by Gene Skellig
“Ma'am, we have over 1300 inbound missiles from various launch sites within the Russian Federation. This amounts to over three thousand warheads. The first will strike Alaska NORAD Region Headquarters, at Elmendorf Air Force Base in Anchorage in less than...three minutes. We have confirmed our data. Confidence is HIGH. This attack profile requires that you authorize the ‘Launch on Warning’ counter-strike immediately, Madame President.”
“Are you serious? This can’t be! What happened to the thirty minutes warning I was told we would have from your space-based sensors?”
“We’re still trying to piece that together, Madame President. But early indications are that an ion flux from yesterday’s solar flare was just passing over the Russian Federation and may have disrupted our launch monitoring satellites,” he explained with embarrassment and anger.
“All I was told about the Russians at this morning’s Early-Bird brief was that they were continuing a validation of their Missile Command and Control systems, and that we had people on site in their command centers!” the President exclaimed to the anxious looking men in the Situation Room, and the strained faces she saw over the video teleconference.
“Ma'am, we had no warning. But our data has been confirmed by space and ground-based sensors. We need you to give the order and then relocate yourself at least to the PREOC immediately. There are already seven tracks inbound to Washington, with the first to strike in eighteen minutes.”
“I need to give the order now? We don’t have time for more confirmation? Wait a minute; DID YOU SAY THE FIRST TARGET WOULD BE HIT IN THREE MINUTES?”
“Seconds, Now, Madame President.”
As she began to comprehend, she noticed that the military men were looking at the strategic plot on one of the screens. She followed their eyes and saw missile tracks converting to flashing red dots, which she knew meant strikes. At the same instant, the video feed labeled “AASOC/NORAD ANR Elmendorf” went dead. Soon after, a new image was pushed into the same screen. Live streaming data from an aircraft showed a distinctive mushroom cloud rising from a forested valley framed by a small coastal city and a long range of impressive mountains.
“Madame President, that was Elmendorf AFB and most of Anchorage. We just lost NORAD Alaska Region Headquarters. You are now looking at live video from an F-15 Eagle. Madam President, you must give the order NOW, before it’s too late.”
She gave the order, authorizing the “Well Done” retaliatory option recommended by Commander USSTRATCOM: an all-out retaliatory strike of ICBMs, SLBMs, SLCMs and ALCMs. The Secretary of Defense confirmed the order.
“I am now evacuating to the PREOC and then to Mount Weather. You all know what to do. I hope that you’re safe wherever you are, or can get to safety. We’ll re-establish this conference when I’m safe. How long do I have?”
“Fourteen minutes.”
Sharpshooter had only gone into the Presidential Emergency Operations Centre once in the four months since Inauguration Day, but she remembered that it would take a few minutes to get through the twists and turns of those corridors and that first elevator. Then there would be that terrifying free-fall as the elevator seemingly fell the entire 500 feet to the deeper level. From there, she could stay in the small bunker. That would keep her close to the White House but safe from most dangers, or she could take the very small and fast-moving underground shuttle to the staging bunker under the Pentagon; or all the way to the Deep Underground Military Base at Mount Weather.
Ten minutes later, President Parker was moving at a hair-raising 95 miles per hour on her subterranean journey from the PREOC under the White House to the Mount Weather DUMB.
In the Canadian CAOC, General Charnley heard from General Adams that an American counter-strike had been ordered and that all NORAD units should issue immediate evacuation and dispersal orders. At the same time, he learned that CANR’s counterpart in Anchorage, ANR, had been nuked. This matched the strategic plot that he and his Battle Staff had been watching in stunned disbelief on SIMON. With no antimissile forces under his command and probably only minutes to live, General Charnley focused on passing what he knew through secure VTC to Canada Command and the Strategic Joint Staff the in Ottawa. Canada Command was keeping the Government of Canada and all Canadian military commands in the loop, but it would take time to send dispersal and evacuation orders to all of Canada’s military bases and to activate regional emergency response organizations. But the news that Canada was under imminent nuclear attack had already gone out over the airways, as the media was far more efficient.
Meanwhile, clearly under attack by the Russian Federation, subordinate commands under USSTRATCOM activated America’s antimissile defenses. Others warmed up the 2436 highest readiness of the 5,913 currently operational warheads, now that formal Launch Authorization had been given. National Military Communications Center would send the Emergency Action Messages to the various Commands, Control Centers, Ships’ Captains and Battlefield Commanders to carry-out selected strike options against pre-assigned targets.
They understood that they had to work fast, as they had lost at least twenty minutes of response time due to the failure to detect the Russian missiles when they were first launched. Having seen what happened to ANR in Elmendorf, they did not take the time to thoroughly examine the theory that this lapse was due to the solar flare activity. Russia had actually been in solar shadow when the relatively minor solar flare had surged past the Earth.
Other personnel, working at a slightly less frantic pace, were reviewing procedures to bring the remaining 4270 warheads of the “Responsible Reserve Force” back to active status, to replenish the soon to be depleted number of ICBMs, SLBMs, B61 bombs, Tomahawk cruise missiles and smaller yield battlefield nuclear artillery devices.
While disarmament over the last few decades had reduced the American stockpile considerably, they retained the fissionable material in the form of Plutonium, U232 and other highly enriched materials and had the technical might to quickly ramp up the assembly of delivery systems, provided these were not all knocked out in the Russian first strike.
The highest readiness American missiles were the Trident-II’s and Minuteman-III’s. The 450 LGM-G Minutemen-III missiles distributed in missile silos spread across Wyoming, Montana and North Dakota could each carry up to three Multiple Independent Re-entry Vehicles. Each MIRV was armed with a variant of the W87 warhead, outfitted with defensive shielding and capable of dispensing decoys and chaff. Reaching the target at Mach 23 to detonate in air-burst mode or as bunker-busters at the surface, the W87 warheads would be delivered precisely on target with yields ranging from 300 to 475 kilotons.
The missile fields of the Midwest were a “use-it-or-lose-it” resource. Their fixed locations made them the first targets to be attacked by the Russians. As a result, few of the Minutemen-III missiles were held in reserve. 410 of the 450 missiles, comprising 1230 warheads out of the full compliment of 1350, were launched in the primary retaliatory strike. This left 120 warheads on 40 Minutemen-III missiles in reserve and subject to losses in the Russian first strike.
The Trident-IIs, on the other hand, as standard armament for the eighteen Ohio Class submarines of the US Navy, would be more difficult for the Russians to take out. When the Launch Orders were received through VLF-VHF communications, there were twelve fully-armed and war-ready Ohios on station throughout the world. Nine of the Ohios were outfitted as SLBM subs, each carrying twenty-four Trident missiles with MIRVs up to five W88 475 kiloton missiles. The other three Ohios were rigged as SLCM subs with 154 Tomahawk cruise missiles each, with “dial-able” variable yields up to 150 kilotons. The Ohio’s at sea were available to strike up to 1542 individual targets. But only 800 of these warheads were given targets in the initial attack. This allowed a few subs to be completely depleted right away, to redeploy for reloading and replenishment. This apportionment left a few Ohios with full or near-full wartime loads after the first strike, ready for follow-up and re-target strikes.
There were an additional 250 nuclear-armed Tomahawks available from various surface combatant vessels of the US Navy. Two thirds of these were held in reserve, particularly for the eleven Carrier Strike Groups, of which seven were at sea and the remaining four were in various stages of refit rotations.
The final 240 missiles in the counter strike would come from a small but useful stockpile of 500 nuclear-armed Tomahawks deployable as Air Launched Cruise Missiles.
The balance of the American nuclear arsenal was comprised of the reliable B-61 bombs which could be delivered by B-52, B-1B and B2 aircraft, and a variety of artillery-delivered tactical nuclear weapons with yields in the tens of kilotons. These were considered follow-on weapons because they could be brought to bear only through air and land attack.
That left 1190 warheads on the highest readiness missiles as an immediate reserve, ready to be re-programmed with new targets once the Battlefield Damage Assessment results of the first wave were analyzed and follow-on targeting was computed.
In Winnipeg, Major Stradins saw that American missile tracks were now being displayed. As the blue tracks began to multiply, one particular red track closed in on CANR HQ. The Battle Staff became silent. There was nothing more to do but wait for the end. Without sufficient time to get out of harms way, and with the bunker at 17 Wing having been decommissioned years ago, there was no way to survive. Their fate was sealed.
As Major Stradins waited for the painless death by instantaneous vaporization, he thought of the letter from Casey Callaghan. He now understood that it could have been a lifeline. It certainly would have been useful if he had been off-duty and out there at the Headingly Range, hunting with his bow, when the blast occurred. But it was not to be, so Major Stradins spent the last fifteen seconds thinking of his favorite past-time. He felt the warm breeze in the trees and smelled the musty aroma of the grassland as he imagined it. He was at peace with the universe.
“Time to impact: 5, 4, 3, 2, 1,” he read from the display.
Strangely, the counter continued: “0, -1, -2, -3, -4,”
That’s not possible, Major Stradins thought to himself. He looked at Fish Tank and saw that the Headquarters of the Canadian NORAD Region was now showing as having been destroyed.
“-5, -6, -7,”
Major Stradins was just opening his mouth to speak when the timer on the nuclear device completed its own countdown to zero and detonated. The device had been assembled by personnel of the Academy of Engineering Physics at the Mianyang facility in Sichuan, China. Custom-built for the job, it was identical to the ones which had just detonated in Honolulu, Fairbanks, Anchorage, Inuvik, Yellowknife, Frobisher Bay and other places.
It had been designed to mimic the effects of a Russian 550 kiloton warhead delivered by SS25/RT2PM Topol ICBM for ground-burst. The bombs had been shipped in specially rigged Evergreen sea-containers which had arrived at pre-arranged sites before the commencement of Phase IV of General Bing’s operation. This particular bomb had been sitting in the fenced-off parking-lot of a small rented warehouse, less than a kilometer from CANR HQ.
To the SIMON technicians at USSTRATCOM in Omaha, and to the Battle Staff in Colorado Springs, the 7-second discrepancy between the Detonation Alert on SIMON and the actual time of the detonation in Winnipeg went un-noticed. They were experiencing information overload as the complexity of Russian attack rose faster than human beings could process. Nobody wondered why the Strategic Information Management Operations Network had confirmed that Winnipeg had been destroyed by a 550 kiloton ground burst of a Russian SS25/RT2PM Topol ICBM a full seven seconds before the Chinese bomb had detonated in the Evergreen container. And why would they? SIMON was never wrong.
The busy technicians simply announced the destruction of two bases in Alaska, one in Hawaii, and three in Canada as each detonation alert was displayed on SIMON. Their main focus was to provide updates on the progress of the launch of American missiles from their silos and sea-based platforms.
Russian missile tracks closed in on key command and control sites. When the Commanders of those sites were satisfied that the bulk of the American counter-attack had been launched in time, many ordered their staffs to evacuate to any bunker or shelter they could reach in the few minutes they had left. They wanted to give their personnel a fighting chance.
At military bases throughout North America, the emphasis was on “Survive to Operate”, with aircraft and personnel ordered to disperse from their bases or to get personnel into bunkers and shelters. Aircrew scrambled into their aircraft and took off without Air Traffic Control clearances, desperate to get beyond the range of the detonation they expected at any second. Personnel on the ground jumped into any vehicle they could and drove as fast as they could away from their bases. Those with loved ones attempted to contact them and give them what warning they could.
In Russia, there was confusion. The Americans had suddenly launched a massive wave of missiles without provocation. This initiated a chain of events at the headquarters of the Strategic Rocket Forces, and at the Russian equivalent of the War Room. President Dvorkin made only one attempt to contact President Parker by Red Phone. Learning that all communications with Washington were cut off, and seeing that missiles fired from American submarines in the North Atlantic would strike Russian targets within minutes, he ordered a full retaliatory strike.
Once he had given the order, he began his own evacuation. He knew that dispersal of military forces would be automatic, and that the civil defense apparatus would provide what warning they could to the civilian population. Russians had long experience with civil defense drills, during the Cold War. More recently, nuclear defense had returned to the public consciousness in the crisis of the previous week, when Russia almost launched an attack based upon a computer error.
With robust fallout shelters in most cities, and with hundreds of km of subway lines buried deep under Moscow and Saint Petersburg, Russia had sufficient fallout shelters for nearly six million citizens for up to four weeks, and military shelters to preserve over a million personnel for up to six months. However, the food, batteries, stored fuel and other supplies were now over thirty years old, and completely useless.
President Dvorkin and his staff traveled by underground train to the primary bunker in Solnechnogorsk, forty km outside of Moscow. This was the best location for top government and military leaders to relocate to because it was also the headquarters of Lt General Sergey Ivanovich Maatsal, Commander Third Space and Missile Defense Army, responsible for early warning and detection. The facilities in the underground complex at Solnechnogorsk were first rate, employing the latest computer technologies stolen from American and Western industry and adapted to Russian needs.
The progress of the American missiles tracked by a network of Series 2400 Cosmos geo-stationary satellites and “ORTU” early-detection radar sites was displayed on the impressive wall of plasma screens. By the time President Dvorkin arrived in the Command Center, the first American missiles had struck in Saint Petersburg, Murmansk and Petropavlovsk. The detonations had been confirmed by adjacent military units. Other missiles would be striking their targets within minutes.
Meanwhile, the Russian counter-attack was just getting underway. The Russian missiles were launching with a surprisingly good 62% success rate. President Dvorkin had been prepared to live with an overall 55% success rate. Even at 55%, Russia would be able to put over 2300 warheads in the first wave of the Russian counter-strike, and up to 1400 in the follow-on strikes that would be launched after the results of the American attack and Russian counter-attack were known.
That would leave 4400 mission-ready warheads of over 25 different types and delivery systems that could be deployed for subsequent strikes, after a few weeks of concerted effort to bring them into operational status.
Much depended on what was left after the American first strike. He knew that cruise missiles would be first to strike, as their flight time from the patrol areas of the American Ohio submarines was on the order of ten
to twelve minutes, while the larger yielding ICBMs from the American Midwest would take thirty minutes to reach their targets.
There were unconfirmed reports of American missiles failing to detonate, or having been shot down by the antimissile defenses of the Third Army’s A-135 missile defenses protecting Moscow and other key sites. While the accuracy of the 51T6 “Gorgon” long range and 53T6 “Gazelle” short range interceptor was less than perfect, they did give the Muscovites and others a fighting chance. If they were indeed taking out some of the American missiles this was a good sign, but Dvorkin would wait for a full assessment.
Another series of reports got his attention. Early reports of American missiles striking targets in Great Britain, France and Germany had been received and were being confirmed. If this is true, President Dvorkin thought, then the Americans are launching an all-out global attack. This made no sense at all. The Americans had no reason to attack their allies. Sure, they were suffering the consequences of decades of overspending, debt, and the erosion of their manufacturing base while China and Europe continued to be net exporters, but to attack Europe? That made no sense at all.
His attention was drawn to the plasma screens, indicating that Russian missiles were obliterating targets in North America. Targets in Europe were also being hit by Russian missiles, as part of the Global Counter-Strike Order he had given back in Moscow some 35 minutes before. According to the Prikaz Silniy Udar, “Hard Strike Order”, all key NATO bases in Europe were being hit, along with the same range of critical infrastructure, manufacturing and communications capabilities that were being targeted in North America.
He was initially pleased to hear that, of 2720 warheads in the first wave, only 10% had failed to detonate or were defeated by NATO antimissile defenses. He was perturbed by reports that some missiles had gone rogue. The new targeting computers confirmed that the missiles had hit their assigned targets; however telemetry reports from 3rd Space and Missile Defense Army, using some of the older generation of computers and intelligence sources, were reporting that some of the SS27s had hit targets in the Persian Gulf, Africa, and Australia.