Skydancer by Geoffrey Archer

hissed, when the newsreader had finished. ‘They can’t have fouled that up so soon!’
    Angrily he turned off the radio and marched into the living-room with its fine view over the Moskva River. He poured himself a glass of vodka and drank it quickly. Then, shuddering at the oily warmth of the liquid, he filled the glass again and took it into the kitchen to lace it with ice.
    Staring out through the picture window at the city, Kvitzinsky reminded himself of what was at stake. In his hands lay the responsibility for the protection of Moscow if there should be a nuclear war – at least that was more or less how the Military Committee had put it when they appointed him. As chief scientist for the Ballistic Missile Defence modernisation programme, it was his special responsibility to ensure that the technology of their defences could match that of the missiles aimed at them.
    Trying to stop any small nuclear warhead hurtling out of the sky at thousands of miles per hour was a brainstorming problem. The idea of defending an area the size of the Soviet Union against such an attack was nonsense. What mattered to the leaders in the Kremlin, however, was that Moscow itself should never be destroyed. Without its capital, the nation would cease to exist, they believed. It was for that reason, when the first Russian anti-ballistic missiles were built in the 1960s, they were concentrated in a ring round the city.
    Until a few years ago, those ABMs all carried nuclear warheads. If the city was attacked, these would havebeen fired into space and detonated in the path of the enemy rockets, hoping to destroy the incoming warheads through blast and radiation, even from a considerable distance. Accuracy had not been so easy to attain in those days; Kvitzinsky had thought of it as trying to crack a nut with a hand-grenade, and feared that much of Moscow could be destroyed by the defences themselves.
    New technology had changed all that, though. New radars and infra-red detectors had made it easier to pinpoint and track objects in space, so that new super-accurate missiles and ground-based lasers could destroy attacking warheads individually and with great precision.
    But to every measure there was a counter-measure, as Kvitzinsky knew well. The new American approach would be to saturate the defences round Moscow – to fire so many missiles at the city that eventually all the defences would be exhausted. An ever-increasing expansion of the number of defences was the only effective answer to that.
    With the British it was a different matter. They could not afford the massive numbers of weapons the Americans possessed, and had resorted to guile to achieve their aims. With a nuclear force of just sixty-four missiles, Kvitzinsky knew that the British had one main target in mind, the capital itself.
    The British scientists at Aldermaston had been assiduous in their efforts to ensure their Polaris H-bombs would be able to penetrate Moscow’s defensive ring. At the end of the 1970s they had started an improvement programme called ‘Chevaline’, hardening the Polaris warheads so that they could withstand the blast and radiation effects of Moscow’s nuclear-tipped ABMs. Chevaline also involved the firing of several missiles inrapid succession so that their warheads and decoys would arrive over the target at the same time, causing the maximum of confusion and difficulty for the Soviet defences.
    At the end of the 1980s, Chevaline’s potential effectiveness had been almost negated by the Soviet introduction of new radars and infra-red detectors, and a massive increase in the number of defensive missiles round Moscow.
    Inevitably, the game had not ended there. The British had decided to follow the American lead and go for massive numbers of warheads. The Trident system was to be bought, with eight bombs per missile. Moscow had resigned itself to expanding its defences yet further.
    But suddenly, two years ago, the