Frederick Forsyth: The Negotiator

But while he had done his duty, and earned his marshal’s baton, he had also made himself a private vow: Never again would he lead his beloved Soviet Army in retreat-and despite the fulsome PR exercise, Afghanistan had been a defeat. It was the prospect of another looming defeat that caused the bleakness of his mood as he stared out through the double glass at the horizontal drifts of tiny ice particles that snapped periodically past the window.

The key to his mood lay in a report lying on his desk, a report he had commissioned himself from one of the brightest of his own protégés, a young major general whom he had brought to the General Staff with him from Kabul. Kaminsky was an academic, a deep thinker who was also a genius at organization, and the marshal had given him the second-top slot in the logistics field. Like all experienced combat men, Kozlov knew better than most that battles are not won by courage or sacrifice or even clever generals; they are won by having the right gear in the right place at the right time and plenty of it.

He still recalled with bitterness how, as an eighteen-year-old trooper, he had watched the superbly equipped German blitzkrieg roll through the defenses of the Motherland as the Red Army, bled white by Stalin’s purges of 1938 and equipped with antiques, had tried to stem the tide. His own father had died trying to hold an impossible position at Smolensk, fighting back with bolt-action rifles against Guderian’s growling panzer regiments. Next time, he swore, they would have the right equipment and plenty of it. He had devoted much of his military career to that concept and now he headed the five services of the U.S.S.R.: the Army, Navy, Air Force, Strategic Rocket Forces, and Air Defense of the Homeland. And they all faced possible future defeat because of a three-hundred-page report lying on his desk.

He had read it twice, through the night in his spartan apartment off Kutuzovsky Prospekt and again this morning in his office, where he had arrived at 7:00 A.M. and taken the phone off the hook. Now he turned from the window, strode back to his great desk at the head of the T-shaped conference table, and turned to the last few pages of the report again.

SUMMARY . The point therefore is not that the planet is forecast to run out of oil in the next twenty to thirty years; it is that the Soviet Union definitely will run out of oil in the next seven or eight. The key to this fact lies in the table of Proved Reserves earlier in the report and particularly in the column of figures called the R/P ratio. The Reserves-to-Production ratio is achieved by taking the annual production of an oil-producing nation and dividing that figure into the known reserves of that nation, usually expressed in billions of barrels.

Figures at the end of 1985-Western figures, I am afraid, because we still have to rely on Western information to find out just what is going on in Siberia, despite my intimate contacts with our oil industry-show that in that year we produced 4.4 billion barrels of crude, giving us fourteen years of extractable reserves-assuming production at the same figure over the period. But that is optimistic, since our production and therefore use-up of reserves has been forced to increase since that time. Today our reserves stand at between seven and eight years.

The reason for the increase in demand lies in two areas. One is the increase in industrial production, mainly in the area of consumer goods, demanded by the Politburo since the introduction of the new economic reforms; the other lies in the gas-guzzling inefficiency of those industries, not only the traditional ones but even the new ones. Our manufacturing industry overall is hugely energy-inefficient and in many areas the use of obsolete machinery has an add-on effect. For example, a Russian car weighs three times as much as its American equivalent-not, as published, because of our bitter winters, but because our steel plants cannot produce sufficiently fine-gauge sheet metal. Thus more oil-produced electrical energy is needed for the production of the car than in the West, and it uses more gasoline when it hits the road.

ALTERNATIVES . Nuclear reactors used to produce 11 percent of the U.S.S.R.’s electricity, and our planners had counted on nuclear plants producing 20 percent or more by the year 2000. Until Chernobyl. Unfortunately, 40 percent of our nuclear capacity was generated by plants using the same design as Chernobyl. Since then, most have been shut down for “modifications”-it is extremely unlikely they will in fact reopen-and others scheduled for construction have been decommissioned. As a result, our nuclear production in percentage terms, instead of being in double figures, is down to 7 and dropping.

We have the largest reserves of natural gas in the world, but the problem is that the gas is mainly located in the extremity of Siberia, and simply to get it out of the ground is not enough. We need, and do not have, a vast infrastructure of pipelines and grids to get it from Siberia to our cities, factories, and generating stations.

You may recall that in the early seventies, when oil prices after the Yom Kippur war were hiked sky-high, we offered to supply Western Europe with long-term natural gas by pipeline. This would have enabled us to afford the supply grid we needed through the front-end financing the Europeans were ready to put up. But because America would not be benefiting, the U.S.A. killed the initiative by threatening a wide range of commercial sanctions on anyone who cooperated with us, and the project died. Today, since the so-called “thaw,” such a scheme would probably be politically acceptable, but at the moment oil prices in the West are low and they have no need of our gas. By the time the global run-out of oil has hiked the Western price back to a level where they could use our gas, it will be far too late for the U.S.S.R.

Thus neither of the feasible alternatives will work in practice. Natural gas and nuclear energy will not come to our rescue. The overwhelming majority of our industries and those of our partners who rely on us for energy are indissolubly tied to oil-based fuels and feedstocks.

THE ALLIES . A brief aside to mention our allies in Central Europe, the states Western propagandists refer to as our “satellites.” Although their joint production-mainly from the small Romanian field at Ploesti -amounts to 168 million barrels a year, this is a drop in the ocean compared to their needs. The rest comes from us, and is one of the ties that holds them in our camp. To relieve the demands on us we have, it is true, sanctioned a few barter deals between them and the Middle East. But if they were ever to achieve total independence from us in oil, and thus dependence on the West, it would surely be a matter of time, and a short time, before East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and even Romania slipped into the grasp of the capitalist camp. Not to mention Cuba.

CONCLUSION …

Marshal Kozlov looked up and checked the wall clock. Eleven o’clock. The ceremony out at the airport would be about to begin. He had chosen not to go. He had no intention of dancing attendance on Americans. He stretched, rose, and walked back to the window carrying the Kaminsky oil report with him. It was still classified Top Secret and Kozlov knew now he would have to continue to give it that designation. It was far too explosive to be bandied about the General Staff building.

In an earlier age any staff officer who had written as candidly as Kaminsky would have measured his career in microns, but Ivan Kozlov, though a diehard traditionalist in almost every area, had never penalized frankness. It was about the only thing he appreciated in the General Secretary; even though he could not abide the man’s newfangled ideas for giving television sets to the peasants and washing machines to housewives, he had to admit you could speak your mind to Mikhail Gorbachev without getting a one-way ticket to Yakutsk.