December 5, 1997
RainbowSix reports i an effort to ensure GCHQ was completely destroyed a second warhead was aimed at Cheltenham, although it overshot its target, devastating the nearby town of Gloucester instead. Soviet missiles also returned to South Wales - Cardiff, Swansea and Newport were all destroyed, along with the steel works at Port Talbot. A final Soviet nuclear missile targeted the twin port facilities of Felixstone and Harwich (the former was the busiest container port in the UK whilst the latter had been the main departure point for ships taking troops and material to the Continent). The missile missed its mark however, detonating directly over the nearby city of Ipswich, which was totally destroyed. Both ports suffered some damage, which was compounded by subsequent disorder, but would not require a large amount of work to be brought back to working order. The Folkestone strike also destroyed the UK end of the Channel Tunnel. RAF Bentwaters and RAF Woodbridge both suffered heavy damage in the nuclear strike aimed at the Felixstone and Harwich ports.
Throughout the UK, food and fuel were both rationed, although this was a relatively futile measure, as supplies of both were already exhausted in many areas; the news media came under Government control; and emergency centres were set up to deal with casualties, however the sheer scale of the devastation meant that much of the Government’s planning, whilst well intentioned, was woefully inadequate. The South East in particular was swamped with displaced persons, with many thousands of people being housed in hastily erected tented camps that offered little protection against the bitter winter. Bodies were still lying unburied in some areas, causing outbreaks of diseases unknown in Britain for decades; cholera first broke out in a Kent refugee camp on this date. Officially, one of the refugees fleeing London was GRU Colonel Piotr Bulganin
RainbowSix also reports that attempts to evacuate the major cities which had not yet been targeted proved futile in many cases; many of those who could leave had already done so, overwhelming rural communities.
Officially, in northeastern Arkansas most towns near the destroyed Blytheville AFB but outside the fallout footprint were abandoned in the panic.
The decapitation of the US military command, control, and communications systems proved to be only the beginning, although the apocalyptic spasm predicted for decades never took place. Instead of a chain reaction of ever-widening destruction, a slow, carefully calculated program of industrial and economic destruction began. American retaliatory strikes were not only aimed at Soviet command centers, but also at key industrial targets. Prewar studies had determined that the one key industry for modern society was petroleum production and refining.
Unofficially, President Munson, after watching the Soviet destruction of refineries across the US, authorized the execution of the SIOP’s anti-petroleum package, albeit on an extended time scale as a result of his stipulation that no more than ten warheads be expended in the campaign within any 24-hour time period. (Even the wording of his approval reflected Munson’s background as a contract attorney).
While the British had struck several refineries in the Volga region in the prior days and Baku’s oil infrastructure had been severely damaged by American strikes on the city when the Southern TVD headquarters was hit in the prior week, the Soviet petroleum industry had yet to suffer the effects of an all-out American nuclear attack. That began to change rapidly.
While Soviet PVO (Air Defense Force) commanders had ordered large numbers of the SA-10 missile batteries that had surrounded Moscow north to close the massive gap in the air defense network, but ordering and happening in the post-nuclear USSR were two vastly different things. The missile batteries were reasonably truck mobile, but the headquarters and support organizations had been largely static for many decades and had been raided for trucks earlier in the war. Shortages abounded, and the distances were too vast for the batteries to make it without refueling their thirsty trucks; the most fuel-efficient way to deploy was to move to the northern terminuses of the rail network before proceeding overland. The rapidly cooling winter weather would transform the northern-flowing rivers to travelable roads. Unfortunately, none of that plan came to pass. Without the coordination of the Ministry of Railways there was no rail capacity available, and the few batteries that attempted to make the move entirely by road soon found themselves spread out over many kilometers of northern Russian highway, out of fuel and with a trail of broken-down vehicles behind them leading to the ruins of Moscow. The hole in the Soviet air defenses would remain a permanent fixture of the Soviet Union, one that had been supplemented in prior days by smaller strikes that opened egress corridors over the Baltic, Balkans and Iranian-Afghan border.
The day saw SAC bombers launching cruise missiles at three Soviet refinery complexes in Siberia- at Angarsk near Irkutsk in eastern Siberia, Tomsk in western Siberia and Achinsk in the center. Ground Launched Cruise Missiles fired by the 303rd Tactical Missile Wing in the UK targeted two of the largest refineries in Europe, at Novopolotsk and Mozyr in Byelorussia, destroying each of them with a pair of 150-kiloton missiles. The loss of five refineries is a fierce blow to the already-reeling Soviet war economy.
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The Soviets respond in kind with one of their most severe attacks on the American petroleum industry with an attack on the Houston area. Once again, two SS-17s rise over the steppes near Pervomaisk, Ukraine and 25 minutes later mushroom clouds rise over Texas. Two 750-kiloton MIRVs each are aimed at Texas City, Houston and Baytown, Texas, with the last two MIRVs aimed at NASA’s Houston Space Center. Seven of the eight warheads work, extinguishing nearly 2.5 million barrels per day of America’s refining capacity at ten refineries, over ten percent of the nation’s refining capacity in a single afternoon.
Officially, on President Munson's orders, Army and National Guard units seized bulk food storage facilities across the country and took custody of what petroleum remained. Rationing of food and fuel was introduced.
Congress attempted to reconvene at Mount Weather, but most members of Congress chose not to or were unable to return. (Unofficially, several dozen members gathered at the Greenbriar Resort 200 miles to the southwest, which contained a large bunker that had been long designated as a Congressional shelter.) Officially, lacking a quorum, nothing could be accomplished.
The search for the downed B-1B bomber was called off after two rescue UH-1s were lost in blizzard conditions over the Black Hills.
New England had one of the worst food/population ratios in the United States before the war and was the site of some of the earliest food riots. Having no local coal, oil, or natural gas reserves to speak of. New England could have survived on the energy production of local hydroelectric and nuclear power stations had these not been rendered almost completely inoperable by EMP from nuclear detonations. Local authorities determined that the prior week’s explosion that killed the CNBF leadership outside Boston was caused by flammable gas which collected in an empty heating oil tank.
The KGB broke 400 Pact POWs out of Graterford Prison outside Philadelphia, taking advantage of the chaos that reigned over Eastern Pennsylvania. Unofficially, KGB agents were able to incite an infamous Philadelphia leftist organization, MOVE, to provide armed fighters for the attack on the outnumbered guard force (many of which had fled the area in the aftermath of the attacks).
Officially, in Florida, the worst of the burn victims from the Tampa strike had died. Others died from shock, blast-related injuries, suicide, heart attacks, pacemaker failure, insulin shock, and related causes brought on by the subsequent EMP that stripped the central portion of Florida right out of the electrical age. The doomed stampede of panic-stricken civilians from Tampa and later from an ever-enlarging circle of surrounding communities did far more harm than the direct effects of the original attack. Many of those who didn't flee to the interior clung to the gulf beaches. Water was a major problem on the beaches and that alone thinned the population there. The reality of the chaos and death among those fleeing the Pinellas megalopolis soon brought back a trickle of former residents, and not a few brought new refugees back to this desolate little parcel of paradise. Life among those that remained was difficult as well. Without electricity and without water pressure, the great concrete and glass shells of the high-rise retirement condominiums in the seaside village of South Pasadena could not sustain life for long. Like the individual coral polyps that make up a coral reef, the residents of those high rises perished when the power failed in the EMP. The many elderly people with pacemakers were snuffed out as the EMP stole the electrical genie that kept their heartbeat tuned to a livable rhythm. The insulin-dependent perished over the next few days as did those whose spirits could no longer stand up under the onslaught of depression and despair. Death came in a thousand ways: dehydration, exposure, starvation, and despair. High-rise towers of proud engineering became homes for the dead. The tower dwellers would be no more; they were gone and soon to be as forgotten as the mound-building Indian tribes. The loss of electricity and telecommunications by the effects of the EMP created an information void into which fear, ignorance, and blind panic rushed. Without the strong voice of civil authority (be it Civil Defense, the military, police, or even the local radio or television announcers) to sooth and calm fears in an unprecedented situation, fear grew to panic and panic to blind flight.
Eighteen miles from Corpus Christi, Texas, the impact point of a 1 megaton nuclear device, the city of Sinton suffered heavy casualties - mostly in riots and panic that broke out in the prior days following the blast.
In Iran, the IPA 2nd Armored Division and 9th Airmobile Brigade destroyed the Soviet 94th (my 57th) Air Assault Brigade at Chah Bahar, as the Soviet paratroops were preparing to withdraw to friendlier territory.
Unofficially, the Headquarters of the 157th Air Refueling Wing was overrun by rioters at Boston-Logan airport; some of the staff escaped on the remaining tankers.
An assessment team from FEMA travelled to the site of the
strike on the Robinson, Illinois refinery. (Emergency response teams, either state or federal, attempted to perform a site assessment on each attack outside of military installations). The team, heavily protected against radiation, was elated to discover that the MIRV targeted at the refinery not only fizzled (the warhead’s small fission primary charge failed to initiate the much larger thermonuclear part of the charge), with an assessed yield of 8.5 kilotons, but it also missed by over two kilometers. Unfortunately, that put the detonation right over the center of the small town, but meant that the refinery, the target of the attack, was only subjected to .5 psi of blast overpressure and was only very lightly damaged and remained fully operational. Of course, this information was kept highly classified, and the surviving population was unaware that the terrible explosion over the city was actually a Soviet failure and was intended to be much, much worse. (The Soviet analyst tasked to evaluate the poor-quality damage assessment imagery of the strike noted the presence of a mushroom cloud over the target area but, in a typical instance of Soviet sloppiness, didn't check the size of the cloud with what a 750-kiloton warhead should produce and therefore didn't realize that the strike was a fizzle; the GRU reported to the Strategic Rocket Forces that the target was destroyed).
An awkward confrontation occurred at the Naval magazine in Port Hadlock, Washington, when the USS Baton Rouge appeared at the facility, its captain demanding torpedoes and whatever missiles were available. He had a valid requisition from COMSUBPAC but the base commander had been told that the sub's skipper should be arrested for defying the Bremerton naval base commander's order for the sub to remain. The skipper succeeded in convincing the magazine's CO that he just want to preserve his ship and crew and return to the fight, and received a load of four Mk-101 and ten Mk-48 torpedoes, two Sub-Harpoon missiles, two Sea Lance-Ns and four Tomahawk cruise missiles (two with nuclear warheads, two with conventional). The crew began loading the weapons aboard, raiding the post commissary for food and finishing what repairs it could.
In Europe, the last of the NATO troops (except for the US-Dutch-German marine force under II MEF command along the Baltic Coast) withdrew from Polish territory after combat engineers rigged the bridges over the Oder with command-detonated mines. The bridges were not blown, the defenders on the western shore holding the triggers but unwilling to complicate any potential future advance into Poland with having to build replacement bridges. The initial Warsaw Pact forces to reach the eastern shore were Polish territorial defense troops under command of the Polish Internal Front, reporting to the Polish Communist Party, such was the paralysis gripping Soviet Front commanders following the attacks on Moscow and the Western TVD headquarters. American ELINT aircraft located a suspected Soviet higher-level headquarters along the Polish-Soviet border south of Brest and relayed its location to US Army headquarters. Two hours later a Pershing II missile was on its way to the target, its TV-guidance package landing it within the field headquarters’ inner perimeter. While it would be years before what was hit in the strike, the attack destroyed the field command post of the KGB Border Guards’ Western District, killing the commander and most of his remaining staff.
The collapse of the Guatemalan invasion of Belize was nearly completed with the arrival of Belizian Defense Force troops at the border, relieving the British troops holding the former border post. The Belizian troops passed through several encampments of demoralized and disorganized Guatemalan troops as they drove west, leaving the task of accepting the Guatemalan’s surrender to following forces. As with the British detachment at the border, surrendering Guatemalan troops were disarmed and sent west on foot back into the remote Guatemalan jungle to fend for themselves; the burden of supporting thousands of POWs was beyond the ability of the tiny British-Belizian force.