Winter Kill - War With China Has Already Begun

by Gene Skellig

  DDG53’s sonar operators verified the acoustic signature of Chinese Kilo SSK hull number 374. A Tomahawk missile from DDG53 placed a variable-yield W80 warhead just five hundred feet above the surface of the water and nearly on top of the Chinese Kilo. It vaporized the ocean for a radius of 1,200 feet. The 2,300 tons of metal, machinery, weapons and men in the Tomahawk’s fully dialed-in 150 kiloton blast radius no longer existed.

  The resulting plume of radioactive fallout was blown ashore by the gentle ten knot breeze. It reached the resort hotels of Puerto Vallarta within two hours. 310,000 locals and 113,000 tourists had considered themselves forgotten about in the war and were busy working out how to survive the coming nuclear winter in what had been a tropical paradise. Now they had to contend with a rapidly approaching blizzard of freshly charged gamma radiation from the Tomahawk’s warhead and the fissionable material of the 13 unused warheads on the Chinese Kilo. They had not escaped the war after all.

  A second follow-on attack had come from a Chinese land-based missile several months later; however, this was not a surprise. General Masterson, the top surviving general, had recommended that President Parker test the waters and see if enemy forces were still actively targeting the government. The plan was to include remarks in the weekly presidential broadcast that would lead the enemy to conclude that the broadcast was coming from the old bunker under the Greenbrier Hotel, in West Virginia. Being a well known bunker, the Greenbrier had been destroyed in the initial attack. But by using the green-screen wall in the Mount Weather facility, the audio-visual technicians could depict whatever they wanted as a backdrop behind the president as she made her address. They overlaid a duplicate of the backdrop from the Greenbrier, a picture of the White House that had been wall-papered on the wall behind the president’s speaking platform in the old bunker, and touched up the deception with some artfully crafted props that matched the original furnishings of that now completely destroyed room in the Greenbrier Bunker.

  The trick worked. It deceived the Chinese into believing that despite three Russian missiles, Greenbrier was intact. The Chinese didn’t want there to be a functioning US Government so quickly after the war, so they dedicated one of their very few upgraded Fengbao-Tempest missiles, with a 13,000 km range.

  This particular missile was launched from one of the hardened land-based silos near Wuzhai. It was just sufficient to propel the 3,200 Kg bunker-buster variant of the DF-5A missile. By adapting it with the DF-7K bus rather than the MIRV bus of the DF-5A, they were able to install a 10 Megaton warhead. The blast consumed the radioactive rubble that had once been the Hotel and bunker complex at Greenbrier, and the town of White Sulphur Springs. The 3743 residents of the nearby town of Lewisburg, West Virginia, and the 2,900 refugees that the kindhearted towns-folk had taken in, were also wiped out by this much larger explosion’s ten mile radius of total destruction.

  The shock waves were felt less than a hundred miles away by President Parker and the rest of the inhabitants of DUMB One. It was as though a subway train had rolled over their facility. This left no doubt in their minds that there was still a target on their backs.

  From then on, President Parker accepted the need to remain a government largely in hiding. All broadcasts of any agency would be vetted by the military for INFOSEC and OPSEC, and various tricks would be used to make the enemy believe that the broadcasts were coming from different locations each time. The new trick was to make the enemy believe that the government was hiding in remote areas of Maine. There were no further attacks.

  Now, nine months after the war had beguan, the government knew that the war had been extremely severe. 4138 warheads had detonated in Russia and the US alone. There had been a further 1160 strikes in Europe, 475 strikes in China, and 1400 strikes against principle cities in the rest of the world, making a grand total of 7173 detonations, with over four thousand megatons in combined yield.

  Each of the 659 cities worldwide with over 500,000 inhabitants had been hit at least once. Key cities had been hit repeatedly, ensuring that the strategic infrastructure, power facilities and other important capabilities had been destroyed.

  In addition to the yield produced by the atomic blasts, vast quantities of radioactive material had also been released by the destruction of missile silos, arms production facilities, warhead storage facilities, nuclear power plants and nuclear-powered warships. To make matters worse, more strikes were yet possible even though the stockpile of high readiness missiles and bombs had been expended. Replacement missiles and bombs were being made ready for subsequent nuclear battles, with thousands of warheads being readied for use on all sides.

  The resulting shroud of radioactive particles, toxic smoke, ash and debris had caused a full-blown nuclear winter. Average temperatures had dropped by twenty five degrees celsius over continental areas of the northern hemisphere. Vast areas near and immediately down-wind of the many detonations would remain uninhabitable for scores of years.

  From 350 million before the war, the population of the United States had fallen to 130 million in just 9 months. It would be below 80 million in another year.

  The horrible reality was that the best case scenario achievable in the context of this global catastrophe would be for as few as 50 million American citizens to have survived for the hardest five years of the nuclear winter. Beyond that, it was anybody’s guess. The nuclear winter had changed the climate so suddenly that a tipping point may have been reached. The skies might never clear. The continental areas could be stuck in a mini-ice age for centuries. Or things could suddenly improve and allow food production to begin to be restored.

  If the nuclear winter lasted more than ten years, as a growing number of scientists believed likely, the forecast was unimaginably grim. Without new inputs of food production, other than what could be grown by hydroponics and other artificially illuminated agricultural systems, the actual sustainable number beyond the ten year timeframe was five to ten million in the US - just one to three percent of the original population. The real unknowns amounted to: how strongly could the American people hang on; how well would individuals fare without well-organized government guidance? How well could people adapt to a prolonged extreme winter with little or no sunlight?

  It was in this context of unknowns and fear for their own personal survival that the personnel of the Mount Weather facility were emerging. Secrecy and self-preservation were at the forefront as they began to reconnect with the nation. The subordination of local property and food resources to the needs of the DUMB inhabitants was a necessary evil. The government would continue to function, but could do little to help the nation. The citizens would have to fend for themselves.

  By the end of the twelve-hour engineering operation a thirty foot by forty foot garage had been completely assembled. The garage was nestled up against the hillside with a gravel driveway leading to it. It had just a few windows and a man-door to go along with the oversized garage door. Engineers had even blown snow around to cast a layer over the work site, making it look like the Garage had been there for years.

  Who would suspect that the utilitarian structure housed the entrance to the bunker from which the President of the United States and the upper echelon of the US Government, FEMA and the Department of Homeland Security were operating.

  It would be the responsibility of WO Blakely and others in the Utility Battalion to seek out and capture food and other essentials, and to overcome any opposition. Hopefully the locals would not put up too much of a fight.

  Little did Blakely know that put up a fight was exactly what the local network of over 2,500 farmers, loggers, miners and combat veterans of Afghanistan and Iraq were preparing to give to the 512 soldiers of the DUMB One Utility Battalion. Their food was not for the taking.

  25

  VOGEL SHELTER

  25 May: 5 Days After NEW

  The Vogels were very smelly after five days in the basement. Manfred Vogel’s last shower had been on the morning of his last flight. He had just com
pleted the post-takeoff checks on the Air Canada Jazz Dash-8 that he was piloting from Prince George to Vancouver, when he heard from an Air Traffic Controller that Winnipeg had been 'nuked'. He immediately called his wife in Vancouver. He told Jillian to get the boys out of school, and to start moving food and water down to the basement. He would land in Vancouver within the hour, and somehow find his way home and join them in the basement.

  Forty minutes later, when the EMP wave from a blast over Vancouver took out the electrical system of his Dash-8 Q400, he and his copilot had been in descent through 12,000 feet over Lions Bay, just about to come visual with the city. Mountains had protected them from the blinding light of the flash from Vancouver to their left and another blast at the Air Base in Comox behind them on their right, but the EMP fried their electrical systems and started fires in their aircraft.

  After donning emergency oxygen masks and initiating an emergency descent, they barely managed to force-land the aircraft on a low-tide sandbar at Spanish Banks. They had landed just moments after the blast and shock wave from downtown had died down. Fires could be seen in the wreckage of the Kitsilano neighborhood that lay between Spanish Banks and downtown. It was a horrible sight to behold, as the secondary explosions and whirling firestorm consumed the lives of the people in that area like a hellish monster. Closer to the crash site, the damage was less severe and fires were more scattered. Manfred saw that the far side of the Jericho Beach Sailing Center was on fire, as was the old wooden pier.

  After evacuating the passengers from the burning aircraft, Manfred told the passengers that they should follow Marine Drive for two km to the west, to find help at the University of British Columbia. The copilot knew why his aircraft captain would not go with them to UBC, so he led the passengers. They were silent, stunned by the devastation they had witnessed and shaken by the emergency landing on the beach.

  Manfred wished his copilot luck, and then ran as fast as he could up Trimble hill to Eighth Avenue. Then he walked for a block to catch his breath before jogging the rest of the way along Discovery Street to his house on West 15th Avenue.

  He had just made it to his front door when the skyline on the opposite side of his house was suddenly filled by the intensely bright light of a detonation overhead Vancouver International Airport, five km over the Dunbar ridge from his home. He ducked down and covered his eyes with his forearm in the sheltered alcove of his front porch. This saved him from being blinded by the detonation of the third atomic blast he had experienced in less than an hour.

  After the house had been shaken by the shock wave from the airport, Manfred entered the house and headed down to the basement.

  On his way, he saw that although his windows had been blown in, his home was basically intact. He figured that was because his street was in the lee of the Dunbar highlands. He was grateful that today’s westerly winds would blow the fallout from the airport eastward, and not immediately threaten his family.

  He found Jillian and the boys in the basement, terrified but intact. With perhaps four hours before the fallout from the blast at the base in Comox would reach Point Grey, Manfred knew that they didn’t have much time. Before he could say much, they all felt a deep rumbling from yet another blast, this one more distant. Manfred wondered if radiation from Victoria or Nanaimo could arrive sooner, but then remembered that the winds were westerly, and would probably take that fallout over Richmond, well south of his home in Point Grey.

  Having had the lecture from his long-time buddy, Casey Callaghan, he knew he needed to make a shelter that would put as much mass as possible between them and the soon-to-be radiated exterior of his house. Casey had even given Manfred some diagrams and pamphlets, which Manfred quickly forgot about once they had returned home from their weekend visit with the Callaghans.

  He hadn’t read the “How to Survive a Nuclear War” pamphlets after all, and hadn’t watched any of the disaster films Casey had given him on disks. So Jillian and Manfred now had to rush through the diagrams to make sure they knew what to build.

  Fortunately, they had a good starting point. Not only had Manfred been a construction worker before he became an airline pilot, but he also had a very well-built home. Thanks in part to his younger brother’s success in the ‘dot com’ craze, Manfred had built a very large home for his family, just three blocks from where he had grown up, in upscale West Point Grey. The house had a deep basement with a ‘nanny suite’, rec room, bathroom, and modest-sized utility room.

  With the lives of his loved ones at stake, Manfred suddenly took survivalism very seriously. Jillian found the package of reference material that Casey had given them for an improvised basement fallout shelter. Manfred scanned the handout and found a section that listed the “halving thicknesses” of various materials: Concrete, 2.3 inches; Steel, 0.99 inches; Packed Soil, 3.6 inches; Water, 7.2 inches; and Lumber, 11 inches.

  He understood the physics involved in maximizing the mass surrounding the shelter. Each halving thickness that he could put over their heads would cut the radiation level by one half. A footnote to the chart said that ten halving thicknesses would reduce radiation to 1/1024th. He had some materials on hand and, after assessing them for a few minutes, came up with a plan.

  Working efficiently in the little time that they had, they first shoved the rec-room furniture away from the deepest corner of the basement. Then they brought the six plastic shelving units from the utility room and set them up in three rows of two, four feet apart, and laid some 2x6’s across the top shelves. Then they piled two four-by-eight sheets of plywood on the 2x6s, making a clean, flat roof about five feet high.

  Then they covered every inch of this improvised rooftop with empty Roughneck bins and cardboard boxes lined with heavy-duty plastic bags. Ten year old Tyler was given the job of filling the containers with water. Soon they were bulging and pressing up against each other. This made a fairly tightly packed layer of additional mass. The sturdy plastic shelving showed no sign of buckling under the heavy load of water. Just to make sure that the structure would not crash down on them while they slept, Manfred reinforced the shelving units with landscaping ties that he cut to length and strapped to the ends of the shelving units to carry some of the load.

  When Jillian and Manfred took a break to assess how much protection their shelter would give them, they realized that the huge quantity of water would be helpful later on, if water pressure failed. Nevertheless, Jillian had the boys fill every water bucket or pot they could find.

  Manfred added up the halving thicknesses. He figured a half for the clay-tile roof and associated lumber, two and a half for the total of eight inches of concrete in the main and upper floor’s 4 inch thick concrete slabs of the in-floor radiant heating system, plus perhaps another one for the lumber, plywood and drywall upstairs, and one and a half for the ten inches of water in the boxes on top of their shelter. That came to just five and a half halving thicknesses.

  “If we don’t come up with a way to add a more halving thicknesses, I don’t know if this will be enough,” he said.

  “Can we add another layer of bins of water on top?”

  “I don’t think that would be safe, Jillian. That’s a lot of weight, and we’ll be staying under it for over ten days.”

  “What else can we do?” The adults stared at each other, worried about the effects of only cutting the radiation to 1/50th of the unprotected level.

  “We need mass? On top of our heads, right?” 11-year old Adam asked, wanting to help his parents. They looked afraid.

  “That’s right, champ. Any ideas?” Manfred held his son.

  “Why don’t we pull up the bricks in the patio and lay them on top of the floor right above where this shelter is?” he said.

  “HEY! That would work! It would be like adding three inches of concrete to the floor, adding another halving thickness. That would DOUBLE our protection, and not add any danger of collapse. But we’ve only got about two hours left. You boys get started tearing up the bricks, and M
om will show you where to put them. Jillian, this corner is directly under the area in front of the bay window, in the formal living room. I’ll grab Bob’s wheel-barrow and help the boys.”

  “And we can add even more on top of that, come to think of it,” Jillian said, excitedly.

  “How?”

  “THE INFLATABLE POOL! It’s not even half full, so we can dump the water out of it, drag it into the living room, and set it up on top of the bricks. We could lay the area rug on top of the bricks to make sure we don’t puncture the pool, and then throw the hose into it and fill it all the way up to the rim. It’ll take hours to fill, but we can run the hose through down here with one of these “Y” shutoffs, and turn it off when we hear it overfill.”

  “That's a great idea!” said Manfred. As everybody got busy with the plan, Manfred rushed across the lane to his neighbor Bob’s house, and took the wheel-barrow. He calculated that the three inches of bricks and thirty inches of water would add almost five halving thicknesses, taking them to the full ten. That would cut the radiation down to 1/1024th, which had to be enough.

  As Manfred rushed back with the wheel-barrow, something was clattering around at the back of his mind but he couldn’t figure it out. Something he had seen at Bob’s house.

  Soon after, when a small wind-up alarm clock Manfred had set went off, they realized that it was time to get into the shelter. Manfred turned on the Survey Meter and saw no radiation indicated. He wondered if he was using it correctly. Just to make sure, Manfred headed up to the second floor deck by the Master Bedroom and tried an outdoor reading. He could see that the mushroom cloud over the Vancouver International Airport had blown to the east. But at least a fraction of the radioactive particles must have been swirling around at lower levels since the survey meter now registered the occasional burst of about ten Roentgens per hour.