One Second to Midnight: World War III, 1986

Chapter 1: The Buildup to War

While the third World War may seem inevitable to a modern reader, the truth is that in many ways it was completely avoidable, and in fact undesirable to both sides throughout most of what is now referred to as the ‘Cold War’ period of 1946 to 1986. The world had reached the brink of all consuming war several times beforehand, and each time had dragged itself away from the precipice. Three years earlier, nuclear war had nearly been sparked not once, but twice due to a NATO exercise and a faulty Soviet system respectively. The Cuban Missile Crisis in 1963 had also nearly caused a full scale war to erupt between NATO and the Warsaw Pact. In almost every case, skillful diplomacy and level heads had kept the United Soviet Socialist Republics and the United States of America from pressing the big red button and dooming the world to nuclear hellfire.

The scale of the diplomatic and espionage machines both of the superpowers used to try to determine what the other was up to was staggering. Agents in Moscow, Berlin, and all around the world stole secrets, hid or ferreted out informants, experimented with radical new techniques and equipment, and kept tabs on whoever was deemed interesting enough to watch. Summits between world leaders were commonly scheduled in order to discuss and resolve issues, while ambassadors negotiated and discussed policies and aims with each other to prevent either side from getting too nervous. The President of the United States of America, Ronald Reagan, and the Soviet Premier Mikael Gorbachev even had hotlines in their offices they could use to directly contact each other at any time. However, no matter how lucky the gamblers, eventually the dice go against them, and no more so was this evident than in the weeks following the Black Sea incident. A comparison of the history behind and the situations between the NATO powers and Warsaw Pact is really needed to understand why things this time broke down in such a devastating manner.

NATO, or the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was founded in 1949 as a defensive alliance incorporating most of the Western nations involved in the Second World War. The structure for the alliance was set earlier than that however, as it merely expanded upon the framework provided by the Treaty of Brussels a year earlier. The Treaty of Brussels was a defensive pact between the United Kingdom, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg, and was primarily intended to deter any expansionist actions by the USSR in the post-war towards Western Europe. The founding members of NATO included the signatories of the Treaty of Brussels, along with the United States of America, Canada, Italy, Portugal, Denmark, Norway, and Iceland.

NATO was very similarly intended, though the scope grew as the escalation into the Cold War truly began. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s first few articles were primarily focused on diplomatic resolutions to crises involving member nations, and for economic inter-cooperation and trade between the signatories. However, these facts are overshadowed by the fifth article. Article V stated quite plainly “The Parties [to the treaty] agree that an armed attack against one or more of them … shall be considered an attack against them all”. In short, any military attack against any one of the members, would be responded to as an attack on all of the members together. The gauntlet had been thrown down against the Soviet Union, and in no uncertain terms.

NATO’s first expansions similarly reinforced its position as standing as a barrier against the Soviet Union and the Communist Blocs forming in Europe and the world. Turkey and Greece, both surrounded by Soviet aligned nations and fervently anti-communist, joined the alliance in 1952. Strategically, the alignment of Turkey into the NATO sphere was a huge boon for the budding alliance, effectively rendering the Soviet Black Sea Fleet an irrelevant afterthought to naval planners, and along with Greece presenting a unified front in the Balkans against communist expansion. More importantly though, it set the battle lines and ideological differences that would come to define the Cold War and the escalation of it. There was no hiding the true purpose of the alliance after the Soviets were rejected from joining in 1954: NATO would not accept communist interference in Western Europe.

Early on however, NATO prospects against the Soviet Union and its puppet nations in Eastern Europe were grim, if not impossible. They were outnumbered, outspent, and in many ways technologically behind the Soviet Union in terms of armor development and to a degree, aircraft. In response, NATO decided early on that the use of nuclear devices even before the Soviets had deployed or used their own would be necessary to defeat any Soviet thrust into Western Europe. Even with the addition of the Federal Republic of Germany (better known as West Germany) to the alliance structure in 1955 did little to shift this balance of power. The German lands would become an irradiated killing zone, in the hopes of stopping or even outright destroying the Soviet Union.

This unified nuclear policy though, ran into many issues. The West Germans naturally objected to their country being a free fire zone for nuclear weapons, though the strategic and tactical necessity of their use was enough of a fact that they tended to keep their objections somewhat subdued. The French however, would have none of it. As one of the three nuclear powers in NATO (the other two being the UK and USA) they demanded far more influence on the alliance than they had been originally granted, and a modification of the ‘Special Relationship’ of the Anglo-American alliance to include the French. French President Charles De Gaulle’s demands eventually caused a fracture within the alliance structure, with all non-French NATO troops having to leave French territory, French nuclear doctrine no longer aligning with NATO’s, and the French slowly withdrawing from the command structure of the alliance alongside demanding to be able to make a separate peace with the now formed Warsaw Pact and Soviet Union. While still a NATO member, and secretly having agreed to rejoin the command structure in case of conflict with the Warsaw Pact, this apparent withdrawal from NATO affairs would have dire ramifications decades down the line.

By 1986, NATO consisted of sixteen nations with the addition of Spain as a signatory in 1982, possessed a considerable nuclear arsenal, a nearly unmatchable naval force, and had reached the point where they considered a Warsaw Pact offensive in Western Europe to be stoppable without the use of nuclear arms due to technological equivalence or superiority. Over five million men were actively serving in the military's of the various parties to the treaty. Economically, NATO was humming along quite nicely with few exceptions. On the other side of the Iron Curtain however, the situation was somewhat different.
 
Oh good, glad to see that this TL is still active and not dead like a couple out there.
School and a general feeling of "Oh god what have I gotten myself into" can contribute to that. Really, researching this is also one hell of a ride, because I'm trying to write this in the context of a sort of popular history book and not as some kind of scholarly text, and as such I'm not sure how deep I need to go on my research and the like. I've got another two pages or so on the pact written up, but I want to get a bit more of the sort of timeline I'm working on hashed out.
 
School and a general feeling of "Oh god what have I gotten myself into" can contribute to that. Really, researching this is also one hell of a ride, because I'm trying to write this in the context of a sort of popular history book and not as some kind of scholarly text, and as such I'm not sure how deep I need to go on my research and the like. I've got another two pages or so on the pact written up, but I want to get a bit more of the sort of timeline I'm working on hashed out.

I'm willing to bet research can be a bee-yotch, especially when it comes to buying certain items that are far more costly than they should be.
 
School and a general feeling of "Oh god what have I gotten myself into" can contribute to that. Really, researching this is also one hell of a ride, because I'm trying to write this in the context of a sort of popular history book and not as some kind of scholarly text, and as such I'm not sure how deep I need to go on my research and the like. I've got another two pages or so on the pact written up, but I want to get a bit more of the sort of timeline I'm working on hashed out.

Understatement. Feel free to reach out if you want to compare notes. Jimmy Green has a lot going on regarding the topic as well.
 
I'm willing to bet research can be a bee-yotch, especially when it comes to buying certain items that are far more costly than they should be.

I'm trying to do this for free, and this is something I am doing for fun. There's a limit to the amount of time and energy I want and have to spend on this.

Understatement. Feel free to reach out if you want to compare notes. Jimmy Green has a lot going on regarding the topic as well.

Duly noted. Piecing together what's been going on in a semi-logical fashion is difficult, especially in regards to making the escalation make sense, and trying to be original: Invading Iceland is a little bit crazy and done to death.
 
will others like latin America and africa as well as Iberia and the nordic countries get involve or is just an northern hemisphere thing with oceanian involved thanks to the commonwealth.
 

James G

Gone Fishin'
So looking through the forum (well, more skimming it) I haven't seen many 'things get hot in the 80's' threads recently, so I thought I'd throw my hat in the ring for at least a concept of a World War III that nearly goes full scale nuclear war towards the end.

Preface

While most would point to the start of World War III being April 12th, 1986 as tanks and men poured across the borders of Western Germany and Austria, the Cold War went hot a good month earlier, in the March 13th Black Sea Incident. The rationale for the decision to send two American warships into the black sea to patrol within waters claimed by the Soviets as part of their territory is still hotly debated between historians, veterans, and politicians to this day. There are several proponents who lay the blame entirely at the feet of the Americans, their Freedom of Transit operation being little more than a thin excuse to try and provoke the USSR into hostile action and allow NATO to be the defender in a conflict. Another theory leaves the blame in the hands of the negotiators and diplomats who were unable to reign in the political ambitions of various officials in both the Warsaw Pact and NATO, and even another throws the blame at the feet of the Soviet fleet for aggressively acting against ships that happened to be in international waters near the Crimean Peninsula. The generally accepted explanation of the incident however, is that it was merely the match that lit the powder keg that had been brewing for four decades as the world’s two Superpowers waged an ideological battle in every medium imaginable. Escalation into full scale conflict was inevitable despite the best efforts and intentions of all involved, especially with unrest building up in the Soviet puppet states formed in the aftermath of the Second World War. Responsibility for the following bloody struggle belongs to no-one.

Whatever the truth behind it, the great tragedy of the Black Sea Incident is how close the entire thing was to never going beyond sailors on both sides simply exchanging hostile glances. As the USS Yorktown and USS Carson sailed on, semi-shadowed by several Soviet border patrol vessels and the Ladny, a Soviet FFG that was in the area. An hour into the tense stare down between the two groups of ships, and six miles off the coast of the Crimea, someone blinked. A junior weapons officer aboard the Ladny conducted a routine check of readiness for the frigate’s Anti-Submarine Weapons, a cluster of SS-N-14 missiles. A one in a trillion malfunction cased his check to launch a pair of the weapons in the direction of the two US vessels, and with that bring the clock a second closer to midnight for the world.

The USS Yorktown, the closer of the US Navy vessels, launched a pair of Harpoon missiles in response to the apparent attack and targeting the Ladny, and unfortunately for the Soviet FFG, both of the missiles got through the attempted defensive countermeasures. The Ladny didn’t even have a chance to respond, the chaff blown out by the frigate rapidly consumed by the fireball it became. Few of the crew survived, the inferno consuming those not killed by the explosion itself. The two Soviet coastguard vessels then opened fire on the Americans, but lacking missile armament they caused very little damage as the two US ships rapidly exited the area.

Tensions that were already in trouble due to the cancellation of the Reykjavik Summit suddenly reached a fever pitch, the Soviet leadership calling for the removal of the commanders of the two ships along with reparations and the men standing trial. The Americans complied with the first of the requests, but staunchly refused to follow through with the others. Along the borders of Europe and across the Atlantic, men were called back into uniform, units prepared to mobilize, and strategies and tactics developed in a vacuum over four decades prepared to be tested. The stage was set for devastation on a scale not seen since the first half of the century.

It was the USS Caron, not the 'Carson'.
The Yorktown and the Caron were both involved in a similar incident in 1988 too.
 
I'll follow this - let me say under the circumstances the Navy might temporarily remove the skippers, however if they had irrefutable proof the Ladny launched first, which I assume they would, it would go against everything for the captains to even receive a letter of reprimand. Given the actual coming under fire, policy allows for self defense, and in fact had they not defended themselves they would have been punished. Even if the two missiles launched at them missed or were stopped by defensive means the ships had no way of knowing if more might come at any moment.
 
It was the USS Caron, not the 'Carson'.
The Yorktown and the Caron were both involved in a similar incident in 1988 too.
Ouch. Can't believe I didn't catch that. And yes, I noticed the second incident actually involved the ships colliding. I just picked the 1986 date because I feel the true balance of power isn't as in favor of NATO as it would be just two years later.

I'll follow this - let me say under the circumstances the Navy might temporarily remove the skippers, however if they had irrefutable proof the Ladny launched first, which I assume they would, it would go against everything for the captains to even receive a letter of reprimand. Given the actual coming under fire, policy allows for self defense, and in fact had they not defended themselves they would have been punished. Even if the two missiles launched at them missed or were stopped by defensive means the ships had no way of knowing if more might come at any moment.
Yeah, I was basically implying the removal was temporary, mainly until they could figure out what the hell had exactly happened, which I think is sort of standard operating procedure in an incident like this.
 

iddt3

Donor
Huh, didn't know that bit about France wanting in on the Special Relationship, that would make an interesting TL.

Separately, it was my understanding that the Soviet planning didn't distinguish between Nuclear and Non-Nuclear, and all assumed that the war would go Nuclear quickly, and therefore Nuclear weapon use was a core part of the warplan. Was that not the case by 1986?
 
You know, I wonder how would tank warfare progress in TTL's war? if anything I would imagine that when the anti-tank missiles hit, both sides would come up with various solutions to counter them.
 
Huh, didn't know that bit about France wanting in on the Special Relationship, that would make an interesting TL.

Separately, it was my understanding that the Soviet planning didn't distinguish between Nuclear and Non-Nuclear, and all assumed that the war would go Nuclear quickly, and therefore Nuclear weapon use was a core part of the warplan. Was that not the case by 1986?
As far as I know about Soviet tactical nuclear use, it was limited - and more of a response measure. It's amazing how most people consider nuclear doctrine in this case some kind of murder-suicide pact going on, when the reality is that the French, and the United States were both totally willing to launch first. Soviets, less so - and Britain as far as I know, was entirely deterrent based. Also, the Soviets somewhat correctly considered that the element of surprise and bypassing strong points could have as much of an effect as a nuclear strike. Plus there's chemical weapons which would probably be broken out before things went nuclear.

You know, I wonder how would tank warfare progress in TTL's war? if anything I would imagine that when the anti-tank missiles hit, both sides would come up with various solutions to counter them.
Everyone had some experience and idea of this from conflicts in Afghanistan and the (at this time ongoing) Iran-Iraq War and Arab-Israeli conflicts. ATGM's are nasty nasty weapons on the defensive.
 
Ch1. Continued

In the aftermath of the Second World War, the Soviet Union had perhaps suffered the most of any of the victorious powers. Millions of its citizens had died in the ‘Great Patriotic War’ and it had been Soviet forces who were the first to enter Berlin and took the city after vicious fighting. Most of Eastern Europe was occupied by Soviet forces, and the divisions of Germany between the victorious powers left the Soviets in control of the area around Berlin, if not in complete control of the city itself. In every nation that had been overrun by the Red Army during its push against the Third Reich, Soviet agents were setting up networks to eliminate counter-revolutionary elements and to install puppet communist regimes that were policed even more thoroughly than the Soviet Union.

Joseph Stalin was extremely paranoid about the potential of the Western Allies turning on him shortly after the war, and his actions sowed the seeds of the cold war as soon as Berlin started falling. As the Iron Curtain descended across Europe, nuclear weapons and the bombers to deliver them were present on both sides, but the real sticking point for the Soviet Union was the foundation of an alliance aimed at preventing them from further exporting the Worker’s Paradise. With their attempt to join NATO rebuffed in 1954, and the addition of West Germany to NATO in 1955 finally caused the Soviets to formalize the sort of control they had over their puppet states in military matters by creating their own version of NATO. The Treaty of Friendship, Co-operation, and Mutual Assistance, signed May 14th 1955 was on paper, a collective defense treaty similar to NATO and complemented an earlier economically based treaty that already existed between the Soviets and their puppets.

The Warsaw Pact was signed by each of the communist puppet states in Central and Eastern Europe at the time, with the founding members consisting of the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, the German Democratic Republic (better known as East Germany), Poland, Albania, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria. The Pact consisted of two major parts, political and military respectively, with each part having its own administrative structure in ruler selected from the member nations. In reality, the Soviet Union controlled the Warsaw Pact without exception – the Supreme Commander and Chief of Staff of the Warsaw Pact were both also the First Deputy Minister of Defense and First Deputy Chief of Staff of the Soviet Union respectively, and thus the military forces of the Warsaw Pact were under direct Soviet Control officially. It is important to note that unlike NATO, the Warsaw Pact would never expand outside its founding members.

Soviet grip on Eastern Europe had been exercised directly multiple times before the signing of the Warsaw pact, but now the collars were truly starting to snap shut. The first official military action by the Warsaw Pact was internal, as Soviet troops violently crushed the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and installed a new leader who would more readily bend the knee to Moscow. The Prague Spring of 1968 would also similarly be reacted to violently, and feature the use of the militaries of other Warsaw Pact nations to suppress. The Brezhnev Doctrine that retroactively justified the Soviet response was implemented soon after, and made it perfectly clear that to oppose the Soviets in regards to their policies regarding communism, socialism or the Warsaw Pact was considered an attack on the Pact itself. What little political freedom the Soviet satellite states still possessed was now even further limited.

Albania however, was able to flatly deny the Soviets, finally severing the military ties between them and the rest of the Pact shortly after the Prague Spring. This itself allows a good jumping off point to point out one of the key and often overlooked factors in pre-war strategic concerns for both NATO and the Warsaw Pact: The Sino-Soviet split. While into the early 1960s, at least on paper the People’s Republic of China was a friend if not an out and out ally of the Soviet Union, the reality was vastly different. Border tensions, the split over the future of communism in the 1950’s and the growing sense between the two nuclear powers that the other was more of a potential enemy than a current friend, as geopolitical realities started to set in. Influence over Vietnam and North Korea, both nations bordering China, were held more by the Soviets at this point in time then by the Chinese, and revolutionary movements in foreign countries often found themselves at odds over ideology and supported by either China or the Soviet Union. This struggle over the ideological leadership of the Communist movement worldwide would even stretch itself into Europe. Albania at least for a time, simply shifted its choice of patron and supporter to the other major communist power in the world, though even then this was short lived.

Now reduced to seven total member states and potentially surrounded on all sides by political enemies, the Warsaw Pact maneuvered through the time leading up to the outbreak of hostilities in 1986 rather cautiously, and for good reason. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan to prop up the communist government further increased tensions between China and the Soviet Union, and even caused some concern among other Warsaw Pact members. Internally, the state of the economies of the Warsaw Pact was starting to wear down and stagnate, leading to political unrest as well. Poland’s Solidarity movement was suppressed but still semi-active all the way up to the outbreak of hostilities, and Romania was slowly trying to gain a bit of distance between themselves and the Soviets. The minor efforts at reform within the Soviet Union by Gorbachev were facing resistance by party hardliners, and the March 16th incident was for many of them the final straw. Gorbachev would be forced out of power several days before the decision to go to war was made.

Overall though, while entering a period that likely would have resulted in the dissolving of the Warsaw Pact if the war had not in fact gone hot (some estimates put the dissolving of the Eastern Bloc as soon as the turn of the century, though more reasonable estimates put it around the late 2000’s or early 2010’s) the Warsaw Pact was by no means a weak or even lacking alliance. Around six and a half million service men were ready and under arms across the Pact, and while the number balance at least in manpower favored the Warsaw Pact, it became more lopsided when examining other factors. In terms of main battle tanks, NATO was outnumbered by a ratio of roughly two to one in favor of the Pact, and this balance extended to artillery. Rough parity in anti-tank equipment and tactical aircraft still numerically favored the Soviets and their puppet states, and while their surface navy was lacking compared to NATO, the submarine forces of the Soviet Union easily outnumbered those of the Western allies.

With the rough balance of power and situations established, it is much easier to get an idea of what other factors were in play at least militarily. After all, not all forces of either side were deployed in respect to the European theater. The two superpowers both had global obligations and deployments tying up a variety of forces. Several divisions were slated by the United States to locations in Central America, Japan, and Korea, along with naval forces and aircraft, while similarly the USSR had over one hundred thousand crack troops stationed in Afghanistan, and a large garrison stationed on the Chinese border. This also isn’t including such statistics as potential conscript forces or even arguably a chunk of each side’s reservist forces. For that matter, the comparison between NATO and Warsaw Pact in the terms of armor numbers was tilted, with much of the stockpiles of Pact tanks consisting of outdated equipment. It is also in this environment that we necessarily need to evaluate the general plans of both sides towards the onset of war.
 
Something tells me that this conflict doesn't get nuclear at all given the mentioning of people speculating how the Warsaw pact countries would have survived if this war haven't happened.
 
Good riddance I say, the less commie states around the better, communism is hipster trash.

I know, you hardly will find someone as anti communism as I here in the forum, but still muh DDR is gone, no moar epic military marshes :'(


(I'm being ironic, ok? I know DDR was a hellhole)
 
I know, you hardly will find someone as anti communism as I here in the forum, but still muh DDR is gone, no moar epic military marshes :'(


(I'm being ironic, ok? I know DDR was a hellhole)

So do I and I see what you mean, heck I'll admit that Border guard song is awesome.
 
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