DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA
1) NUCLEAR TARGETS
Date Type Target
10/28/62 Frog Washington
2) ORGANIZED MILITARY FORCES
None. The "Old Guard" 3rd Infantry Regiment pulled out of the city when the government left in 1962 for Mount Weather, leaving only police and National Guardsmen to attempt the hopeless task of controlling the city.
3) THE DISTRICT AT LARGE
Sneak attack: Late in the evening of October 28, 1962 there was a Liberian-registered freighter docked in Baltimore harbor, having just arrived there the previous day. Her captain had refused to let the harbor patrol aboard for a routine inspection that afternoon, causing the Harbor Police to be called in during the evening. Just as the situation began to escalate, the police noticed that the ship's crew had, during the stand-off, disassembled a large shipping container on the foredeck. Before they could even ask, there was a cloud of smoke and a streak of fire as a stubby-winged Frog surface-to-surface missile shot off to the west towards Washington DC. This was the ultimate culmination of a Russian plan devised and planned for since at least the late 1950s, where a nuclear first strike against America would be preceded by a sneak attack to catch the government in a trap and thereby possibly delay any retaliation until the Russian nukes had already done the deed. The Frog missed a little and the 12 kiloton warhead burst low over a residential area in the northwest part of the city, just outside the National Zoological Park, and a few miles from the Capital, killing fifty thousand people in an instant. Though the big apartment buildings in the area absorbed a lot of the shock, the blast wave rolled north right up the open space of Rock Creek Park, demolishing Walter Reed Hospital, crushing that area and sending firestorms racing east and north. The blast and firestorm shattered a large area to the west and east, but favorable terrain to the south saved much of the actual government district from being totally destroyed. The damage to the buildings was serious enough, however, to force the evacuation of all surviving government personnel.
To catch a President: The intended effect was to decapitate the US government with a sneak attack--particularly the president and his staff--and it worked to perfection. There were helicopters at Andrews AFB whose sole job was to get President Kennedy and his family out of DC if needed. That evening, Kennedy was nearing a nervous breakdown in the Oval Office, the pressure of the morning's debacle on the beaches of Cuba crushing his spirit. Even when a frantic call to his office warned of satellite sightings of the dreaded ICBMs being launched from the Russian heartland, Kennedy dithered too much and didn't allow the evacuation request to go out until nearly the last minute. Then there were communications problems between the White House Signals Office and Andrews AFB--someone didn't have the right authentication codes and the colonel in charge was afraid to act without them. That ate up a lot of minutes and when the helicopters finally got into the air, the Frog from Baltimore was racing in, unbeknownst to virtually everyone. It is assumed, due to lack of substantial evidence to the contrary, that in the race between the helicopters and the missile to get to the White House, the missile won.
The city today: Today, half the city is now rubbled out and the rest is being fought over by at least twenty rival gangs. The city is marked by vast burnt sections of houses, toppled monuments and once white marble walkways and statues now black. On the southwest side of town one of the bigger gangs, several hundred strong, is the "Red Dog Family". Other gangs in the metro area are the "Georgetown Boys" to the northwest. And Rushton's "American Union" who hold the remains of Capital Hill, which they have cleaned up. Several hundred strong, they claim a chunk of central Washington turf stretching from Union Station in the north to Fourth Street in the east to Route 395 in the south and the National Gallery of Art and the Air and Space Museum on opposite sides of the Mall, the rest of the Smithsonian being a no-man's land between the American Union and Tide Camp lands. And to the east on both sides of the Anacostia is Louis Farrakhan and his "New American Nation of Islam". And up along Rock Creek Park are the "Gold Coasters"--a mostly black gang in the formerly affluent black neighborhood area between Rock Creek Park and 16th Street that is led by a former Princeton professor, it is a community of several hundred who have cleared a good chunk of the park for cultivation. And the mostly Puerto Rican "Super Machos" around Columbia Road. And then innumerable smaller organized gangs such as the "Nuclear Winners" who live on the edge of the park a half mile north of the Gold Coasters and are even doing a little cultivation in Rock Creek Park as well as scarfing and scavenging, the "Bloods"--who are 40 strong and hold the North Capital slums that had not been too badly damaged by the blast, the "Rangers", and the "Warlords", even the nationwide Black Liberation Army has a unit in the urban renewal area north of New York Avenue, and then the straight-out scum and bandit groups such as the "Rebel Runners", the "Pagans", the "Pirates", and the "Death Commandoes". They, and all the other gangs on this side, are subservient to the "Lord of the Tidal Basin". The Lord is an ethnic Chinese from Thailand named Soong, and is in fact the former leader of the backup White House Secret Service Security Detail. He has the power over the gangs in the area and has made it very clear to them that the White House is off limits. Out of fear of retribution from the Lord, the gangs leave the grounds of the ruined White House sacrosanct, even though there is only rubble left of it on the surface. In the intact subbasements of the White House are a lot of valuable gear and supplies just sitting there. They also hold the Court of Claims and the Treasury Annex and the intact Federal Bureau of Engraving and Printing and plan to begin reissuing money soon. The Lord's base is in the Lincoln Memorial and he has hundreds of well armed men, some with anti-tank weapons. The core of his fighters are all former enforcement types: police, DEA, FBI, and Secret Service agents that survived the nuke and chaos. They also have a 81mm mortar and a 4.2inch mortar which are zeroed in on the White House perimeter in pre-selected firing patterns. The reason that so much attention is paid to preserving the White House is that Soong's people are slightly deluded and crazy, and are waiting with Second Coming anticipation for the President to return to Washington DC and resume the head of the nation. They are working the Tidal Basin, having set up rice paddies and fields to feed the people. The fields are worked by a large Asian-American population that have migrated here over the years. The Highway One bridge was dropped by the blasts but a plank and rope bridge has been fashioned using the existing pillars to cross the neck of the Washington Channel where it runs into the Tidal Basin. All the bridges on the Potomac and the Anacostia are down, from the Woodrow Wilson Bridge clear up to the Beltway Bridge in Montgomery County to the west and the suburb of Brentwood in the east. On the island of East Potomac Park they have more fields and paddies, the lower half of the island, once a pampered gold course is now a well-ordered shantytown for several hundred field workers. The major neutral ground in the district is the "Rubble Mart", a cleaned out shopping mall on the far northwest side of town almost to the Maryland boundary and a few blocks west of the edge of Rock Creek Park. The mall is open to all comers and offers all manner of salvaged goods. Security is by hired guns but the mall is so valuable to everyone that no one dares to cause trouble there. The Washington Monument is now a broken off stump. West Potomac Park is now a tangled jungle of out-of-control weeds and trees. The Jefferson Memorial was leveled, all that remains are several shattered columns and the cracked and ruined dome lying on the ground. A group seized Theodore Roosevelt Island and declared it an independent republic and now live and in-breed in reclaimed truck trailers around the ruins of the memorial. At Andrews Air Force Base to the southeast, today, amongst the scattered wreckage of F-106 Delta Darts, there only remains left-behind GIs, MPs, and nutcase National Guard types. The Pentagon across the river in Arlington was devastated by fires and abandoned. However, in recent months, the civilian government in Mount Weather has picked up intermittent, weak signals from what are believed to be the underground bunkers beneath the foundation of the Pentagon, perhaps meaning that someone has survived down there.
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