November 27, 1997
part 2
Unofficially,
Word was received in Washington of the London strike within a few minutes. The Secret Service and military wanted to evacuate President Tanner immediately. NORAD confirmed that there were no missiles inbound to North America. The President refused to board the NEACP, unwilling to give the appearance of panicking, but agreed to leave the White House. After issuing a statement condemning the attack on America’s closest ally, offering condolences for the loss of life and ordering American forces in the UK to support HM Government’s relief efforts to the extent that it does not impede combat operations, Tanner departed the White House for the last time. His motorcade took him to the US Department of Agriculture research center in Beltsville, Maryland (adjacent to the Secret Service training center, which had a small Presidential Emergency Facility) for a relaxing jog. A US Marine Corps VH-60 helicopter of HMX-1 stood on standby at the Secret Service center. At mid-morning, he departed the Secret Service center, his motorcade disrupting traffic on the Beltway as the President travelled to Andrews Air Force Base for Thanksgiving dinner with the troops. To keep up the appearance of normalcy, Vice President Pemberton remained in the city to host the White House’s formal Thanksgiving dinner with VIPs.
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At shortly after 1700 GMT (3 pm on the US East Coast) in the North Atlantic the second phase of the decapitation strike, the attack on the US, was begun. As the satellites aligned the submerged Typhoon-class ballistic missile submarine TK-20 was able to receive an updated position fix from its onboard GLONASS satellite navigation system. The massive boat’s fire control system adjusted for the distance between the receiver on the navigation masthead and the missiles’ locations forward on the boat and with a final glance between the captain and the political officer the first SS-N-20 missile was launched. Within 90 seconds six missiles had been launched and the boat dove and turned northeast, accelerating as fast as the sub’s two nuclear reactors could push the 48,000-ton boat.
(Officially) An orbiting military surveillance satellite picked up a number of IR signatures, characteristic of the launch of SLBMs (Submarine-Launched Ballistic Missiles). Within minutes, messages were zipping through established channels and alarms began ringing across the nation. (Unofficially) The initial detection by Defense Support Program satellites was relayed to NORAD headquarters, which quickly relayed the news to the White House, Pentagon and Strategic Air Command (SAC). The launch was confirmed by the PAVE PAWS early warning radar on Cape Cod shortly thereafter.
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SAC ordered the alert bomber force - some 75 B-1s and B-52s stationed at 14 bases around the nation (as well as the 43rd Bomb Wing’s B-52Gs at Anderson Air Force Base on Guam), as well as their accompanying tankers - to scramble. The so-called Elephant Walk of bombers began within 90 seconds of the confirmation, and with 15 minutes of MITOs (Minimum Interval Take Offs) the bombers were airborne. Following standing Emergency War Orders, they immediately refueled from approximately half of the tankers, topping off their fuel tanks, and proceeded to holding areas over the Arctic and western Pacific for further orders, joining the dozen B-52s already on airborne alert over the Canadian Arctic.
Back in Washington, when the warning of the incoming SLBMs arrived President Tanner was rushed across the base to board the E-4B NEACP, which immediately took off. (Officially) Because an inbound missile had been detected Vice President Pemberton elected to try to make it to the Special Facility at Mount Weather. (Unofficially) Vice President Pemberton ran to the waiting VH-3 of HMX-1 that had been more or less permanently stationed at the White House since the outbreak of war.
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(Officially) President Tanner was killed, not by the strike on Washington, but by an accident during takeoff of the NEACP aircraft. The mystery of precisely what went wrong with one of the most rigorously inspected, carefully maintained aircraft in the nation has never been solved - the FAA never properly investigated the accident.
(Unofficially) Back at the White House, the helicopter’s crew already had the rotors turning when Pemberton’s military aide, a Marine Corps Major, heard the radio call about the NEACP crash. (Officially) Upon being informed of the President's death and told that no retaliatory action had been taken, Vice President Pemberton was forced to delay her departure and remain at a secure communications facility (the radios on the evacuation helicopter have never been considered reliable for this purpose). From the bomb shelter under the east wing of the White House (built during President Truman's tenure, and never intended to withstand a direct hit), Vice President Pemberton, after identifying herself, issued a proclamation of the existence of a state of war (only Congress has the power to declare war, and that body was not in session), and ordered retaliatory strikes on the USSR. With less than 10 minutes' notice between the rising of sub-launched ballistic missiles from off the Atlantic coast and their detonation over Washington DC, the orders to evacuate the cities were never given.
(Unofficially) The first missile to be launched by TK-20 was the one targeted at Washington. The SS-N-20 had ten 100-kiloton warheads aboard. One was aimed at the White House, two at the Pentagon, three at Andrews Air Force Base (necessary to ensure the destruction of aircraft on the base as well as cutting the runway) and one each at CIA headquarters at Langley, Virginia, DIA headquarters at Bolling Air Force Base, the Presidential Emergency Facility and NSA headquarters at Fort Meade, Maryland and the National Reconnaissance Office headquarters at Westfields, Virginia. The missile warhead’s courses had been adjusted as they re-entered the atmosphere, adjusting for changes in atmospheric conditions, the missile’s performance, even differences in magnetic fields and gravity, all detected by the on-board electronics and cross-checked against the position reported by the GLONASS receiver. These adjustments allowed each re-entry vehicle accuracy nearly unmatched by any other Soviet (or many American) missiles. Each warhead landed, on average, within 220 meters of its aim point. With this level of accuracy, the strikes were devastating. The warhead aimed at the White House landed in the Kennedy Garden, just south of the East Wing, and detonated. The warhead created a crater 90 meters wide and 40 meters deep; the fireball consumed the adjacent Old Executive Office Building and Treasury Building and flattened all other buildings within a 1000-meter radius. Pemberton was killed when the missile detonated, the blast shelter completely inadequate against a blast so close and so powerful. (a representation of the blast is
here). The other strikes were nearly as successful, with none of the Washington area targets surviving.
(Officially) The main target in Washington, DC was the White House, in an effort (a successful one, as it turned out) to destroy the executive leadership of the country. A sizable portion of the downtown area was damaged, not by the blast itself (which was a small one), but from the seismic shock and radiation of the ground burst and the flash-induced fires. As a side note, the National Archives was closed at the time of the attack. When the bomb destroyed the White House, the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, the two most important documents in American history, were in their normal nocturnal resting place: a 50-ton subterranean vault designed to protect them from fire, flood, earthquake, and (of course) nuclear attack.
NORAD (North American Air Defense) headquarters at Cheyenne Mountain had three SLBMs aimed at it, each with a single 1 MT warhead set for ground bursts. (Unofficially) One of these scored a direct hit while the others landed nearby, creating quite impressive craters in the granite mountainside and delivering an intense shock to the underground facility. The facility had been designed to withstand just such a shock and was largely undamaged. (Officially) It was, however, out of communication temporarily.
Two missiles were targeted at SAC headquarters at Offutt AFB, Nebraska. (Unofficially) An Army Patriot battery at the base, deployed as an experimental anti-missile defense measure, succeeded in destroying one incoming warhead (as well as two decoys), leaving 19 100-kiloton MIRVs (Multiple Independently-targeted Reentry Vehicles) landing within the base perimeter. (Officially) Several, set for ground burst, were aimed at the SAC underground command post, while others attempted to sever the runway, destroy the SR-71s of the 95th Strategic Recon Wing as well as that unit’s and the 544th Aerospace Recon Technical Wing’s headquarters and facilities. The base was incinerated and all the targets were destroyed.
The Thanksgiving Massacre (as it came to be called) destroyed only a limited number of command and control centers, but these were vital. In a matter of minutes the U.S. had been delivered a massive blow.