第 2 页

?

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 reservesof that nation, usually expressed in bil-lions of barrels.

Figures at the end of 1985?Western figures, I am afraid, because we still have to rely on Western infor-mation 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 bar-rels 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 in-crease since that time. Today our reserves stand at be-tween 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 neweconomic reforms; the other lies in the gas-guzzling ineffi-ciency 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 pro-duce 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 Cherno-byl. 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 feed-stocks.

THE ALLIES.A brief aside to mention our allies in Central Europe, the states Western propagandists refer to as our ?satellites.? Although their joint pro-duction?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, Czechoslo-vakia, 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 ma-chines to housewives, he had to admit you could speak your mind to Mikhail Gorbachev without getting a one-way ticket to Yakutsk.

The report had come as a shock to him. He had known things in the economy were not working any better since the introductionof perestroika ?the restructuring?than before, but as a soldier he had spent his life locked into the military hierarchy, and the military had always had first call on re-sources, materiel, and technology, enabling them to occupy the only area in Soviet life where quality control could be practiced. The fact that civilians? hair dryers were lethal and their shoes leaked was not his problem. And now here was a crisis from which not even the military could be exempt. He knew the sting in the tail came in the report?s conclusion. Standing by the window he resumed reading.

?

CONCLUSION.The prospects that face us are only four and they are all extremely bleak.

1. We can continue our own oil production at present levels in the certainty that we are going to run out in eight years maximum, and then enter the global oil market as a buyer. We would do so at the worst possible moment, just as global oil prices start their remorseless and inevitable climb to impossible levels. To purchase under these conditions even part of our oil needs would use up our entire reserves of hard cur-rency and Siberian gold and diamond earnings.

Nor could we ease our position with barter deals. Over 55 percent of the world?s oil lies in five Middle East countries whose domestic requirements are tiny in relation to their resources, and it is they who will soon rule the roost again. Unfortunately, apart from arms and some raw materials, our Soviet goods have no at-traction for the Middle East, so we will not get barter deals for our oil needs. We will have to pay in cold hard cash, and we cannot.

Finally there is the strategic hazard of being de-pendent on any outside source for our oil, and even more so when one considers the character and histori-cal behavior of the five Middle East states involved.

2. We could repair and update our existing oil production facilities to achieve a higher efficiency and thus lower our consumption without loss of benefit. Our production facilities are obsolete, in general disre-pair, and our recovery potential from major reservoirs constantly damaged through excessive daily extrac-tion. We would have to redesign all our extraction fields, refineries, and pipe infrastructure to spin out our oil for an extra decade. We would have to start now, and the resources needed would be astronomical.

3. We could put all our effort into correcting and updating our offshore oil-drilling technology. The Arc-tic is our most promising area for finding new oil, but the extraction problems are far more formidable even than those in Siberia. No wellhead-to-user pipe infra-structure exists at all and even the exploration program has slipped five years behind schedule. Again, the re-sources needed would be simply huge.

4. We could return to natural gas, of which, as stated, we have the largest reserves in the world, virtu-ally limitless. But we would have to invest further mas-sive resources in extraction, technology, skilled manpower, pipe infrastructure, and the conversion of hundreds of thousands of plants to gas usage.

Finally, the question must arise: Where would such resources as mentioned in Options 2, 3, and 4 come from? Given the necessity of using our foreign currency to import grain to feed our people, and the Politburo?s commitment to spending the rest for im-ported high technology, the resources would appar-ently have to be found internally. And given the Politburo?s further commitment to industrial moderni-zation, their obvious temptation might be to look at the area of military appropriations.

I have the honor to remain, Comrade Marshal,

?Pyotr V. Kaminsky, Major General

?

Marshal Kozlov swore quietly, closed the dossier, and stared down at the street. The ice flurries had stopped but the wind was still bitter; he could see the tiny pedestrians eight floors down holding their shapkas tight on their heads, ear-muffs down, heads bent, as they hurried along Frunze Street.

It had been almost forty-five years since, as a twenty-two-year-old lieutenant of Motor/Rifles, he had stormed into Berlin under Chuikov and had climbed to the roof of Hitler?s chancellery to tear down the last swastika flag fluttering there. There was even a picture of him doing it in several history books. Since then he had fought his way up through the ranks, step by step, serving in Hungary during the 1956 revolt, on the Ussuri River border with China, on garrison duty in East Germany, then back to Far Eastern Command at Khabarovsk, High Command South at Baku, and thence to the General Staff. He had paid his dues: He had endured the freezing nights in far-off outposts of the empire; he had di-vorced one wife who refused to follow him, and buried an-other who died in the Far East. He had seen a daughter married to a mining engineer, not a soldier as he had hoped, and watched a son refuse to join him in the Army. He had spent those forty-five years watching the Soviet Army grow into what he deemed to be the finest fighting force on the planet, dedicated to the defense of the Rodina, the Mother-land, and the destruction of her enemies.

Like many a traditionalist he believed that one day those weapons that the toiling masses had worked to provide him and his men would have to be used, and he was damned if any set of circumstances or of men would stultify his beloved Army while he was in charge. He was utterly loyal to the Party?he would not have been where he was had he not been?but if anyone, even the men who now led the Party, thought they could strike billions of rubles off the military budget, then he might have to restructure his loyalty to those men.

The more he thought about the concluding pages of the report in his hand, the more he thought that Kaminsky, smart though he was, had overlooked a possible fifth option. If the Soviet Union could take political control of a ready-made source of ample raw crude oil, a piece of territory presently outside her own borders ... if she could import in exclusiv-ity that crude oil at a price she could afford, i.e., dictate ... and do so before her own oil ran out ...

He laid the report on the conference table and crossed the room to the global map that covered half the wall oppo-site the windows. He studied it carefully as the minutes ticked away to noon. And always his eye fell on one piece of land. Finally he crossed to the desk, reconnected the inter-com, and called his ADC.

?Ask Major General Zemskov to come and see me?now,? he said.

He sat in the high-backed chair behind his desk, picked up the TV remote control, and activated the set on its stand to the left of his desk. Channel One swam into focus, the prom-ised live news broadcast from Vnukovo, the VIP airport out-side Moscow.

United States Air Force One stood fully fueled and ready to roll. She was the new Boeing 747 that had super-seded the old and time-expired 707?searlier in the year, and she could get from Moscow back to Washington in one hop, which the old 707?scould never do. Men of the 89th Military Airlift Wing, which guards and maintains the President?s Wing at Andrews Air Force Base, stood around the aircraft just in case any overenthusiastic Russian tried to get close enough to attach something to it or have a peek inside. But the Russians were behaving like perfect gentlemen and had been throughout the three-day visit.

Some yards away from the tip of the airplane?s wing was a podium, dominated by a raised lectern in its center. At the lectern stood the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Sergeevich Gorbachev, bringing his valedictory address to a close. At his side, hatless, his iron-gray hair ruffled by the bitter breeze, sat his visitor, John J. Cormack, President of the United States of America. Ranged on either side of both were the twelve other members of the Politburo.

Drawn up in front of the podium was an honor guard of the Militia, the civil police from the Interior Ministry, the MVD; and another drawn from the Border Guards Director-ate of the KGB. In an attempt to add the common touch, two hundred engineers, technicians, and members of the airport staff formed a crowd on the fourth side of the hollow square. But the focal point for the speaker was the battery of TV cameras, still photographers, and press placed between the two honor guards. For this was a momentous occasion.

Shortly after his inauguration the previous January, John Cormack, surprise winner of the preceding Novem-ber?s election, had indicated he would like to meet the Soviet leader and would be prepared to fly to Moscow to do so. Mikhail Gorbachev had not been slow to agree and to his gratification had found over the previous three days that this tall, astringent, but basically humane American academic appeared to be a man?to borrow Mrs. Thatcher?s phrase　with whom he could do business.?

So he had taken a gamble, against the advice of his security and ideology advisers. He had acceded to the Presi-dent?s personal request that he, the American, be permitted to address the Soviet Union on live television without submit-ting his script for approval. Virtually no Soviet television is ?live?; almost everything shown is carefully edited, pre-pared, vetted, and finally passed as fit for consumption.