On this day 25 years ago

[chico20854]

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.

[chico20854]

November 27, 1997

part 3

The people of the United States counted on a steady flow of electricity for their health, comfort, and well-being, not to mention their livelihoods. This flow of electricity was the target of the USSR’’s drive to cripple the American war effort. (Unofficially) A matter of minutes after the warhead detonated on Cheyenne Mountain, three SS-18 missiles rose into the skies over the steppes at Dombarovski south of the Ural Mountains. Travelling over the North Pole, they each released a single 1 megaton warhead, (Officially) which detonated more than 50 miles high in several locations over the United States, inducing a massive Electro-Magnetic Pulse (EMP). The EMP "killed" all unshielded electric power sources and functioning electrical devices over most of the continental United States. EMP proved to be more powerful than the most conservative prewar estimates, affecting even some supposedly shielded equipment. Enough equipment was on standby, and enough adequately shielded, to enable the Joint Chiefs to remain in touch with their scattered forces (for a time). However, basically all unshielded equipment which was turned on at the time of the attack was subjected to induced currents sufficient to destroy it, especially if it contained integrated circuits or the older transistors, which are very sensitive to variations in current and easily damaged by the slightest excess. Telephones, telexes, radios, computers, televisions, practically every form of electronic communications was out of commission or severely damaged. EMP had fried the control circuits of every hydroelectric station on the Tennessee River. Without controls, the massive turbines and generators were severely damaged. Power-generating facilities and the power transmission grid in Utah were severely damaged by surges and EMP.

The EMP knocked out all the operating radio and television channels. It took out the power grid and the power stations themselves, together with the spider web network of power transformers, inducers, relays, back-up generators and associated control instruments. Control circuits in all plants were fried by EMP, and the surge that occurred when the target cities went off-line brought down power transmission lines throughout the country. The power companies had lots of experience getting power back on line. Replacing one or even a dozen major transformers at scattered sites in the teeth of electrical storms or hurricanes was not an unusual occurrence, even on a holiday like Thanksgiving. But what had happened here and across the middle of Florida was a catastrophe of unprecedented proportions. The damage was not to one portion of the system but to the entire power grid. All power-generating equipment was affected, from the Crystal River Nuclear Power Plant - which automatically shut down to the tiny gas turbine surge stations scattered across the state. Just about the entire electrical production system was on at the time of the strike, including all the back-ups, and was completely destroyed. Stations which had escaped the EMP surged, trying to make up for the sudden shortfall. One by one they overloaded, then their automatic shutoffs took them off-line. The continental power generation and transmission grid collapsed like a string of dominoes.

An effect labeled "residual reverberation" played havoc with backup diesel-generating systems in hospitals, hotels, and inevitably, the Civil Defense control centers. For sowing the seeds of what happened next, the strikes must be counted a total success. The electrical blackout and accompanying residual telecommunications jamming associated with the pulse created a monstrous void in communications, and into that void slipped rumor, exaggeration, and ultimately, panic. Without a reassuring central voice of authority, panic turned to rout and rout into riot and worse.

Airborne civilian aircraft (military aircraft were hardened against EMP) lost all power due to the EMP and dropped out of the sky. Some pilots made successful "dead stick" landings; many of them died trying. Some, blinded by the direct rays of the fireball, were flash-blinded where they sat. With virtually every radio in the affected zone blitzed into inoperability, no one was able to talk anyone down. The scorched ruins of the aircraft dot the nation. One of the lucky passengers was TV journalist Fanya Ayn Wilkerson, who was flying to visit her husband's family in New York. He had taken the boy and went ahead while Fanya completed some tapings for a network special about her escapades in Iran. Fanya was to catch a flight out of Tampa on Thanksgiving Day. Hers was one of the fortunate ones; the pilot managed to make a belly landing near Orlando, and the passengers survived.

Mundane devices like cars, ambulances, electric pacemakers and medical refrigeration units also failed. So did the incubators, respirators, kidney dialysis machines, and iron lungs in local hospitals and clinics. Even when hospital backup generators could be kicked back in to restore power, many patients died because the machines themselves could not be restarted or replaced in time to save them. Cars lost their electrical systems while in motion, causing massive chain-reaction collisions. Traffic lights, police emergency radios, and even the civil defense radios failed. The "We interrupt this program" messages were not heard because the home TV and radio sets that were turned on at the moment of the pulse (and remember the attack occurred on Thanksgiving Day, while the various ball games were on the air) were instantly rendered into so much junk, not even salvageable for spare parts. Generally speaking, if an item of electronic equipment was in use at the time the pulse occurred, that piece of electronics was irretrievably ruined.

(Unofficially) Pemberton’s orders for retaliatory strikes were received at SAC Headquarters at Offutt Air Force Base outside Omaha, Nebraska as well as aboard the fleet of always-airborne strategic command and control aircraft. While SAC Headquarters was obliterated only a few minutes later, the Looking Glass airborne command post was able to relay the launch order to missile launch control centers, the airborne bombers and their bases and the US Navy’s TACAMO aircraft.

However, Pemberton’s orders did not specify what retaliatory measures should be implemented. The Single Integrated Operations Plan (SIOP), the US military’s nuclear war plan, had not, in fact, been a single plan for several decades. Starting in the 1970s the SIOP had evolved into a package of plans, which the National Command Authority was intended to select one or more options to execute. (Some early options included whether or not to target China, North Korea and Warsaw Pact allies as well as differing plans depending on the alert status and desire to withhold some assets for follow-up strikes or post-exchange negotiations). The SIOP in effect in 1997, updated earlier in the year, was composed of several categories of targets that could be assembled, like blocks, into a strike plan. (These blocks included five categories of Command and Control targets, two different air defense suppression packages, a petroleum package, a ground forces package, a military industry package, a naval base package, as well as packages of bombers, missiles, population centers, intelligence assets, early-warning assets and electrical power, among others.) In the confusion and chaos that preceded the incoming warhead aimed at Washington, Pemberton did not specify which package or packages should be executed, leaving SAC commanders without guidance.

In the absence of direction from the National Command Authorities, the Vice Chief of SAC, the senior officer aboard the Looking Glass airborne command post circling over the upper Midwest states, ordered what he believed was a proportionate and reasonable response - a near-mirror image strike on the Soviet Union. Therefore, he ordered the execution of the smallest counter-C3I package and a high-altitude EMP strike, after checking to ensure that the number of warheads to be delivered was nearly identical to that used against the US and UK.

As the afternoon wore on it became apparent that the Soviet strikes had ended with (just?) those three target areas and the high-altitude EMP burst. US Navy P-3C maritime patrol aircraft had flooded the area where TK-20 had launched from, with surface ships and attack submarines rushing to the vicinity at flank speed. At 5 pm the operators monitoring the SOSUS underwater sonar array in Bermuda detected a transient noise near where TK-20 had been operating; Allied Command Atlantic in Norfolk confirmed that no friendly submarines were operating in the area. Within five minutes a P-3C was overhead, joined seven minutes later by a second aircraft. Both deployed active sonar sonobuoys en masse, which, combined with low-flying magnetic anomaly detection, soon located the massive Soviet boat. The first aircraft, from squadron VP-24, dropped all four of the Mk.-50 lightweight torpedoes it was carrying. Two of the torpedoes hit, but the massive Soviet boat featured over two meters of separation between its inner and outer hulls, resulting in no significant damage (although creating a lot of structural steel damage that vastly increased the noise generated by the sub). The second plane, from VP-49. then closed in for the kill, dropping a B-57 nuclear depth charge, which crushed the boomer’s hull and reactor compartments. SAC established a round robin of tankers to support the airborne bomber force, keeping them on station but not launching additional aircraft. At bomber bases the commands worked overtime to generate additional alert-ready aircraft, while ground support teams, recalled from their holiday meals with family, raced to dispersal sites to support turnaround of aircraft landing at their alternate sites.

Complicating the plan for striking the Soviet command, control and intelligence apparatus was the presence of the Moscow A-135 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) system. Consisting of 100 nuclear-armed (10-kiloton warheads) interceptor missiles (68 Gazelle missiles to strike targets in the atmosphere and 32 Gorogn missiles to engage incoming reentry vehicles outside the atmosphere), the ABM system was controlled by a single tracking and guidance radar, the large PILLBOX phased-array radar at Pushkino, north of Moscow. NATO planners, starting in the late 1960s, had planned to deal with the system by overwhelming it with massive numbers of warheads aimed at the missile launch sites as well as the control radars, as well as striking targets in Moscow with enough warheads that destruction could be reasonably expected even if the ABM system was operational.

The orders from SAC, however, severely limited the number of warheads that could be deployed to defeat the A-135 system, forcing SAC to use an alternative. In the years before the war, American target planners had focused on the PILLBOX radar, concluding that if it were destroyed that the system would be inoperable, the various interceptor missiles unable to be guided against incoming NATO warheads. A slimmed-down effort to suppress the ABM system, therefore, could concentrate on a single target - the radar. Obviously, however, the operators of the A-135 would use the system to protect the radar from incoming ballistic missile warheads, negating the possibility of using low numbers of MIRVs against the PILLBOX. The CIA, reasonably, could not guarantee that one of its covert action teams would be able to penetrate the radar’s security perimeter to place a “backpack nuke” within lethal range. That left bombers as the only nuclear delivery means available to potentially strike the target.

The Moscow area was protected by the 1st Red Banner Air Defense Army for Special Use, a force that deployed four PVO (air defense force) divisions with 26 regiments of the latest model SA-10 surface-to-air missiles deployed in two concentric rings around the Soviet capital. As confident as SAC commanders were in their men and aircraft, they harbored doubts about the ability of a bomber being able to penetrate the Soviet border defenses, reach the Moscow area and overfly the radar to drop a gravity bomb. While the B-2 stealth bomber had proven successful in penetrating Soviet airspace over Siberia the density of overlapping air defense radars and missiles in the Moscow area was an order of magnitude more challenging. A cruise missile, however, harbored a better chance of reaching the target. The most advanced cruise missile, the AGM-129, first fielded in 1990, could be launched outside of Soviet airspace and reach Moscow. A stealthy missile, designed to defeat overhead pulse-doppler radars and coated in radar absorbing material, it offered a reasonable chance of reaching a heavily defended target, and if it failed no American airmen would be imperiled. Therefore, the plan called for the PILLBOX radar to be eliminated by a quartet of AGM-129 Advanced Cruise Missiles.

The American counterstrike began shortly before midnight Washington time. A B-52H of the 644th Bomb Squadron, 410th Bomb Wing from K.I. Sawyer Air Force Base in Michigan orbiting between the North Pole and the Siberian coast launched a volley of four AGM-129s. The cruise missiles were routed on an indirect path to Moscow, crossing the Soviet coast a few miles east of Murmansk to take advantage of an air defense network ravaged by months of fighting earlier in the year and travelled the length of the Kola Peninsula. Once they were south of the White Sea they rose to a cruising altitude of 7,000 feet to conserve fuel, and headed south once they passed Lake Onega. When the missiles were 200 miles north of the PILLBOX radar they dropped to an altitude of 50 meters, following a snaking path to avoid overflying large population centers, air defense installations or military bases. As they approached Moscow air defense radars began to sweep over the stealthy missiles, but with a radar cross section smaller than a pigeon the radar operators were unable to distinguish their signature from background noise. An orbiting Su-27 interceptor of the 611th Regiment, flying the northern sector of the capital’s Combat Air Patrol, failed to detect the missiles as well. Only when the missiles were less than 10 kilometers from Pushkino was a nearby air defense radar able to get a positive ID, and by then it was too late.

The Pushkino PILLBOX radar was obliterated by three of the missiles’ W-80 5-kiloton warheads. The fourth missile, the trailing one, was knocked out of the sky by the blast wave of the third missile. The blasts also knocked out the surface elements of the adjacent Gazelle missile battery. The A-135 system was down, a fact confirmed by an overwatching Defense Support Program early warning satellite.

With Moscow defenseless against ballistic missiles, the next phase of the American attack proceeded. A pair of LGM-118 Peacekeeper (MX) missiles, each with ten 335-kiloton MIRVs, was launched by the 400th Strategic Missile Squadron, 90th Strategic Missile Wing from silos outside F.E. Warren Air Force Base in Wyoming. They arrived 25 minutes later, during the Friday morning commute, with 18 of the warheads detonating. Three reduced the Kremlin to a glowing crater, while others did varying degrees of damage to the PVO, Strategic Rocket Forces, KGB and GRU headquarters complexes. While the missiles did not kill General Secretary Sauronski or KGB Chairman Yangel, they did a great deal to cripple the Soviet war effort. Two Politburo members were killed in the attack, along with hundreds of thousands of Muscovites. (The effects of the firestorms and radiation that followed the strike would take the casualty numbers into the millions). While the political leadership that directed the war effort survived, the vast bureaucracy that had been struggling to manage the war effort was completely devastated. The centralized Soviet state had been dealt a body blow.

The next element of the American retaliatory strike was an insurance policy to ensure collapse of the Soviet Union’s war effort - a series of high-altitude EMP strikes that matched the ones inflicted on the US. These strikes were delivered by older-model Minuteman II ICBMs fired by the 321st Strategic Missile Wing at Grand Forks Air Force Base, North Dakota. The collapse of the Soviet electrical grid was assured, The EMP strike had less effect on the lives of many rural Russian citizens, many of whom had no or only intermittent electrical power before the war, but for the urban middle class it was just as life-changing as for their American counterparts.

(Officially) The decapitation attacks were not limited to the UK and US, however. A nuclear bomb was directed at Oslo, the Norwegian capital. King Harald, who refused to abandon the seat of government in the face of enemy attack, died in the blast along with the Statsrad (state council) and most of the Storting (the Norwegian Parliament). (Unofficially) Soviet missiles also struck Copenhagen, Bonn and the Hague. (Officially) Riyadh was nuked. The cumulative effect of the attacks was as intended, a decapitation of NATO’s political leadership.

The Soviets had calculated that the nuclear strikes would disrupt American command, control, and communications - surgical strikes intended to knock America out of the war and end the war before the nuclear Armageddon spread any further. Like most of the major calculations of both sides this proved to be another miscalculation, but that was a small comfort to over half the members of the world's prewar population who were now dead, or to the other half, many of who wished they were.

Elsewhere in the world, the only development of note is that the US 24th Infantry Division begins a drive toward Ahvaz, supported by the 101st Air Assault Division's aviation assets. The assault quickly overwhelms the Soviet rear guards.