an alert reporter for the New York Times, has come up with these figures and made the comment: “To Great Britain such a development would match its North Sea potential and make it a far greater economic power. To Argentina, that offshore oil would nearly match Venezuela’s annual production and help transform Argentina into the dominant power in Latin America.”

However, it’s too late to sit and speculate about the motives. The facts have obliterated them. Britain has her evidently well-calculated plans and is forging ahead with them. And the United States - it is by now far from being a disinterested observer, a well meaning neutral, though it must try to appear so if Secretary Haig’s mission is to do any good.

Britain built up the Argentine fleet and the United States built up her air force, and the United States for some time has been backing Argentina, a dictatorship or not, as the big counterforce to Soviet penetration into the South Atlantic.

This is what makes it difficult for Mr Reagan to join Western Europe in condemning the Argentine aggression out of hand. He heard himself saying - and it must have had a bleak sound in Europe - that Argentina and Britain were “equally friends of this country.”

So the present policy of the United States towards Argentina and the Argentine attack on America’s firmest ally in Europe produce the American dilemma and offer the main reason why the United States must hope that the United Nations, the Organisation of American States or somebody can forestall a war or even a prolonged blockade in which the United States would be called on to help the British refuel at least.

There are two possibilities that the White House and the State Department reluctantly keep in mind, especially if it came to a battle and the British were winning it. One is a hard-pressed Argentina asking for help from its best food customer, the Soviet Union. The other is the possible intervention of Cuba.

To put it mildly, neither consequence is one the United States would simply sit back and brood upon. One or both of them could confront the United States with a military challenge hardly less menacing than the Russians’ installation of nuclear missiles in Cuba in 1962.

THIS TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING OF THE ORIGINAL BBC BROADCAST (© BBC) AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT. BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING, THE BBC CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY.

Letter from America audio recordings of broadcasts ©BBC

Letter from America scripts © Cooke Americas, RLLP. All rights reserved.