The French nuclear capability was never used, however. Under a Popular Front government the nuclear element in the defence programme had been allowed to fall behind, but even if it had not been, there was no question but that in a bilateral exchange with the USSR, without US intervention, France would be the loser. Soviet propaganda played upon this. The Soviet Union made it clear that there would be no area bombing of French cities but that precision attack could be expected from the air on any port or other target actively operating in an Allied military interest. A nuclear response from France would result in a rain of weapons of mass destruction upon her cities.
There was, in fact, considerable Soviet conventional bombing of French ports and communications complexes. Since, however, penetration by hostile aircraft was for the greater part of their journey over land and through several belts of air defence, the damage that was done, where it mattered most to the Allied war effort (above all in the Western ports), was not intolerably great.
Quite as much hindrance, and possibly even more, to the prosecution of the war in France came from civil disturbance. War with the Soviet Union stripped the mask from many professing Euro-communism in France, as in Italy and other countries. An impressively well-prepared Peace Movement burgeoned on the streets at once. Demonstrations, strikes and sabotage led to frequent clashes between communist and Gaullist sympathizers and a growing strain on the police, in whose support troops sometimes had to intervene. Widespread avoidance of call-up was accompanied by a sharp rise in petty crime. Food and petrol rationing, introduced on mobilization, never worked and perhaps were scarcely expected to. On the whole, nevertheless, France moved towards a war footing without intolerable upheaval, largely because the overwhelming majority of the French people were seen to be plainly in favour of resistance to the Soviet initiative.
Conditions were much the same in the Low Countries, with the added pressure of the immediate danger of invasion in both Belgium and the Netherlands, and, in the case of the latter, the burden of partial occupation by the enemy within a very few days. Resistance in Holland was slow to get under way in the Second World War, due to the habits formed over a long period of neutrality. When it found its feet it was formidable. In the Third World War there were many still in Holland who remembered how it had been before. Underground movements began to come into being as soon as the country was ordered to mobilize. From the time Soviet troops first crossed the frontier they felt the strength and dourness of Dutch resistance and replied with a savagery far exceeding what was still remembered in Holland from the Germans. It was fortunate indeed for the Dutch that this occupation by a wartime enemy of a very different sort lasted only a few weeks.
Britain, once again free from invasion and occupation by an enemy, had its own problems. An account is given in Chapter 4, ‘Awakening Response in the West’, and in Appendices 1 and 4, of the growing awareness, in the seven years before the outbreak of war, of the reality of the danger to the Western Alliance from the USSR, of the dangerously weak state into which the defences of the United Kingdom had been allowed to fall, and of the country’s exposed position as the bridgehead for US reinforcement. In the matter of civil defence, growing pressure from the public, spearheaded in the first instance by unofficial bodies such as the National Emergency Volunteers (see Appendix 4), finally compelled a reluctant government to take the threat more seriously. Government spending on civil defence (at style='font-size:12.0pt;font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; color: black'>£2 million per annum in 1978, just one-twentieth of what had been allocated ten years earlier) was sharply increased, until by 1983 it was approaching the 1968 figure. The legislation on army reserves (see Appendix 1), introduced as a result of constant pressure from Chief Constables on the Home Office, provided for the re-establishment of what was known as TAVR II — a part of the Territorial and Auxiliary Volunteer Reserve of particular relevance in the management of a national emergency — in a general increase in reserve forces. Further legislation included, in 1983, a Civil Protection (Emergencies) Act, which rationalized and extended emergency planning at all levels and introduced a phased system of alerts. A national civil defence exercise held in August 1984 led to a widespread improvement in procedures and brought out the clear lesson — borne out a year later — that law and order would provide the acutest problems.
