I extrapolated by comparing the population size of North Korea and Romania and the size of their respective militaries. If you have reasons why North Korea could maintain such a large army whereas Romania could not, I'm all ears. If Romania couldn't pull it off, then what would be realistic numbers for this North Korea esque Romania?
Five Years Less - Brezhnev dies in 1977
- Thread starter Onkel Willie
- Start date
I extrapolated by comparing the population size of North Korea and Romania and the size of their respective militaries. If you have reasons why North Korea could maintain such a large army whereas Romania could not, I'm all ears. If Romania couldn't pull it off, then what would be realistic numbers for this North Korea esque Romania?
You mean besides the obvious one that the North Koreans systematically stocked up on arms and equipment for 4 decades and similarly took about two decades to grow from about 400,000 in 1970 to 950,000 in 1990 and the 400,000 in 1970 were already 3 times the size of the Romanian army?
I edited this chapter to reflect your input. I hope it's more to your liking now
.
...gee, I wonder what the Muscovites are thinking about that loon in Bucharest?
They probably have told them that as long as they stay quiet and in the border they will be left alone. If they cause trouble then the Red Army shows up.
Chapter XVI: The May 1st Attacks, May 2002.
Romania will stay quiet for now, but soon the Soviets will get distracted. What will that bring?
The bilateral Cold War dynamic was to change at the dawn of the 21st century by the advent of non-state actors, new nuclear powers and rogue states. One specific non-state actor was to change the course of history in the early 2000s and it was called Al-Qaeda. Its main founder was a Saudi Arabian billionaire named Osama bin Laden, who had fought for years among the mujahideen in Afghanistan against the Soviet-backed communist regime, later telling a journalist he felt “outraged that an injustice had been committed against the people of Afghanistan.” The Pakistanis trained many of his militants, but the United States provided the funding and weapons. The US cut off their support in 1995 and together with the Soviet enemy mediated a peace between the communist regime in Kabul and the opposition, signed in 1996. Most of the opposition took the deal and laid down their arms to receive amnesty and be co-opted into the regime. An infuriated Osama bin Laden and his jihadist supporters were among the few who refused this deal and he considered US actions a stab in the back, an unforgivable betrayal. In the meantime, he didn’t give up his anti-communist stance. Both superpowers were now enemies of Islam, more precisely of Allah, as far as Bin Laden was concerned.
Al-Qaeda as an Islamic faction in the Afghan opposition had existed since the late 80s, but required more time to organize for a jihad via international terrorism. Bin Laden returned home to Saudi Arabia in 1995 as a veteran of armed struggle against an atheist superpower. He spoke with King Fahd about Allah’s will to launch a jihad against both the infidel West and the atheist communist world, but quickly learned his religious arguments couldn’t push the King into abandoning his ties with the West. The West was the main buyer of Saudi oil and the Saudis saw the US as their main ally if a confrontation ever took place between them and Iran. Bin Laden was disappointed and continued to criticize the King, who revoked his citizenship and convinced his family to cut off his annual $7 million stipend.
He left the country for Sudan. Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir welcomed Osama because he invested heavily into infrastructure, agriculture and businesses. In return, Bin Laden was allowed to established terrorist training camps in the desert and prepare for his initial terrorist attacks. Sudan was labelled a state sponsor of terrorism by the US, but al-Bashir categorically denied that the training camps in the desert had anything to do with terrorism, calling them military training camps. Osama couldn’t be directly linked to Al-Qaeda terrorist attacks yet.
His first terrorist attacks took place in Afghanistan as an alternative to guerrilla struggle (which by the late 90s was no option given that the communist regime controlled the entire country). Further jihadist attacks took place in Algeria, Yemen and Egypt, such as the Luxor Massacre in 1997 that killed 62 people. Internally to Al-Qaeda members Bin Laden justified the attacks in which fellow Muslims also died through a fatwa that said the following: the killing of someone standing near the enemy was justified because any innocent bystander will find a proper reward in death, going to “paradise” if they were good Muslims and to hell if they were bad or non-believers. Later the death of Western civilians was justified because of the fact that they’d elected governments responsible for Muslim deaths while the deaths of Soviet citizens was justified by their atheism.
In February 1998, Osama bin Laden and his henchman Ayman al-Zawahiri co-signed a fatwa in the name of the “World Islamic Front for Jihad against Jews, Crusaders and Atheist Marxists”, which declared the killing of North Americans, Soviets and their allies an “individual duty for every Muslim” to “liberate the al-Aqsa Mosque (in Jerusalem) and the holy mosque (in Mecca) from their grip”. At the public announcement of the fatwa Bin Laden announced that North Americans are “very easy targets”. He told the attending journalists, “You will see the results of this in a very short time.” He made true on his words: on August 7th 1998, Al-Qaeda used truck bombs against the US embassies in Dar es Salaam (Tanzania) and Nairobi (Kenya), resulting in the deaths of 224 people. Bin Laden was placed on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List and President Clinton retaliated with a series of cruise missile attacks against Al-Qaeda related targets in Sudan. The US didn’t falter due to the Al-Qaeda attacks in East Africa and there was the matter of the Soviet Union.
An incredibly ambitious terrorist strike was being planned meticulously during 2000 and 2001, which both the CIA, the KGB and other major intelligence agencies failed to pick up on. The plans were ready by the spring of 2002. Wednesday May 1st 2002 was Labour Day in the Soviet Union and most other countries in the world. A day that started with people waking up and enjoying the thought of the holiday activities they had planned ended in tragedy and everyone’s eyes glued to their TV sets as the shocking news was repeated over and over while there were fears of World War III. May 1st 2002 would see the largest terrorist attack in history. Nothing before or since can be compared to it.
A man named Mohammed Atta led four other hijackers aboard an Aeroflot Tu-154 jet airliner that was scheduled to depart from Hamburg Airport, the second largest airport in Germany, at 08:30 AM. It was to arrive at Moscow Sheremetyevo International Airport, the USSR’s busiest airfield, after a flight of two and a half hours at 01:00 PM Moscow Time. A Panam flight from New York to Moscow making a scheduled stop at Berlin Tempelhof Airport, a Boeing 757, was boarded by a an Al-Qaeda terrorist named Hani Hanjour and four others. Their flight took off at 09:00 AM and was to arrive at 01:20 PM Moscow Time. A third flight was a domestic flight with a Tu-134 airliner departing from Grozny with Chechen Muslim radicals as the hijackers, also with Moscow as its destination, which would arrive within minutes of the second attack. The fourth and final flight to be boarded by hijackers was an Aeroflot flight from Stockholm to Leningrad, also a T-134.
Atta’s flight was routine until he and his fellow terrorists seized control thirty minutes before landing and at two o’clock in the afternoon crashed the plane into the central tower of the main building of Moscow State University, a Stalinist monolith. The robust 240 metre tall, 36 storey tower contained 40.000 tonnes of steel and 130.000 cubic metres of concrete and survived the onslaught rather than collapsing as the perpetrators had hoped. Exactly 1.559 people were still killed, most of them students enjoying their day off (but also including 100 passengers and crew and the hijackers). At this point the authorities assumed a terrible accident had taken place as clouds of smoke rose up from the Stalinist Gothic concrete colossus dominating the university, but twenty minutes later the Panam flight seized by Hanjour hit the main building of the Soviet Ministry of Defence on the bank of the Moskva River and 455 people were killed (including 200 passengers, crew and terrorists).
At this point it was clear to Soviet leader Ryzhkov that the Soviet Union was under attack, but it was too late to intercept the flight from Grozny. It crashed into the Grand Kremlin Palace, which houses the Central Committee, but because it was a holiday only security guards were present. Had the Central Committee been in session, hundreds would have died, but instead most victims were those already on the plane (82 passengers, versus 35 people in the building). The fourth flight from Stockholm was aimed at Kronstadt, the base of the Baltic Fleet in Leningrad and the site of historic fortifications. Aware of the attacks in Moscow that had taken place less than an hour earlier, Leningrad commanders suspected a fourth attack when this flight descended to an unusually low altitude. Su-33 fighters were sent in response and they fired their 30 mm autocannons into the plane’s two engines when the hijackers didn’t respond to orders to change their course. Without engine power, the plane glided to the water’s surface and made an emergency landing around 02:30 PM. The terrorists and crew in the cockpit died on impact and thirty passengers drowned, but another seventeen passengers were rescued by the Soviet Navy in the Finnish Gulf. With that the May 1st Attacks, also known as the Labour Day Attacks, were over for the Soviet Union.
At the time that the fourth flight was downed before it reached its intended target, Americans living on the US eastern seaboard were barely out of bed and busy getting ready to go to work or school. To them it was 06:30 AM and it seemed like it’d be a perfectly normal Wednesday morning. Radio and TV news broadcasts of course reported of the terrible attacks in the Soviet Union but, though considered terrible, to most people it was a distant affair that didn’t concern them. The US government was a bit more concerned and raised the alertness level of their forces to DEFCON 3 in response to the Soviet mobilization. The intelligence community was also abuzz. President Giuliani used the Moscow-Washington hotline between the Pentagon and the Kremlin to reassure Premier Ryzhkov that the United States had nothing to do with the attacks and to offer aid (which the Soviets declined). Very soon he had an attack of his own to deal with.
The Lebanese Ziad Jarrah had arrived in the US in June 2000 after applying for and receiving a five year US B-1/B-2 (tourist/business) visa. After living in Yemen for a while, he moved to Germany with a cousin and studied aerospace engineering at Hamburg’s university of applied sciences whilst observing a mostly secular lifestyle. He even had a Turkish-German girlfriend and lived with her, vexing his more religious friends. They pulled him back in and convinced him to train in Sudan, learning extensively about explosives. After he entered the US he brought his girlfriend over several times and had doubts about the plot, but eventually resolved to press ahead. He studied the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing and the 1993 World Trade Centre bombing, learning from them so he could improve upon them. He also slowly but surely accumulated the materials necessary for the bombing he was planning. In the meantime, he held down a job and was described as friendly and inconspicuous by his co-workers. They didn’t even remember him ever speaking of any kind of religious beliefs.
On April 29th 2002, Jarrah hired a truck and filled it with 26 barrels: eighteen of these contained ammonium nitrate and nitromethane while the other eight contained a mix consisting of fertilizer and fifteen litres of diesel fuel; all barrels also contained metal cylinders filled with acetylene to increase the fireball and the brisance of the explosion. The explosive materials, the wiring, the tubing and the fuses necessary to make the bomb only cost about $10.000. On May 1st 2002 at 10:00 AM, Jarrah parked the truck in a parking garage below the North Tower of New York’s World Trade Centre and activated the time-delayed fuses, which gave him about an hour to escape. He was almost halfway the distance toward Allentown by the time the bomb went off. He was caught a few days later during a routine traffic stop on his way to Buffalo, where he had planned to cross the border into Canada. As the only terrorist who didn’t get killed in the May 1st Attacks, he received a high profile trial and was sentenced to death in 2003 for over one thousand counts of murder (which was controversially commuted to life without the possibility of parole when the state of New York abolished the death penalty in 2007). He ended up dying in prison when a low-level member of the Italian Mob, who had lost a relative in the attack, shanked him in 2009.
The bomb exploded at 11:05 AM and was the equivalent of 4.600 kilos of TNT, which Al-Qaeda had hoped would be enough to cause the North Tower to topple and crash into the South Tower, killing tens of thousands in the process. They hadn’t counted on the structural soundness of the building: the structural support of just one tower consisted of 14 inch steel columns spaced roughly one metre apart along the external faces of the building, for a total of 232 supports; besides that both towers had a 41x26 metre central box core that contained the building’s services and an additional 47 steel columns supporting the bulk of each building’s vertical load. Furthermore, the columns were cross braced, forming four boxes, each box incorporating one external corner and part of the core, with considerable overlap; removing the supports under one of these boxes would have resulted in the loads being distributed across the remaining supporting columns.
The truck bomb went off right next to the core central box of the North Tower of the World Trade Centre and heavily damaged it (seismometers recorded the blast as measuring approximately 6.0 on the Richter scale). With the lower floors ablaze, the emergency services and later the same day also the National Guard evacuated people by helicopter from the top of the building. The fire continued to spread upward, consuming one floor at a time and further weakening the structure. After burning for three hours, the North Tower of the WTC collapsed vertically at 03:10 PM and 1.012 people still in the building perished (contrary to the expectations of the terrorists, the building didn’t crash into the South Tower and didn’t cost tens of thousands of lives). Surrounding buildings were seriously damaged. The attacks weren’t over: sarin attacks took place at several stations of the Washington Metro, killing 188 people; truck bombs went off at several locations in Philadelphia and 395 more perished. By the afternoon the entire country was in terror as more attacks were feared after these three. They never materialized, but nobody could know that at the time. The American armed forces went to DEFCON 2 for the first time since 1980.
By now it was clear to Moscow and Washington DC that one had not attacked the other, but that they were both under attack and most likely by the same culprit, which would eventually be confirmed by the release of a videotaped statement made by Osama bin Laden, despite earlier denials: “What the United States and Russia [sic] are tasting today is nothing compared to what we have tasted for decades. Our umma has known this humiliation and contempt for over eighty years. Its sons are killed, its blood is spilled, its holy sites are attacked, and it is not governed according to Allah’s command. Despite this, no one cares.” He condemned American interventionism in the Muslim world and its support for Zionism while also lambasting the Soviets for imposing an infidel atheist regime on a Muslim country (Afghanistan).
Both the US President and the Soviet Premier had words to say, words that would soon be followed by actions. When he addressed the nation that evening, Giuliani showed grief but also resolve: “Thousands of lives were ended today in despicable, evil acts of terror. Our country is on one bended knee, but we will stand up again and stand by the people of New York, Philadelphia and Washington as they mourn their dead. […] These acts were designed to scare and intimidate us into taking away our cherished freedom and democracy, but they’ve only broken concrete and steel. They won’t break the resolve of the great people of this great nation. […] These attacks were acts of war and I ask Congress to declare a war on terror, against all terrorists worldwide, a war of which I am certain that our people will see it through to absolute victory in their righteous might with the help of all our friends and allies no matter how long it takes, so help us God.”
Ryzhkov was also clear in his televised address that day that this attack meant war: “Today our great nation was suddenly and deliberately attacked through means that are supposed to bring us together rather than drive us apart. We will not be driven apart, mark my words, and we shall rebuild what was lost and avenge the dead. We’ve defeated the fascist legions at great cost and now a declaration of war has come from an even more base, primitive, superstitious ideology that claims to be the divine absolute truth. Like the fascists before them, this repugnant blight called jihadism will not just be defeated but wiped off the face of the Earth by Soviet power no matter the cost!”
Chapter XVI: The May 1st Attacks, May 2002.
The bilateral Cold War dynamic was to change at the dawn of the 21st century by the advent of non-state actors, new nuclear powers and rogue states. One specific non-state actor was to change the course of history in the early 2000s and it was called Al-Qaeda. Its main founder was a Saudi Arabian billionaire named Osama bin Laden, who had fought for years among the mujahideen in Afghanistan against the Soviet-backed communist regime, later telling a journalist he felt “outraged that an injustice had been committed against the people of Afghanistan.” The Pakistanis trained many of his militants, but the United States provided the funding and weapons. The US cut off their support in 1995 and together with the Soviet enemy mediated a peace between the communist regime in Kabul and the opposition, signed in 1996. Most of the opposition took the deal and laid down their arms to receive amnesty and be co-opted into the regime. An infuriated Osama bin Laden and his jihadist supporters were among the few who refused this deal and he considered US actions a stab in the back, an unforgivable betrayal. In the meantime, he didn’t give up his anti-communist stance. Both superpowers were now enemies of Islam, more precisely of Allah, as far as Bin Laden was concerned.
Al-Qaeda as an Islamic faction in the Afghan opposition had existed since the late 80s, but required more time to organize for a jihad via international terrorism. Bin Laden returned home to Saudi Arabia in 1995 as a veteran of armed struggle against an atheist superpower. He spoke with King Fahd about Allah’s will to launch a jihad against both the infidel West and the atheist communist world, but quickly learned his religious arguments couldn’t push the King into abandoning his ties with the West. The West was the main buyer of Saudi oil and the Saudis saw the US as their main ally if a confrontation ever took place between them and Iran. Bin Laden was disappointed and continued to criticize the King, who revoked his citizenship and convinced his family to cut off his annual $7 million stipend.
He left the country for Sudan. Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir welcomed Osama because he invested heavily into infrastructure, agriculture and businesses. In return, Bin Laden was allowed to established terrorist training camps in the desert and prepare for his initial terrorist attacks. Sudan was labelled a state sponsor of terrorism by the US, but al-Bashir categorically denied that the training camps in the desert had anything to do with terrorism, calling them military training camps. Osama couldn’t be directly linked to Al-Qaeda terrorist attacks yet.
His first terrorist attacks took place in Afghanistan as an alternative to guerrilla struggle (which by the late 90s was no option given that the communist regime controlled the entire country). Further jihadist attacks took place in Algeria, Yemen and Egypt, such as the Luxor Massacre in 1997 that killed 62 people. Internally to Al-Qaeda members Bin Laden justified the attacks in which fellow Muslims also died through a fatwa that said the following: the killing of someone standing near the enemy was justified because any innocent bystander will find a proper reward in death, going to “paradise” if they were good Muslims and to hell if they were bad or non-believers. Later the death of Western civilians was justified because of the fact that they’d elected governments responsible for Muslim deaths while the deaths of Soviet citizens was justified by their atheism.
In February 1998, Osama bin Laden and his henchman Ayman al-Zawahiri co-signed a fatwa in the name of the “World Islamic Front for Jihad against Jews, Crusaders and Atheist Marxists”, which declared the killing of North Americans, Soviets and their allies an “individual duty for every Muslim” to “liberate the al-Aqsa Mosque (in Jerusalem) and the holy mosque (in Mecca) from their grip”. At the public announcement of the fatwa Bin Laden announced that North Americans are “very easy targets”. He told the attending journalists, “You will see the results of this in a very short time.” He made true on his words: on August 7th 1998, Al-Qaeda used truck bombs against the US embassies in Dar es Salaam (Tanzania) and Nairobi (Kenya), resulting in the deaths of 224 people. Bin Laden was placed on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List and President Clinton retaliated with a series of cruise missile attacks against Al-Qaeda related targets in Sudan. The US didn’t falter due to the Al-Qaeda attacks in East Africa and there was the matter of the Soviet Union.
An incredibly ambitious terrorist strike was being planned meticulously during 2000 and 2001, which both the CIA, the KGB and other major intelligence agencies failed to pick up on. The plans were ready by the spring of 2002. Wednesday May 1st 2002 was Labour Day in the Soviet Union and most other countries in the world. A day that started with people waking up and enjoying the thought of the holiday activities they had planned ended in tragedy and everyone’s eyes glued to their TV sets as the shocking news was repeated over and over while there were fears of World War III. May 1st 2002 would see the largest terrorist attack in history. Nothing before or since can be compared to it.
A man named Mohammed Atta led four other hijackers aboard an Aeroflot Tu-154 jet airliner that was scheduled to depart from Hamburg Airport, the second largest airport in Germany, at 08:30 AM. It was to arrive at Moscow Sheremetyevo International Airport, the USSR’s busiest airfield, after a flight of two and a half hours at 01:00 PM Moscow Time. A Panam flight from New York to Moscow making a scheduled stop at Berlin Tempelhof Airport, a Boeing 757, was boarded by a an Al-Qaeda terrorist named Hani Hanjour and four others. Their flight took off at 09:00 AM and was to arrive at 01:20 PM Moscow Time. A third flight was a domestic flight with a Tu-134 airliner departing from Grozny with Chechen Muslim radicals as the hijackers, also with Moscow as its destination, which would arrive within minutes of the second attack. The fourth and final flight to be boarded by hijackers was an Aeroflot flight from Stockholm to Leningrad, also a T-134.
Atta’s flight was routine until he and his fellow terrorists seized control thirty minutes before landing and at two o’clock in the afternoon crashed the plane into the central tower of the main building of Moscow State University, a Stalinist monolith. The robust 240 metre tall, 36 storey tower contained 40.000 tonnes of steel and 130.000 cubic metres of concrete and survived the onslaught rather than collapsing as the perpetrators had hoped. Exactly 1.559 people were still killed, most of them students enjoying their day off (but also including 100 passengers and crew and the hijackers). At this point the authorities assumed a terrible accident had taken place as clouds of smoke rose up from the Stalinist Gothic concrete colossus dominating the university, but twenty minutes later the Panam flight seized by Hanjour hit the main building of the Soviet Ministry of Defence on the bank of the Moskva River and 455 people were killed (including 200 passengers, crew and terrorists).
At this point it was clear to Soviet leader Ryzhkov that the Soviet Union was under attack, but it was too late to intercept the flight from Grozny. It crashed into the Grand Kremlin Palace, which houses the Central Committee, but because it was a holiday only security guards were present. Had the Central Committee been in session, hundreds would have died, but instead most victims were those already on the plane (82 passengers, versus 35 people in the building). The fourth flight from Stockholm was aimed at Kronstadt, the base of the Baltic Fleet in Leningrad and the site of historic fortifications. Aware of the attacks in Moscow that had taken place less than an hour earlier, Leningrad commanders suspected a fourth attack when this flight descended to an unusually low altitude. Su-33 fighters were sent in response and they fired their 30 mm autocannons into the plane’s two engines when the hijackers didn’t respond to orders to change their course. Without engine power, the plane glided to the water’s surface and made an emergency landing around 02:30 PM. The terrorists and crew in the cockpit died on impact and thirty passengers drowned, but another seventeen passengers were rescued by the Soviet Navy in the Finnish Gulf. With that the May 1st Attacks, also known as the Labour Day Attacks, were over for the Soviet Union.
At the time that the fourth flight was downed before it reached its intended target, Americans living on the US eastern seaboard were barely out of bed and busy getting ready to go to work or school. To them it was 06:30 AM and it seemed like it’d be a perfectly normal Wednesday morning. Radio and TV news broadcasts of course reported of the terrible attacks in the Soviet Union but, though considered terrible, to most people it was a distant affair that didn’t concern them. The US government was a bit more concerned and raised the alertness level of their forces to DEFCON 3 in response to the Soviet mobilization. The intelligence community was also abuzz. President Giuliani used the Moscow-Washington hotline between the Pentagon and the Kremlin to reassure Premier Ryzhkov that the United States had nothing to do with the attacks and to offer aid (which the Soviets declined). Very soon he had an attack of his own to deal with.
The Lebanese Ziad Jarrah had arrived in the US in June 2000 after applying for and receiving a five year US B-1/B-2 (tourist/business) visa. After living in Yemen for a while, he moved to Germany with a cousin and studied aerospace engineering at Hamburg’s university of applied sciences whilst observing a mostly secular lifestyle. He even had a Turkish-German girlfriend and lived with her, vexing his more religious friends. They pulled him back in and convinced him to train in Sudan, learning extensively about explosives. After he entered the US he brought his girlfriend over several times and had doubts about the plot, but eventually resolved to press ahead. He studied the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing and the 1993 World Trade Centre bombing, learning from them so he could improve upon them. He also slowly but surely accumulated the materials necessary for the bombing he was planning. In the meantime, he held down a job and was described as friendly and inconspicuous by his co-workers. They didn’t even remember him ever speaking of any kind of religious beliefs.
On April 29th 2002, Jarrah hired a truck and filled it with 26 barrels: eighteen of these contained ammonium nitrate and nitromethane while the other eight contained a mix consisting of fertilizer and fifteen litres of diesel fuel; all barrels also contained metal cylinders filled with acetylene to increase the fireball and the brisance of the explosion. The explosive materials, the wiring, the tubing and the fuses necessary to make the bomb only cost about $10.000. On May 1st 2002 at 10:00 AM, Jarrah parked the truck in a parking garage below the North Tower of New York’s World Trade Centre and activated the time-delayed fuses, which gave him about an hour to escape. He was almost halfway the distance toward Allentown by the time the bomb went off. He was caught a few days later during a routine traffic stop on his way to Buffalo, where he had planned to cross the border into Canada. As the only terrorist who didn’t get killed in the May 1st Attacks, he received a high profile trial and was sentenced to death in 2003 for over one thousand counts of murder (which was controversially commuted to life without the possibility of parole when the state of New York abolished the death penalty in 2007). He ended up dying in prison when a low-level member of the Italian Mob, who had lost a relative in the attack, shanked him in 2009.
The bomb exploded at 11:05 AM and was the equivalent of 4.600 kilos of TNT, which Al-Qaeda had hoped would be enough to cause the North Tower to topple and crash into the South Tower, killing tens of thousands in the process. They hadn’t counted on the structural soundness of the building: the structural support of just one tower consisted of 14 inch steel columns spaced roughly one metre apart along the external faces of the building, for a total of 232 supports; besides that both towers had a 41x26 metre central box core that contained the building’s services and an additional 47 steel columns supporting the bulk of each building’s vertical load. Furthermore, the columns were cross braced, forming four boxes, each box incorporating one external corner and part of the core, with considerable overlap; removing the supports under one of these boxes would have resulted in the loads being distributed across the remaining supporting columns.
The truck bomb went off right next to the core central box of the North Tower of the World Trade Centre and heavily damaged it (seismometers recorded the blast as measuring approximately 6.0 on the Richter scale). With the lower floors ablaze, the emergency services and later the same day also the National Guard evacuated people by helicopter from the top of the building. The fire continued to spread upward, consuming one floor at a time and further weakening the structure. After burning for three hours, the North Tower of the WTC collapsed vertically at 03:10 PM and 1.012 people still in the building perished (contrary to the expectations of the terrorists, the building didn’t crash into the South Tower and didn’t cost tens of thousands of lives). Surrounding buildings were seriously damaged. The attacks weren’t over: sarin attacks took place at several stations of the Washington Metro, killing 188 people; truck bombs went off at several locations in Philadelphia and 395 more perished. By the afternoon the entire country was in terror as more attacks were feared after these three. They never materialized, but nobody could know that at the time. The American armed forces went to DEFCON 2 for the first time since 1980.
By now it was clear to Moscow and Washington DC that one had not attacked the other, but that they were both under attack and most likely by the same culprit, which would eventually be confirmed by the release of a videotaped statement made by Osama bin Laden, despite earlier denials: “What the United States and Russia [sic] are tasting today is nothing compared to what we have tasted for decades. Our umma has known this humiliation and contempt for over eighty years. Its sons are killed, its blood is spilled, its holy sites are attacked, and it is not governed according to Allah’s command. Despite this, no one cares.” He condemned American interventionism in the Muslim world and its support for Zionism while also lambasting the Soviets for imposing an infidel atheist regime on a Muslim country (Afghanistan).
Both the US President and the Soviet Premier had words to say, words that would soon be followed by actions. When he addressed the nation that evening, Giuliani showed grief but also resolve: “Thousands of lives were ended today in despicable, evil acts of terror. Our country is on one bended knee, but we will stand up again and stand by the people of New York, Philadelphia and Washington as they mourn their dead. […] These acts were designed to scare and intimidate us into taking away our cherished freedom and democracy, but they’ve only broken concrete and steel. They won’t break the resolve of the great people of this great nation. […] These attacks were acts of war and I ask Congress to declare a war on terror, against all terrorists worldwide, a war of which I am certain that our people will see it through to absolute victory in their righteous might with the help of all our friends and allies no matter how long it takes, so help us God.”
Ryzhkov was also clear in his televised address that day that this attack meant war: “Today our great nation was suddenly and deliberately attacked through means that are supposed to bring us together rather than drive us apart. We will not be driven apart, mark my words, and we shall rebuild what was lost and avenge the dead. We’ve defeated the fascist legions at great cost and now a declaration of war has come from an even more base, primitive, superstitious ideology that claims to be the divine absolute truth. Like the fascists before them, this repugnant blight called jihadism will not just be defeated but wiped off the face of the Earth by Soviet power no matter the cost!”
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...so he picks a fight with not one, but two superpowers?
Oh, and the second of those superpowers is historically proven to be able and willing to pay a Human cost running into tens of millions to completely and utterly crush an enemy?
Oh, and the second of those superpowers is historically proven to be able and willing to pay a Human cost running into tens of millions to completely and utterly crush an enemy?
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The fun is how he's doomed, which will be explained in the following chapters.
People who believe in divine intervention can and regularly do make stupid decisions
.This is true. I'm already LMAO just imagining jihadists cheering again and again as they destroy T-72s and T-90s one after the other...
...except they just keep on coming. And then the jihadists run out of rockets, and there's still a full armored corps bearing down on them.
Or they run to their hidey-holes in the mountains, thinking they're safe. Only the Soviets bring up multiple artillery divisions and conduct round-the-clock shelling.
People who believe in divine intervention can and regularly do make stupid decisions
This is also true.
Chapter XVII: The War on Terror, the Partition of Sudan and the Capture of Bin Laden, 2002-2004.
And now the alternate war on terror!
In the days that followed the Moscow-Washington hotline was used extensively, with Giuliani and Ryzhkov being in contact almost daily (during which time the former talked the latter out of a nuclear strike). The CIA and the KGB pooled their efforts and resources in their attempts to locate the Al-Qaeda leader. Soon coordination was set up between all the intelligence agencies of NATO and the Warsaw Pact. It was widely believed that Bin Laden was still in Sudan, despite the fact Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir denied this vehemently and declared him persona non grata. For absence of evidence of his departure, the intelligence agencies of West and East still believed he was in the country and under the protection of the Sudanese government.
On Monday June 3rd 2002 at 03:00 PM Sudanese time (08:00 AM Eastern Standard Time, 04:00 PM Moscow Time) the White House and the Kremlin issued a joint ultimatum to the respective Sudanese ambassadors in their country who relayed it to Khartoum: the US and the USSR insisted that Sudan closed immediately every terrorist training camp, hand over every terrorist and their supporters, and give the United States and the Soviet Union full access to terrorist training camps for inspection. Failure to do so would result in a “severe response.” They had 72 hours to comply, but foolishly failed to do so as they didn’t believe the two superpowers would invade their country and affect regime change just to get one person. Al-Bashir was clearly in a state of denial about the possibility of joint US-Soviet military action, pointing out Cold War tensions and overlooking that relations between East and West had never been so good. The regime reiterated its denial that Osama bin Laden was still in the country and flat-out denied the existence of terrorist training camps and the presence of any kind of terrorists. The regime said it was unable to comply as it couldn’t create terrorist or training camps where there weren’t any, dismissing the accusations as preposterous.
In the lead-up to the ultimatum, the Soviets had flown KGB operatives and Spetsnaz commandos into Ethiopia, a Soviet ally in Africa that bordered Sudan. CIA Special Activities Division assets entered Sudan through Uganda and Kenya along with members of all the elite units of the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), which included well known formations such as Delta Force and SEAL Team Six. They established contacts with the parties in the Second Sudanese Civil War opposing al-Bashir’s regime, particularly the Sudan People’s Liberation Army led by John Garang that operated from the predominantly Christian south (the north controlled by al-Bashir was predominantly Muslim and the Arabs formed the largest ethnic group there). The opening stages of Operation Nemesis, a name agreed on by the US and the Soviets, would soon begin.
After the ultimatum expired, the SPLA was promptly given weapons, ammunitions, fuel other supplies it might need, intelligence and direct support by US and Soviet special forces. That enabled it to launch successful offensives and secure strategic targets in southern Sudan that included several major cities. The Sudanese Armed Forces experienced several setbacks in the south and were distracted by the SPLA’s successes. Khartoum remained oblivious to the fact that these recent rebel successes were the result of foreign sponsors. In a civil war that had lasted for nineteen years at this point, these newest opposition successes were considered temporary and not particularly shocking.
In the meantime, the US and the Soviet Union had withdrawn their diplomatic representation from Khartoum, but even that didn’t seem to alert al-Bashir to the fact that an invasion was coming. According to interviews with former inner circle members, he remained in a state of denial. A week after the expiration of the ultimatum some rebel successes had occurred and the US as well as the USSR had withdrawn their ambassadors from Sudan, but nothing else happened. This seemed to confirm Al-Bashir’s belief that the worst was over and that, at most, some economic sanctions might still follow. He was wrong. This was just the silence before the storm.
Infiltrating the country and giving support to the opposition against al-Bashir was only phase one, which was followed by phase two: the elimination of the Sudanese Air Force. The air force had roughly 130 combat aircraft. These were mostly older Soviet and Chinese models like MiG-21s, MiG-23s, Su-24s, Su-25s, Chengdu J-7s (MiG-21 copy) and Shenyang J-6s (MiG-19 copy) as well as about twenty modern MiG-29s. Other aircraft included several types of Antonov transport aircraft, US, Polish and Soviet utility helicopters and 54 Mil Mi 24 helicopter gunships. It was a good air force by African standards and there was some risk, though minimal, that it could inflict damage on land forces. American and Soviet commanders weren’t going to take any chances.
Phase two started on Sunday June 16th when Soviet Tu-22M supersonic strategic bombers launched several dozen Kh-55 cruise missiles with a mix of (conventional) 400 kg high-explosive, penetrating and cluster warheads against the country’s two official military airports: Wadi Seidna Air Base and Port Sudan Military Airport. The effects were devastating: the runways were rendered unusable as they were covered in craters while control towers, radar, hangars and even hardened concrete aircraft shelters were destroyed. Al-Bashir moved his surviving aircraft to civilian airports, but that didn’t save many of them: two Seawolf-class submarines prowling in the Red Sea, USS Seawolf and USS Connecticut, launched a total of one hundred Tomahawk cruise missiles to destroy what remained of the Sudanese Air Force and blind the country’s air defences by taking out their radar. The second phase was over in 72 hours.
Phase three picked up were phase two left off seamlessly and also lasted 72 hours. By now three American carrier groups centred on USS Enterprise as well as Nimitz-class super aircraft carriers USS Carl Vinson and USS Theodore Roosevelt had arrived in the Red Sea. The 85.000 tonne Soviet super carrier Ulyanovsk carrying 68 aircraft and her brand-new sister ship Potemkin arrived too, albeit without big carrier groups (Soviet super carriers followed a different design philosophy by adding large amounts of heavy duty anti-ship missiles and surface-to-air missiles, enabling them to operate independently, if need be). Egypt and Ethiopia both allowed US and Soviet carrier aircraft to pass through their airspace to carry out airstrikes against targets of the Sudanese Armed Forces, which lost much of their heavy equipment and artillery as a result. Only ten carrier jets were lost (four Soviet, six American).
Phase four was the actual invasion: the near destruction of Sudan’s air force and the crippling airstrikes against its military had seriously softened the target, but the Sudanese army was still fairly large and entrenched in anticipation of the invasion. Sudan’s army had 150.000 personnel. The army had T-72 tanks and some modern Chinese models (though most of its tank force consisted of T-54/55 derivatives and their Chinese Type 59 copies). Besides that, the paramilitary Popular Defence Forces, the military wing of the National Islamic Front, had 10.000 active members and 85.000 reservists and these were all activated and made available to the regime. All-in-all, al-Bashir had a quarter of a million men at his disposal. He positioned his troops in coastal towns and towns on the border with Ethiopia, correctly anticipating where the invading forces would come from. These forces were ordered to dig in and to build improvised fortifications from barbed wire, concrete and sandbags.
The invasion of Sudan commenced on Saturday June 22nd 2002 at 06:00 AM local time and overwhelming force was used. The Soviets had transferred the entire 3rd Shock Army to Ethiopia: it consisted of four tank divisions and another 26 subordinate formations and units ranging from companies and battalions to regiments. All-in-all, the Soviet force consisted of about 80.000 men. Moscow’s Ethiopian allies provided another 40.000 men to cover its flanks (and their air force, alongside Soviet pilots, made flights into southern Sudan to support the SPLA). The Soviets and their Ethiopian support force seized Kassala, a city of 400.000 souls located only 20 kilometres from the Sudan-Ethiopian border and along the economically important Khartoum-Port Sudan highway, making it an important trade centre. From there, Soviet forces began advancing along the highway, turning south and then west before turning right again in a northerly direction toward the capital of Khartoum. Sudanese forces conducted several counteroffensives at night, but the cover of night provided little protection against Su-33 multirole fighters and T-90 tanks. Three major battles took place at the cities of Al-Qadarif, Wad Madani and Rufaa and the end result revealed the disparity between the opposing forces: the Sudanese lost 5.000 vehicles, what few aircraft they still had, and suffered 7.000 fatalities while the Soviets lost a few dozen vehicles, 600 men and a handful of aircraft. They arrived at the outskirts of Khartoum in fifteen days at July 7th 2002. Small units from all Warsaw Pact countries except East Germany (which provided logistical support) and Romania (which provided intelligence) participated as well at the frontlines, ranging in size from a battalion in Bulgaria’s case to a full division in Poland’s.
In the meantime, while the Soviet advance began, the Red Sea became even more crowded: American battleship USS Iowa arrived to provide naval gunfire support with its mighty 16 inch (406 mm) guns and Tomahawk cruise missiles to US Marines (while Soviet battlecruiser Kirov fired all of its twenty P-700 Granit cruise missiles at Sudanese targets). The day the Soviet advance started, the 47.000 men strong US II Marine Expeditionary Force seized Port Sudan in a matter of hours. Later that same day the US 3rd Armoured Division arrived in Port Sudan while in the following hours the 82nd Airborne Division, the 101st Airborne Division and the 24th Infantry Division (Mechanized) secured the flanks. US forces rapidly advanced in a southwest direction toward Khartoum. The M1 Abrams, the US third generation main battle tank, performed excellently and tore through formations of Sudanese T-54/55s and T-72s (of which the Soviets took note, as their T-90 was basically a heavily updated T-72). Only six M1 Abrams tanks were lost and another nineteen were damaged. Despite having to cover 200 kilometres more than the Soviets, US forces captured Omdurman just 20 km north of Khartoum only one day after the Soviet arrival.
Britain and France deployed combat troops in support as well as one aircraft carrier each, HMS Invincible and Charles de Gaulle respectively. Remarkable was that West German forces also took part: in 2002 Leopard 2 tanks fired Germany’s first shots in anger since 1945, proving highly effective (just as they noticed how the American M1 Abrams knocked out Sudanese T-72s, the Soviets also noticed how Leopard 2s did the same). Some other NATO countries like Belgium and the Netherlands acted in support roles.
The final battle began on July 9th. US and Soviet forces surrounded the city while precision bombardments decimated Sudanese forces and helicopter gunships peppered Sudanese frontlines with missiles and gunfire. Various ministries were taken out with JDAM munitions and a few thousand men concentrated in the capital were tasked with defending the regime. They mostly had small arms, hand grenades and RPGs to defend themselves with and only two dozen tanks and therefore only lasted for 48 hours. Neither Omar al-Bashir nor Osama bin Laden were found in the fallen capital: they had both gone on the run before US and Soviet forces cut off their escape route by surrounding Khartoum.
The question is what would have happened if one or both had been caught right then and there during the Fall of Khartoum, given that Washington and Moscow weren’t in agreement on what to do with them. The Soviets didn’t care very much what happened to al-Bashir, but really much wanted Bin Laden dead and intended to kill him upon capture: Soviet Ambassador to the US Yuri Ushakov told Secretary of State Colin Powell that “if our soldiers find him in some hole, they’ll drag him out and put a bullet between his eyes.” The Giuliani Administration considered a highly publicized trial to undercut Islamism and demythologize Bin Laden to his followers, despite concerns that Bin Laden might use a trial as a pulpit. The superpowers didn’t reach an agreement.
As to al-Bashir, plenty of evidence was found after the fall of his regime of crimes against humanity, human rights violations and war crimes committed during the Second Sudanese Civil War, which had been ongoing since 1983. Originating in southern Sudan, the war had spread to the Nuba Mountains and the Blue Nile and cost the lives of two million people, not just in direct fighting but also because of famine and disease. Villages were raided, child soldiers were used, ethnic violence became widespread, and people suspected of disloyalty or rebel sympathies were tortured and executed. Furthermore, a 1991 penal code instituted Sharia law in the north while officially exempting the southern states, though it included provisions for future application in the south. Extreme punishments like amputation and stoning were implemented. The use of child soldiers, the torture and execution of dissidents, ethnic cleansing and various “punishments” administered as part of Sharia law were among the main charges of the International Criminal Court, which indicted al-Bashir and 51 others. He turned up in Zimbabwe and under some diplomatic pressure Mugabe turned him over to the new International Criminal Tribunal for Sudan in The Hague, where his trial commenced in 2003 (he would eventually be found guilty on all counts in 2008 and was sentenced to life imprisonment).
The next question is what Sudan would look like now that President al-Bashir was gone. In the immediate aftermath of his flight, his First Vice President Ali Osman Taha (Sudan had two Vice Presidents, one from the north and a second from the south) assumed the Presidency. Meanwhile, John Garang, the leader of the SPLA, the main rebel group, was confronted with dissidents. He hoped to establish a secular, united multi-ethnic Sudan with a Sudanese identity transcending ethnicity, tribe and religion. Many within the SPLA, however, wanted independence for the predominantly non-Arab, majority Christian population (roughly 60% of the south’s population was Christian while 20% adhered to Islam and another 20% practiced traditional African religions). Besides that, rebel groups sprang up in the western Sudanese region of Darfur during the US-Soviet invasion.
The Soviets and the Americans decided to take charge in the Sudanese peace talks by organizing the Zavidovo Conference at the eponymous village located roughly 100 kilometres north-northwest of Moscow in the Konakovsky District of Tver Oblast (Zavidovo is considered the Soviet equivalent to Camp David). The conference took place in October and November 2002. South Sudan and Darfur formally seceded and became independent on January 1st 2003, something which the new Sudanese President Taha could do nothing about. He represented the losing party.
Two new African countries emerged that had different starting positions. Upon its independence in 2003, the Republic of South Sudan controlled Africa’s third largest oil supply which consisted of 80% of all of Sudan’s oil reserves. Moscow’s ally Ethiopia facilitated the construction of a pipeline through their territory to Massawa, where an oil refinery was built. Using oil revenue, South Sudan expand its road and railroad network, built and staffed more schools, initiated a literacy campaign, built new hospitals, invested in the exploitation of other mineral resources like iron ore, copper, chromium, zinc, tungsten, silver, gold, diamonds and hardwood, and experienced GDP growth rates into the double digits. Nominal GDP per capita has grown from $250 in 2003 to $1.100 in 2019 (comparable to Tanzania). Literacy in South Sudan has correspondingly grown to 75%.
The new Federal Republic of Darfur, with Minni Minnawi as President, had a much poorer starting position: its economy was almost completely agrarian and based on pastoralism for lack of known natural resources, with low urbanization, negligible industrialization, high illiteracy rates and tribalism playing a major role (the capital of Al-Fashir had a population of just 260.000 people out of a population of 7.5 million in 2003). Economic growth rates didn’t exceed 1% for several years until Chinese prospectors discovered reserves of gold, diamonds, uranium and copper in 2012. In the years since then, economic growth has averaged on 11%. Nominal GDP per capita was $400 in 2012 and has risen to $830 in 2019 while literacy has correspondingly increased from 35% to 50%. The population of the capital of Al-Fashir has doubled in this same period. As to (North) Sudan, it experienced several years of stagflation before stabilizing. Its GDP per capita in 2019 is $900. Economic growth rates, however, vary between 5% and 7%. South Sudan has already surpassed the North in terms of GDP per capita and Darfur is expected to follow that example in the next few years.
In the meantime, Bin Laden was not found in Sudan even though Soviet and American forces, the CIA, the KGB and allied intelligence agencies like MI6, the DGSE (French intelligence), the BND (West German intelligence) and the foreign intelligence division of the Stasi were all pursuing every possible lead as to his whereabouts and cooperating extensively. They later reconstructed his flight based on eyewitness testimonies and other evidence: using his fabulous wealth, he managed to bribe his way past disorganized Sudanese soldiers and the border guards of the Central African Republic and later Cameroon, finally ending up in Nigeria. There he stayed with an organization called Boko Haram, at the time a still non-violent yet sympathizing group aiming to “purify Islam in northern Nigeria” and “establish an Islamic state.” Though he only stayed for three months, Bin Laden infected their leader Mohammed Yusuf with the jihadist virus and funded him and his organization.
Though his escape route was only reconstructed much later, NATO and Warsaw Pact intelligence agencies deduced his destination from a burst of chatter within the ISI (Inter-Services Intelligence, Pakistan’s premier intelligence agency). Rather than running the risk of falsely accusing Pakistan of harbouring the world’s most prominent terrorist, the US and the Soviet Union doubled down to undeniably prove he was there: using signal decrypts, satellite photos and spies they narrowed down his location to Peshawar, a major Pakistani city only 50 kilometres from the Afghan border. The CIA’s Special Activities Division and the KGB equivalent sent in covert operatives with the necessary language skills, knowledge of religious and cultural uses, and the right appearance to blend in. In late 2003, they confirmed beyond a doubt that Osama bin Laden was hiding out in a compound near Peshawar.
Moscow and Washington confronted Pakistan through diplomatic channels. Islamabad denied any knowledge of Bin Laden being in their country and also withheld permission for a joint US-Soviet operation to capture the compound in which Bin Laden allegedly resided. Two American carrier groups centred on USS Kitty Hawk and USS Independence steamed into the Arabian Sea from the southeast along with two Seawolf-class attack submarines and one Ohio-class SSBN. Simultaneously, Ulyanovsk-class super carrier Potemkin, Kirov-class battlecruiser Frunze, two Akula-class attack submarines and one Typhoon-class SSBN emerged from the Red Sea and engaged the two American carrier groups in naval exercises intended to intimidate Pakistan. To increase the pressure further, the Soviet Army carried out military exercises in the Turkestan and Central Asian Military Districts near the Afghan border.
Wary of becoming the “next Sudan”, Pakistan mobilized its armed forces and in doing so increased the likelihood of a regional crisis, with the potential of becoming a (nuclear) war. Neither, the US nor the Soviets appreciated Pakistan’s stubborn denial, in the face of overwhelming evidence, that Bin Laden was in their country at all. They also condemned Pakistan’s mobilization as an inflammatory move that could needlessly ignite a regional (nuclear) war. American and Soviet forces in the region, however, remained in place rather than withdrawing and de-escalating in the face of a bluff. The US remained at a readiness of DEFCON 3 with the Soviets at a comparable level.
In addition to that, India was alarmed by the Pakistani mobilization and carried out a partial mobilization of its own, further complicating the situation and heightening tensions in the region. Indo-Pakistani relations were fragile and the two countries had gone to war four times before, the last time in 1999. Besides that, the two neighbouring countries were both nuclear powers. Facing a potential conflict against the United States, the Soviet Union and India and with China applying pressure to avoid a nuclear war on its southern flank, Pakistan agreed to a compromise: they’d arrest Bin Laden and other Al-Qaeda leaders within their grasp and them him over for a UN trial in The Hague. This led to Al-Qaeda retaliation: several terrorist attacks took place in Pakistan.
Bin Laden and several others were arrested and remanded into the custody of the International Criminal Tribunal for Al-Qaeda in February 2004. The trial commenced later the same year and was lengthy as countless witnesses testified to the suffering Bin Laden had caused them. Bin Laden didn’t gain any sympathy at all (except among already radicalized Muslims) when he said he didn’t care about their suffering given that they were “infidels, atheist Marxists and Zionists who deserved to die and go to hell.” During the trial, Bin Laden repeatedly tried to justify his crimes with theological arguments. Not that they were obligated to, but the prosecution summoned numerous imams and Islamic scholars who eloquently and knowledgably argued against Bin Laden’s intolerant and violent interpretation of Islam. He lost much of his status as certain imams and Islamic scholars effectively proved the incorrectness of his jihadist beliefs. Finally, at the end of his trial in 2010, he would be sentenced to life imprisonment. The war on terror, however, wasn’t over: others would pick up where Bin Laden had left off.
After this victory over terrorism and détente with the Soviet Union Giuliani was at the zenith of his popularity and he won the 2004 Presidential election by defeating democratic nominee John Kerry (he won the nomination because other major established names like Al Gore, Joe Biden and Bill Clinton thought a Democratic victory was unlikely in ’04 and therefore didn’t take part in the primaries). The Giuliani/Bush ticket carried 32 states, won 290 electoral votes and got 51% of the popular vote while Kerry got 19 states plus DC, 247 electoral votes and 47.5% of the popular vote. It was a clear Republican victory, a greater success than the 2000 elections. With Sudan dealt with, Osama bin Laden behind bars, détente with the USSR and a successor to SALT II around the corner, Giuliani hoped he could devote his second term to domestic policies. Events abroad dictated otherwise.
Chapter XVII: The War on Terror, the Partition of Sudan and the Capture of Bin Laden, 2002-2004.
In the days that followed the Moscow-Washington hotline was used extensively, with Giuliani and Ryzhkov being in contact almost daily (during which time the former talked the latter out of a nuclear strike). The CIA and the KGB pooled their efforts and resources in their attempts to locate the Al-Qaeda leader. Soon coordination was set up between all the intelligence agencies of NATO and the Warsaw Pact. It was widely believed that Bin Laden was still in Sudan, despite the fact Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir denied this vehemently and declared him persona non grata. For absence of evidence of his departure, the intelligence agencies of West and East still believed he was in the country and under the protection of the Sudanese government.
On Monday June 3rd 2002 at 03:00 PM Sudanese time (08:00 AM Eastern Standard Time, 04:00 PM Moscow Time) the White House and the Kremlin issued a joint ultimatum to the respective Sudanese ambassadors in their country who relayed it to Khartoum: the US and the USSR insisted that Sudan closed immediately every terrorist training camp, hand over every terrorist and their supporters, and give the United States and the Soviet Union full access to terrorist training camps for inspection. Failure to do so would result in a “severe response.” They had 72 hours to comply, but foolishly failed to do so as they didn’t believe the two superpowers would invade their country and affect regime change just to get one person. Al-Bashir was clearly in a state of denial about the possibility of joint US-Soviet military action, pointing out Cold War tensions and overlooking that relations between East and West had never been so good. The regime reiterated its denial that Osama bin Laden was still in the country and flat-out denied the existence of terrorist training camps and the presence of any kind of terrorists. The regime said it was unable to comply as it couldn’t create terrorist or training camps where there weren’t any, dismissing the accusations as preposterous.
In the lead-up to the ultimatum, the Soviets had flown KGB operatives and Spetsnaz commandos into Ethiopia, a Soviet ally in Africa that bordered Sudan. CIA Special Activities Division assets entered Sudan through Uganda and Kenya along with members of all the elite units of the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), which included well known formations such as Delta Force and SEAL Team Six. They established contacts with the parties in the Second Sudanese Civil War opposing al-Bashir’s regime, particularly the Sudan People’s Liberation Army led by John Garang that operated from the predominantly Christian south (the north controlled by al-Bashir was predominantly Muslim and the Arabs formed the largest ethnic group there). The opening stages of Operation Nemesis, a name agreed on by the US and the Soviets, would soon begin.
After the ultimatum expired, the SPLA was promptly given weapons, ammunitions, fuel other supplies it might need, intelligence and direct support by US and Soviet special forces. That enabled it to launch successful offensives and secure strategic targets in southern Sudan that included several major cities. The Sudanese Armed Forces experienced several setbacks in the south and were distracted by the SPLA’s successes. Khartoum remained oblivious to the fact that these recent rebel successes were the result of foreign sponsors. In a civil war that had lasted for nineteen years at this point, these newest opposition successes were considered temporary and not particularly shocking.
In the meantime, the US and the Soviet Union had withdrawn their diplomatic representation from Khartoum, but even that didn’t seem to alert al-Bashir to the fact that an invasion was coming. According to interviews with former inner circle members, he remained in a state of denial. A week after the expiration of the ultimatum some rebel successes had occurred and the US as well as the USSR had withdrawn their ambassadors from Sudan, but nothing else happened. This seemed to confirm Al-Bashir’s belief that the worst was over and that, at most, some economic sanctions might still follow. He was wrong. This was just the silence before the storm.
Infiltrating the country and giving support to the opposition against al-Bashir was only phase one, which was followed by phase two: the elimination of the Sudanese Air Force. The air force had roughly 130 combat aircraft. These were mostly older Soviet and Chinese models like MiG-21s, MiG-23s, Su-24s, Su-25s, Chengdu J-7s (MiG-21 copy) and Shenyang J-6s (MiG-19 copy) as well as about twenty modern MiG-29s. Other aircraft included several types of Antonov transport aircraft, US, Polish and Soviet utility helicopters and 54 Mil Mi 24 helicopter gunships. It was a good air force by African standards and there was some risk, though minimal, that it could inflict damage on land forces. American and Soviet commanders weren’t going to take any chances.
Phase two started on Sunday June 16th when Soviet Tu-22M supersonic strategic bombers launched several dozen Kh-55 cruise missiles with a mix of (conventional) 400 kg high-explosive, penetrating and cluster warheads against the country’s two official military airports: Wadi Seidna Air Base and Port Sudan Military Airport. The effects were devastating: the runways were rendered unusable as they were covered in craters while control towers, radar, hangars and even hardened concrete aircraft shelters were destroyed. Al-Bashir moved his surviving aircraft to civilian airports, but that didn’t save many of them: two Seawolf-class submarines prowling in the Red Sea, USS Seawolf and USS Connecticut, launched a total of one hundred Tomahawk cruise missiles to destroy what remained of the Sudanese Air Force and blind the country’s air defences by taking out their radar. The second phase was over in 72 hours.
Phase three picked up were phase two left off seamlessly and also lasted 72 hours. By now three American carrier groups centred on USS Enterprise as well as Nimitz-class super aircraft carriers USS Carl Vinson and USS Theodore Roosevelt had arrived in the Red Sea. The 85.000 tonne Soviet super carrier Ulyanovsk carrying 68 aircraft and her brand-new sister ship Potemkin arrived too, albeit without big carrier groups (Soviet super carriers followed a different design philosophy by adding large amounts of heavy duty anti-ship missiles and surface-to-air missiles, enabling them to operate independently, if need be). Egypt and Ethiopia both allowed US and Soviet carrier aircraft to pass through their airspace to carry out airstrikes against targets of the Sudanese Armed Forces, which lost much of their heavy equipment and artillery as a result. Only ten carrier jets were lost (four Soviet, six American).
Phase four was the actual invasion: the near destruction of Sudan’s air force and the crippling airstrikes against its military had seriously softened the target, but the Sudanese army was still fairly large and entrenched in anticipation of the invasion. Sudan’s army had 150.000 personnel. The army had T-72 tanks and some modern Chinese models (though most of its tank force consisted of T-54/55 derivatives and their Chinese Type 59 copies). Besides that, the paramilitary Popular Defence Forces, the military wing of the National Islamic Front, had 10.000 active members and 85.000 reservists and these were all activated and made available to the regime. All-in-all, al-Bashir had a quarter of a million men at his disposal. He positioned his troops in coastal towns and towns on the border with Ethiopia, correctly anticipating where the invading forces would come from. These forces were ordered to dig in and to build improvised fortifications from barbed wire, concrete and sandbags.
The invasion of Sudan commenced on Saturday June 22nd 2002 at 06:00 AM local time and overwhelming force was used. The Soviets had transferred the entire 3rd Shock Army to Ethiopia: it consisted of four tank divisions and another 26 subordinate formations and units ranging from companies and battalions to regiments. All-in-all, the Soviet force consisted of about 80.000 men. Moscow’s Ethiopian allies provided another 40.000 men to cover its flanks (and their air force, alongside Soviet pilots, made flights into southern Sudan to support the SPLA). The Soviets and their Ethiopian support force seized Kassala, a city of 400.000 souls located only 20 kilometres from the Sudan-Ethiopian border and along the economically important Khartoum-Port Sudan highway, making it an important trade centre. From there, Soviet forces began advancing along the highway, turning south and then west before turning right again in a northerly direction toward the capital of Khartoum. Sudanese forces conducted several counteroffensives at night, but the cover of night provided little protection against Su-33 multirole fighters and T-90 tanks. Three major battles took place at the cities of Al-Qadarif, Wad Madani and Rufaa and the end result revealed the disparity between the opposing forces: the Sudanese lost 5.000 vehicles, what few aircraft they still had, and suffered 7.000 fatalities while the Soviets lost a few dozen vehicles, 600 men and a handful of aircraft. They arrived at the outskirts of Khartoum in fifteen days at July 7th 2002. Small units from all Warsaw Pact countries except East Germany (which provided logistical support) and Romania (which provided intelligence) participated as well at the frontlines, ranging in size from a battalion in Bulgaria’s case to a full division in Poland’s.
In the meantime, while the Soviet advance began, the Red Sea became even more crowded: American battleship USS Iowa arrived to provide naval gunfire support with its mighty 16 inch (406 mm) guns and Tomahawk cruise missiles to US Marines (while Soviet battlecruiser Kirov fired all of its twenty P-700 Granit cruise missiles at Sudanese targets). The day the Soviet advance started, the 47.000 men strong US II Marine Expeditionary Force seized Port Sudan in a matter of hours. Later that same day the US 3rd Armoured Division arrived in Port Sudan while in the following hours the 82nd Airborne Division, the 101st Airborne Division and the 24th Infantry Division (Mechanized) secured the flanks. US forces rapidly advanced in a southwest direction toward Khartoum. The M1 Abrams, the US third generation main battle tank, performed excellently and tore through formations of Sudanese T-54/55s and T-72s (of which the Soviets took note, as their T-90 was basically a heavily updated T-72). Only six M1 Abrams tanks were lost and another nineteen were damaged. Despite having to cover 200 kilometres more than the Soviets, US forces captured Omdurman just 20 km north of Khartoum only one day after the Soviet arrival.
Britain and France deployed combat troops in support as well as one aircraft carrier each, HMS Invincible and Charles de Gaulle respectively. Remarkable was that West German forces also took part: in 2002 Leopard 2 tanks fired Germany’s first shots in anger since 1945, proving highly effective (just as they noticed how the American M1 Abrams knocked out Sudanese T-72s, the Soviets also noticed how Leopard 2s did the same). Some other NATO countries like Belgium and the Netherlands acted in support roles.
The final battle began on July 9th. US and Soviet forces surrounded the city while precision bombardments decimated Sudanese forces and helicopter gunships peppered Sudanese frontlines with missiles and gunfire. Various ministries were taken out with JDAM munitions and a few thousand men concentrated in the capital were tasked with defending the regime. They mostly had small arms, hand grenades and RPGs to defend themselves with and only two dozen tanks and therefore only lasted for 48 hours. Neither Omar al-Bashir nor Osama bin Laden were found in the fallen capital: they had both gone on the run before US and Soviet forces cut off their escape route by surrounding Khartoum.
The question is what would have happened if one or both had been caught right then and there during the Fall of Khartoum, given that Washington and Moscow weren’t in agreement on what to do with them. The Soviets didn’t care very much what happened to al-Bashir, but really much wanted Bin Laden dead and intended to kill him upon capture: Soviet Ambassador to the US Yuri Ushakov told Secretary of State Colin Powell that “if our soldiers find him in some hole, they’ll drag him out and put a bullet between his eyes.” The Giuliani Administration considered a highly publicized trial to undercut Islamism and demythologize Bin Laden to his followers, despite concerns that Bin Laden might use a trial as a pulpit. The superpowers didn’t reach an agreement.
As to al-Bashir, plenty of evidence was found after the fall of his regime of crimes against humanity, human rights violations and war crimes committed during the Second Sudanese Civil War, which had been ongoing since 1983. Originating in southern Sudan, the war had spread to the Nuba Mountains and the Blue Nile and cost the lives of two million people, not just in direct fighting but also because of famine and disease. Villages were raided, child soldiers were used, ethnic violence became widespread, and people suspected of disloyalty or rebel sympathies were tortured and executed. Furthermore, a 1991 penal code instituted Sharia law in the north while officially exempting the southern states, though it included provisions for future application in the south. Extreme punishments like amputation and stoning were implemented. The use of child soldiers, the torture and execution of dissidents, ethnic cleansing and various “punishments” administered as part of Sharia law were among the main charges of the International Criminal Court, which indicted al-Bashir and 51 others. He turned up in Zimbabwe and under some diplomatic pressure Mugabe turned him over to the new International Criminal Tribunal for Sudan in The Hague, where his trial commenced in 2003 (he would eventually be found guilty on all counts in 2008 and was sentenced to life imprisonment).
The next question is what Sudan would look like now that President al-Bashir was gone. In the immediate aftermath of his flight, his First Vice President Ali Osman Taha (Sudan had two Vice Presidents, one from the north and a second from the south) assumed the Presidency. Meanwhile, John Garang, the leader of the SPLA, the main rebel group, was confronted with dissidents. He hoped to establish a secular, united multi-ethnic Sudan with a Sudanese identity transcending ethnicity, tribe and religion. Many within the SPLA, however, wanted independence for the predominantly non-Arab, majority Christian population (roughly 60% of the south’s population was Christian while 20% adhered to Islam and another 20% practiced traditional African religions). Besides that, rebel groups sprang up in the western Sudanese region of Darfur during the US-Soviet invasion.
The Soviets and the Americans decided to take charge in the Sudanese peace talks by organizing the Zavidovo Conference at the eponymous village located roughly 100 kilometres north-northwest of Moscow in the Konakovsky District of Tver Oblast (Zavidovo is considered the Soviet equivalent to Camp David). The conference took place in October and November 2002. South Sudan and Darfur formally seceded and became independent on January 1st 2003, something which the new Sudanese President Taha could do nothing about. He represented the losing party.
Two new African countries emerged that had different starting positions. Upon its independence in 2003, the Republic of South Sudan controlled Africa’s third largest oil supply which consisted of 80% of all of Sudan’s oil reserves. Moscow’s ally Ethiopia facilitated the construction of a pipeline through their territory to Massawa, where an oil refinery was built. Using oil revenue, South Sudan expand its road and railroad network, built and staffed more schools, initiated a literacy campaign, built new hospitals, invested in the exploitation of other mineral resources like iron ore, copper, chromium, zinc, tungsten, silver, gold, diamonds and hardwood, and experienced GDP growth rates into the double digits. Nominal GDP per capita has grown from $250 in 2003 to $1.100 in 2019 (comparable to Tanzania). Literacy in South Sudan has correspondingly grown to 75%.
The new Federal Republic of Darfur, with Minni Minnawi as President, had a much poorer starting position: its economy was almost completely agrarian and based on pastoralism for lack of known natural resources, with low urbanization, negligible industrialization, high illiteracy rates and tribalism playing a major role (the capital of Al-Fashir had a population of just 260.000 people out of a population of 7.5 million in 2003). Economic growth rates didn’t exceed 1% for several years until Chinese prospectors discovered reserves of gold, diamonds, uranium and copper in 2012. In the years since then, economic growth has averaged on 11%. Nominal GDP per capita was $400 in 2012 and has risen to $830 in 2019 while literacy has correspondingly increased from 35% to 50%. The population of the capital of Al-Fashir has doubled in this same period. As to (North) Sudan, it experienced several years of stagflation before stabilizing. Its GDP per capita in 2019 is $900. Economic growth rates, however, vary between 5% and 7%. South Sudan has already surpassed the North in terms of GDP per capita and Darfur is expected to follow that example in the next few years.
In the meantime, Bin Laden was not found in Sudan even though Soviet and American forces, the CIA, the KGB and allied intelligence agencies like MI6, the DGSE (French intelligence), the BND (West German intelligence) and the foreign intelligence division of the Stasi were all pursuing every possible lead as to his whereabouts and cooperating extensively. They later reconstructed his flight based on eyewitness testimonies and other evidence: using his fabulous wealth, he managed to bribe his way past disorganized Sudanese soldiers and the border guards of the Central African Republic and later Cameroon, finally ending up in Nigeria. There he stayed with an organization called Boko Haram, at the time a still non-violent yet sympathizing group aiming to “purify Islam in northern Nigeria” and “establish an Islamic state.” Though he only stayed for three months, Bin Laden infected their leader Mohammed Yusuf with the jihadist virus and funded him and his organization.
Though his escape route was only reconstructed much later, NATO and Warsaw Pact intelligence agencies deduced his destination from a burst of chatter within the ISI (Inter-Services Intelligence, Pakistan’s premier intelligence agency). Rather than running the risk of falsely accusing Pakistan of harbouring the world’s most prominent terrorist, the US and the Soviet Union doubled down to undeniably prove he was there: using signal decrypts, satellite photos and spies they narrowed down his location to Peshawar, a major Pakistani city only 50 kilometres from the Afghan border. The CIA’s Special Activities Division and the KGB equivalent sent in covert operatives with the necessary language skills, knowledge of religious and cultural uses, and the right appearance to blend in. In late 2003, they confirmed beyond a doubt that Osama bin Laden was hiding out in a compound near Peshawar.
Moscow and Washington confronted Pakistan through diplomatic channels. Islamabad denied any knowledge of Bin Laden being in their country and also withheld permission for a joint US-Soviet operation to capture the compound in which Bin Laden allegedly resided. Two American carrier groups centred on USS Kitty Hawk and USS Independence steamed into the Arabian Sea from the southeast along with two Seawolf-class attack submarines and one Ohio-class SSBN. Simultaneously, Ulyanovsk-class super carrier Potemkin, Kirov-class battlecruiser Frunze, two Akula-class attack submarines and one Typhoon-class SSBN emerged from the Red Sea and engaged the two American carrier groups in naval exercises intended to intimidate Pakistan. To increase the pressure further, the Soviet Army carried out military exercises in the Turkestan and Central Asian Military Districts near the Afghan border.
Wary of becoming the “next Sudan”, Pakistan mobilized its armed forces and in doing so increased the likelihood of a regional crisis, with the potential of becoming a (nuclear) war. Neither, the US nor the Soviets appreciated Pakistan’s stubborn denial, in the face of overwhelming evidence, that Bin Laden was in their country at all. They also condemned Pakistan’s mobilization as an inflammatory move that could needlessly ignite a regional (nuclear) war. American and Soviet forces in the region, however, remained in place rather than withdrawing and de-escalating in the face of a bluff. The US remained at a readiness of DEFCON 3 with the Soviets at a comparable level.
In addition to that, India was alarmed by the Pakistani mobilization and carried out a partial mobilization of its own, further complicating the situation and heightening tensions in the region. Indo-Pakistani relations were fragile and the two countries had gone to war four times before, the last time in 1999. Besides that, the two neighbouring countries were both nuclear powers. Facing a potential conflict against the United States, the Soviet Union and India and with China applying pressure to avoid a nuclear war on its southern flank, Pakistan agreed to a compromise: they’d arrest Bin Laden and other Al-Qaeda leaders within their grasp and them him over for a UN trial in The Hague. This led to Al-Qaeda retaliation: several terrorist attacks took place in Pakistan.
Bin Laden and several others were arrested and remanded into the custody of the International Criminal Tribunal for Al-Qaeda in February 2004. The trial commenced later the same year and was lengthy as countless witnesses testified to the suffering Bin Laden had caused them. Bin Laden didn’t gain any sympathy at all (except among already radicalized Muslims) when he said he didn’t care about their suffering given that they were “infidels, atheist Marxists and Zionists who deserved to die and go to hell.” During the trial, Bin Laden repeatedly tried to justify his crimes with theological arguments. Not that they were obligated to, but the prosecution summoned numerous imams and Islamic scholars who eloquently and knowledgably argued against Bin Laden’s intolerant and violent interpretation of Islam. He lost much of his status as certain imams and Islamic scholars effectively proved the incorrectness of his jihadist beliefs. Finally, at the end of his trial in 2010, he would be sentenced to life imprisonment. The war on terror, however, wasn’t over: others would pick up where Bin Laden had left off.
After this victory over terrorism and détente with the Soviet Union Giuliani was at the zenith of his popularity and he won the 2004 Presidential election by defeating democratic nominee John Kerry (he won the nomination because other major established names like Al Gore, Joe Biden and Bill Clinton thought a Democratic victory was unlikely in ’04 and therefore didn’t take part in the primaries). The Giuliani/Bush ticket carried 32 states, won 290 electoral votes and got 51% of the popular vote while Kerry got 19 states plus DC, 247 electoral votes and 47.5% of the popular vote. It was a clear Republican victory, a greater success than the 2000 elections. With Sudan dealt with, Osama bin Laden behind bars, détente with the USSR and a successor to SALT II around the corner, Giuliani hoped he could devote his second term to domestic policies. Events abroad dictated otherwise.
Why would he not hand Bin Laden over when he expelled Bin Laden and Co in 1996 in otl for far less and that without the threat of his overthrow not to mention he's thrown other groups or leaders for even less than that.
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Chapter XVIII: German Reunification and Nuclear Proliferation, 2004-2008.
@Noscoper: butterflies. Also, it's update time!
Tensions between the US and the Soviet Union had never been so low. After SALT II was finally ratified by both powers in 1989, little had been done on the topic of nuclear disarmament. SALT II had reduced nuclear warheads to a maximum of 2.250 and the number of MIRV capable and long range ballistic missiles to 1.320 for both sides. It also forbade the development of new ballistic missiles (a new missile defined as one with any key parameter 5% better than in currently deployed missiles). Giuliani was not an anti-Soviet hawk and engaged in talks with the Soviets on the matter: considering the idea of nuclear war abhorrent and because nuclear weapons were less useful as wars were now generally being waged between states and non-state actors, bilateral talks resulted in the signing of SALT III after several years of negotiations. It reduced the number of warheads for both to a total of 1.750 atop 850 missiles and bombers. He and Ryzhkov ratified the treaty in 2005. However, developments in the recent past and new developments made sure that fears of a nuclear conflict persisted.
A brief distraction from nuclear fears was provided by German Reunification. In January 2002, the German Democratic Republic had seen its first and, as it turns out, only true democratic elections. A coalition of CDU, SPD and the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS, the successor to the ruling SED) emerged with Lothar de Mazière as Prime Minister. His government, the only truly democratically elected government of the GDR, used the trillion dollar investment package from West Germany to improve infrastructure, develop new infrastructure, catch up in matters like internet access and digitization, privatize state-owned companies and ease their transition to the free market, and stimulate emerging privately owned businesses with subsidies. At noon on May 8th 2005 his government resigned and the East German states formally acceded to the Federal Republic of Germany exactly sixty years after the end of World War II. A colossal fireworks display and celebrations took place in Berlin and the GDR ended in a heartbeat. Today its surviving ex-leaders, who weren’t persecuted as per the original terms, live off modest pensions and sometimes gather to lament capitalist developments in former East Germany (Margot Honecker featured heavily at such gatherings, but otherwise lived in Havana, where she could afford a comfortable standard of living with her German pension). All-in-all, however, reunification has been a success.
Meanwhile, India had been a nuclear power since 1974 and Pakistan had become one in 1998, which had resulted in fears that the 1999 Kargil War would go nuclear. Such fears resurfaced in 2004 during the diplomatic and military tensions surrounding the extradition of Bin Laden. The American Geophysical Union calculated that a limited nuclear exchange with one hundred Hiroshima-sized weapons (15 kilotons) would release five million tonnes of soot into the atmosphere. A temperature drop of several degrees would affect large areas of Eurasia and North America, including many grain-growing regions. The result would be catastrophic. In the next few years the risk of nuclear war was only going to increase as new nuclear powers appeared.
Iraq had been accused of possessing a nuclear weapons program several times, which had even resulted in an Israeli attack on the Osirak research reactor in 1981. What was certain was that Iraq had a chemical and biological weapons program, which gave the country access to mustard gas, nerve agents like tabun and sarin, anthrax, botulinum toxin and aflatoxin. Iraq’s ballistic missile program developed chemical and biological warheads for the country’s Scud missiles and the Al Hussein missile, an upgraded Scud with a range of 650 kilometres (~ 400 mi). In 2002, an Iraqi version of the North Korean Rodong-1 entered service with Iraq’s strategic rocket forces under the name Al Hussein-2 and it had a range of 1.500 kilometres.
While Iraq’s chemical and biological weapons programs were a public secret and the Iraqis boasted about the capabilities of their missiles, the status of its nuclear program remained uncertain. Israel, Syria and Iran in particular accused Iraq of still pursuing nuclear weapons, which Saddam Hussein of course always categorically denied. His accusers only had circumstantial evidence, but Iraq definitely had a nuclear weapons program as we now know: the Osirak research reactor was rebuilt in an underground location and later new reactors were built elsewhere for plutonium production while the country secretly imported uranium fuel and engaged in uranium enrichment. Iraq purchased nuclear secrets from Pakistan and exchanged information with Libya, Romania and North Korea. The result was success: on June 14th 2004 seismometers detected a tremor corresponding to a 22 kiloton underground test. Ignoring international condemnation and Israeli threats, several more nuclear tests followed in the next few years with increasing explosive yields, culminating in a 300 kiloton test in April 2008 that Saddam claimed to be a thermonuclear device (though experts argued that the unusually low yield corresponded more closely to a boosted fission device). By then, Iraq was thought to have 20-30 warheads.
The world denounced Iraq for its nuclear weapons program and the US finally cut off diplomatic ties with their problematic ally, ceased weapons deliveries and aligned against them. After Kuwait, Saddam had promised the US to leave its neighbours alone and not develop nuclear weapons. Now it was clear he’d lied to his main ally’s face while methodically working towards establishing an Arab great power, benefiting from American material aid and Iraqi officers going to the US for training in the meantime. The US further increased its cooperation with Saudi Arabia and Israel. Saddam shrugged and moved on, arrogantly assuming he no longer needed any allies.
In this regard Saddam’s nuclear weapons program was more successful than North Korea’s even though the latter’s program had begun much earlier. This was because he had tens of billions of dollars’ worth of oil money to fund it with and much better infrastructure. North Korea, on the other hand, had a horribly inefficient centrally planned and heavily nationalized economy reliant on foreign aid because of food shortages, lack of arable land, a skilled labour shortage, few means of transport, a critically low energy supply and dilapidated infrastructure. The rotten structure was tightly held together by a cementing totalitarian personality cult, pervading every layer of society, that would make even Stalin blush. The economy also relied on exports to Eastern Bloc countries, but they appreciated relatively low quality North Korean products less and less as their market socialist system allowed them to fill the shelves of their stores with high quality Western produce and domestically produced alternatives.
North Korea had always been a heavily militarized society. The Korean War had ended in an armistice that established a Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) at the 38th parallel, a four kilometre wide zone that became the most heavily guarded area in the world. Initial steps to a nuclear energy program were made in the 1950s, but concrete steps to weaponization were first made in the early 80s. Kim Il-Sung witnessed how China and later also the Soviet Union moved away from the traditional model of a command economy towards “market socialism”, which he declared to be revisionism whereas North Korea’s “Juche ideology most closely follows the principles of Marxism-Leninism, adapted to the Korean situation, much more so than other socialist states.” Though Moscow and Beijing were annoyed about these criticisms of their reforms, their aid to Pyongyang didn’t stop: cheap oil and free food supplies continued to arrive.
Uncertain about the continuance of this aid (Moscow had made some noises that North Korea ought to pay for Soviet deliveries) Kim Il-Sung was adamant: the need for Chinese and Soviet aid needed to be eliminated by creating a nuclear deterrent. In an act of hypocrisy, North Korea gratefully accepted Chinese and Soviet food supplies to prevent what would have been a famine as floods in 1995 destroyed the harvests. With famine averted, the regime could quietly continue its nuclear weapons program. Once it was successful, North Korea would no longer need aid like it had in ’95 or any aid at all. Even if there was another internal crisis, nobody in their right mind would attack North Korea if it had a nuclear arsenal, no matter how small, or so the regime reasoned. The Kim dynasty would survive and that was all that mattered. After Kim Il-Sung died in 1994, his son Kim Jong-Il continued his father’s policies.
In the meantime, The IAEA couldn’t inspect North Korean nuclear facilities as they were denied access. Furthermore, both the USSR and China kept protecting North Korea far longer than they should have by vetoing inspections of her nuclear facilities and sanctions, allowing weapons development to continue quietly. This protection ended in 2003 as the Soviets and the Chinese disagreed with Kim Jong-Il’s decision to withdraw from the Non-Proliferation Treaty, protesting against this move diplomatically. This confirmed to the North Korean leadership that they couldn’t expect much support from them in the event of conflict with the Americans. To Moscow and Beijing it was a matter of not wanting their satellite states to have nuclear weapons as it might make them too independent. Moreover, they didn’t see why their allies needed to since they were protected by either the Soviet or the Chinese nuclear umbrella.
By 2003, the North’s nuclear weapons program was well underway and short of a military attack, which could reignite the Korean War and destabilize the region, there was no stopping it anymore. Besides that, neither China nor the Soviets did anything beyond diplomatic protests and regular deliveries of aid continue to arrive (allowing a certain standard of living, with a GDP per capita of $3.400 in 2019 dollars in ’03). In the early 80s, the DPRK already had a plutonium-producing Magnox reactor in their main nuclear facility at Yongbyon. The North Koreans had steadily continued producing plutonium whilst also trying to develop uranium enrichment technology throughout the 1980s and 90s, part of which was also used for nuclear energy for peaceful means, i.e. electricity production to reduce the chronic energy shortage. Even this program contributed to the bomb program: spent fuel rods were used for weapons grade plutonium reprocessing.
On May 9th 2005 seismometers in surrounding countries detected a tremor and Pyongyang bombastically announced it had successfully detonated a nuclear weapon at the Punggye-ri Nuclear Test Site in North Hamgyong Province. US intelligence officials announced that analysis of radioactive debris in air samples collected a few days after the test confirmed the blast had taken place. The 2005 test had a relatively low yield of just 7 kilotons according to a scientific paper. In the summer of 2008, “Dear Leader” Kim Jong-Il suffered a stroke and provisions were made for his son Kim Jong-Un to take power. The August 2008 test was possibly conducted to show that, even in a time of possible weakness, North Korea didn’t intend to give up its nuclear program. The test itself was highly successful: the yield was roughly 30 kilotons (twice the size of Hiroshima). At the time, North Korea was thought to have ten warheads. It was at this point that all Sino-Soviet aid was cut off. The nuclear threat would now be used to dissuade the world from sanctions. Minor economic reform – based on autonomy and flexibility for state enterprises and collective farms as well as material incentives – was enacted and boosted productivity a bit.
After being caught with their pants down twice, Washington and Moscow agreed they’d force other aspiring nuclear powers to abide by the Non-Proliferation Treaty and prevent them from developing nuclear weapons, if necessary through force of arms. That led to the Libyan intervention. Libya under Muammar Gaddafi had a history of trying to develop or acquire weapons of mass destruction, leading to the development of mustard gas and sarin as well as a ballistic missile program (like Iraq and Romania before it, Libya copied North Korea’s Rodong-1 missile).
Besides that, despite signing the NPT, it pursued nuclear weapons through various sources: they unsuccessfully tried to infiltrate the Pakistani nuclear program; peaceful nuclear cooperation with India didn’t yield the desired results either; neither did deceitful plans to gain uranium enrichment technology in the late 70s; black market approaches failed too; Libya did succeed in buying 1.200 tonnes of uranium from French controlled mines in Niger, but was denied purchase of a plant for manufacturing uranium tetrafluoride by Belgium. Libya expanded the complex of the 10 MW research reactor at Tajoura and cooperated heavily with North Korea, providing free oil in return for nuclear secrets. Gaddafi also purchased nuclear information from Iraq and Romania.
By 2007, it was feared that Libya was pretty close to developing nuclear weapons and the UN Security Council applied pressure to allow inspections. The Soviet UN delegate was intentionally absent to avoid having to go against the UN Security Council and get caught in a diplomatic bind: as a government friendly to Gaddafi they’d have to support him, but as a government against anybody else obtaining nuclear weapons they opposed him. They quietly dropped him as an ally and gave their blessing to the Americans to intervene, at least as long as Soviet interests in the central Mediterranean were preserved. The Americans agreed to a continued Soviet naval presence in Libya after “the matter at hand” had been dealt with. In the meantime the US continued to apply pressure to get wide ranging inspections, which Gaddafi continued to refuse. It became clear he wasn’t going to give up his nuclear ambitions. Time was up and a strike had to happen.
Chapter XVIII: German Reunification and Nuclear Proliferation, 2004-2008.
Tensions between the US and the Soviet Union had never been so low. After SALT II was finally ratified by both powers in 1989, little had been done on the topic of nuclear disarmament. SALT II had reduced nuclear warheads to a maximum of 2.250 and the number of MIRV capable and long range ballistic missiles to 1.320 for both sides. It also forbade the development of new ballistic missiles (a new missile defined as one with any key parameter 5% better than in currently deployed missiles). Giuliani was not an anti-Soviet hawk and engaged in talks with the Soviets on the matter: considering the idea of nuclear war abhorrent and because nuclear weapons were less useful as wars were now generally being waged between states and non-state actors, bilateral talks resulted in the signing of SALT III after several years of negotiations. It reduced the number of warheads for both to a total of 1.750 atop 850 missiles and bombers. He and Ryzhkov ratified the treaty in 2005. However, developments in the recent past and new developments made sure that fears of a nuclear conflict persisted.
A brief distraction from nuclear fears was provided by German Reunification. In January 2002, the German Democratic Republic had seen its first and, as it turns out, only true democratic elections. A coalition of CDU, SPD and the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS, the successor to the ruling SED) emerged with Lothar de Mazière as Prime Minister. His government, the only truly democratically elected government of the GDR, used the trillion dollar investment package from West Germany to improve infrastructure, develop new infrastructure, catch up in matters like internet access and digitization, privatize state-owned companies and ease their transition to the free market, and stimulate emerging privately owned businesses with subsidies. At noon on May 8th 2005 his government resigned and the East German states formally acceded to the Federal Republic of Germany exactly sixty years after the end of World War II. A colossal fireworks display and celebrations took place in Berlin and the GDR ended in a heartbeat. Today its surviving ex-leaders, who weren’t persecuted as per the original terms, live off modest pensions and sometimes gather to lament capitalist developments in former East Germany (Margot Honecker featured heavily at such gatherings, but otherwise lived in Havana, where she could afford a comfortable standard of living with her German pension). All-in-all, however, reunification has been a success.
Meanwhile, India had been a nuclear power since 1974 and Pakistan had become one in 1998, which had resulted in fears that the 1999 Kargil War would go nuclear. Such fears resurfaced in 2004 during the diplomatic and military tensions surrounding the extradition of Bin Laden. The American Geophysical Union calculated that a limited nuclear exchange with one hundred Hiroshima-sized weapons (15 kilotons) would release five million tonnes of soot into the atmosphere. A temperature drop of several degrees would affect large areas of Eurasia and North America, including many grain-growing regions. The result would be catastrophic. In the next few years the risk of nuclear war was only going to increase as new nuclear powers appeared.
Iraq had been accused of possessing a nuclear weapons program several times, which had even resulted in an Israeli attack on the Osirak research reactor in 1981. What was certain was that Iraq had a chemical and biological weapons program, which gave the country access to mustard gas, nerve agents like tabun and sarin, anthrax, botulinum toxin and aflatoxin. Iraq’s ballistic missile program developed chemical and biological warheads for the country’s Scud missiles and the Al Hussein missile, an upgraded Scud with a range of 650 kilometres (~ 400 mi). In 2002, an Iraqi version of the North Korean Rodong-1 entered service with Iraq’s strategic rocket forces under the name Al Hussein-2 and it had a range of 1.500 kilometres.
While Iraq’s chemical and biological weapons programs were a public secret and the Iraqis boasted about the capabilities of their missiles, the status of its nuclear program remained uncertain. Israel, Syria and Iran in particular accused Iraq of still pursuing nuclear weapons, which Saddam Hussein of course always categorically denied. His accusers only had circumstantial evidence, but Iraq definitely had a nuclear weapons program as we now know: the Osirak research reactor was rebuilt in an underground location and later new reactors were built elsewhere for plutonium production while the country secretly imported uranium fuel and engaged in uranium enrichment. Iraq purchased nuclear secrets from Pakistan and exchanged information with Libya, Romania and North Korea. The result was success: on June 14th 2004 seismometers detected a tremor corresponding to a 22 kiloton underground test. Ignoring international condemnation and Israeli threats, several more nuclear tests followed in the next few years with increasing explosive yields, culminating in a 300 kiloton test in April 2008 that Saddam claimed to be a thermonuclear device (though experts argued that the unusually low yield corresponded more closely to a boosted fission device). By then, Iraq was thought to have 20-30 warheads.
The world denounced Iraq for its nuclear weapons program and the US finally cut off diplomatic ties with their problematic ally, ceased weapons deliveries and aligned against them. After Kuwait, Saddam had promised the US to leave its neighbours alone and not develop nuclear weapons. Now it was clear he’d lied to his main ally’s face while methodically working towards establishing an Arab great power, benefiting from American material aid and Iraqi officers going to the US for training in the meantime. The US further increased its cooperation with Saudi Arabia and Israel. Saddam shrugged and moved on, arrogantly assuming he no longer needed any allies.
In this regard Saddam’s nuclear weapons program was more successful than North Korea’s even though the latter’s program had begun much earlier. This was because he had tens of billions of dollars’ worth of oil money to fund it with and much better infrastructure. North Korea, on the other hand, had a horribly inefficient centrally planned and heavily nationalized economy reliant on foreign aid because of food shortages, lack of arable land, a skilled labour shortage, few means of transport, a critically low energy supply and dilapidated infrastructure. The rotten structure was tightly held together by a cementing totalitarian personality cult, pervading every layer of society, that would make even Stalin blush. The economy also relied on exports to Eastern Bloc countries, but they appreciated relatively low quality North Korean products less and less as their market socialist system allowed them to fill the shelves of their stores with high quality Western produce and domestically produced alternatives.
North Korea had always been a heavily militarized society. The Korean War had ended in an armistice that established a Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) at the 38th parallel, a four kilometre wide zone that became the most heavily guarded area in the world. Initial steps to a nuclear energy program were made in the 1950s, but concrete steps to weaponization were first made in the early 80s. Kim Il-Sung witnessed how China and later also the Soviet Union moved away from the traditional model of a command economy towards “market socialism”, which he declared to be revisionism whereas North Korea’s “Juche ideology most closely follows the principles of Marxism-Leninism, adapted to the Korean situation, much more so than other socialist states.” Though Moscow and Beijing were annoyed about these criticisms of their reforms, their aid to Pyongyang didn’t stop: cheap oil and free food supplies continued to arrive.
Uncertain about the continuance of this aid (Moscow had made some noises that North Korea ought to pay for Soviet deliveries) Kim Il-Sung was adamant: the need for Chinese and Soviet aid needed to be eliminated by creating a nuclear deterrent. In an act of hypocrisy, North Korea gratefully accepted Chinese and Soviet food supplies to prevent what would have been a famine as floods in 1995 destroyed the harvests. With famine averted, the regime could quietly continue its nuclear weapons program. Once it was successful, North Korea would no longer need aid like it had in ’95 or any aid at all. Even if there was another internal crisis, nobody in their right mind would attack North Korea if it had a nuclear arsenal, no matter how small, or so the regime reasoned. The Kim dynasty would survive and that was all that mattered. After Kim Il-Sung died in 1994, his son Kim Jong-Il continued his father’s policies.
In the meantime, The IAEA couldn’t inspect North Korean nuclear facilities as they were denied access. Furthermore, both the USSR and China kept protecting North Korea far longer than they should have by vetoing inspections of her nuclear facilities and sanctions, allowing weapons development to continue quietly. This protection ended in 2003 as the Soviets and the Chinese disagreed with Kim Jong-Il’s decision to withdraw from the Non-Proliferation Treaty, protesting against this move diplomatically. This confirmed to the North Korean leadership that they couldn’t expect much support from them in the event of conflict with the Americans. To Moscow and Beijing it was a matter of not wanting their satellite states to have nuclear weapons as it might make them too independent. Moreover, they didn’t see why their allies needed to since they were protected by either the Soviet or the Chinese nuclear umbrella.
By 2003, the North’s nuclear weapons program was well underway and short of a military attack, which could reignite the Korean War and destabilize the region, there was no stopping it anymore. Besides that, neither China nor the Soviets did anything beyond diplomatic protests and regular deliveries of aid continue to arrive (allowing a certain standard of living, with a GDP per capita of $3.400 in 2019 dollars in ’03). In the early 80s, the DPRK already had a plutonium-producing Magnox reactor in their main nuclear facility at Yongbyon. The North Koreans had steadily continued producing plutonium whilst also trying to develop uranium enrichment technology throughout the 1980s and 90s, part of which was also used for nuclear energy for peaceful means, i.e. electricity production to reduce the chronic energy shortage. Even this program contributed to the bomb program: spent fuel rods were used for weapons grade plutonium reprocessing.
On May 9th 2005 seismometers in surrounding countries detected a tremor and Pyongyang bombastically announced it had successfully detonated a nuclear weapon at the Punggye-ri Nuclear Test Site in North Hamgyong Province. US intelligence officials announced that analysis of radioactive debris in air samples collected a few days after the test confirmed the blast had taken place. The 2005 test had a relatively low yield of just 7 kilotons according to a scientific paper. In the summer of 2008, “Dear Leader” Kim Jong-Il suffered a stroke and provisions were made for his son Kim Jong-Un to take power. The August 2008 test was possibly conducted to show that, even in a time of possible weakness, North Korea didn’t intend to give up its nuclear program. The test itself was highly successful: the yield was roughly 30 kilotons (twice the size of Hiroshima). At the time, North Korea was thought to have ten warheads. It was at this point that all Sino-Soviet aid was cut off. The nuclear threat would now be used to dissuade the world from sanctions. Minor economic reform – based on autonomy and flexibility for state enterprises and collective farms as well as material incentives – was enacted and boosted productivity a bit.
After being caught with their pants down twice, Washington and Moscow agreed they’d force other aspiring nuclear powers to abide by the Non-Proliferation Treaty and prevent them from developing nuclear weapons, if necessary through force of arms. That led to the Libyan intervention. Libya under Muammar Gaddafi had a history of trying to develop or acquire weapons of mass destruction, leading to the development of mustard gas and sarin as well as a ballistic missile program (like Iraq and Romania before it, Libya copied North Korea’s Rodong-1 missile).
Besides that, despite signing the NPT, it pursued nuclear weapons through various sources: they unsuccessfully tried to infiltrate the Pakistani nuclear program; peaceful nuclear cooperation with India didn’t yield the desired results either; neither did deceitful plans to gain uranium enrichment technology in the late 70s; black market approaches failed too; Libya did succeed in buying 1.200 tonnes of uranium from French controlled mines in Niger, but was denied purchase of a plant for manufacturing uranium tetrafluoride by Belgium. Libya expanded the complex of the 10 MW research reactor at Tajoura and cooperated heavily with North Korea, providing free oil in return for nuclear secrets. Gaddafi also purchased nuclear information from Iraq and Romania.
By 2007, it was feared that Libya was pretty close to developing nuclear weapons and the UN Security Council applied pressure to allow inspections. The Soviet UN delegate was intentionally absent to avoid having to go against the UN Security Council and get caught in a diplomatic bind: as a government friendly to Gaddafi they’d have to support him, but as a government against anybody else obtaining nuclear weapons they opposed him. They quietly dropped him as an ally and gave their blessing to the Americans to intervene, at least as long as Soviet interests in the central Mediterranean were preserved. The Americans agreed to a continued Soviet naval presence in Libya after “the matter at hand” had been dealt with. In the meantime the US continued to apply pressure to get wide ranging inspections, which Gaddafi continued to refuse. It became clear he wasn’t going to give up his nuclear ambitions. Time was up and a strike had to happen.