As a somebody forced to read Dickens at school I would welcome being obliterated during an english literature class. Not finishing a Pratchett though, horror!
Protect & Survive Miami: End of Watch
- Thread starter wolverinethad
- Start date
I find I have more tolerance for Our Chuck than I did when I was a kid.
Was force fed the Brontes and Dickens in my teens, made an enduring apathy for them, however was exposed to a certain Eric Blair, Animal Farm and 1984 made me think in very different way.
I still have the copy of Nineteen Eighty-Four that I got in high school. I couldn't begin to guess how many times I've re-read it.
One consideration is that evacuation of leadership risks triggering a pre-emptive strike once the opposition notices it - it's a clear indication that you are anticipating nuclear escalation, and possibly about to commit to it.
Or the last chapter of Animal Farm, meet the new boss, same as the old boss... A socialist but a realist, very unique writer.
I have a very ambivalent relationship to the P&S franchise; quite a few good story threads build on its premises, but in my judgement the root storyline, that of P&S itself, is itself seriously flawed. I don't think its projection of events especially in terms of what gets targeted and what doesn't is particularly well reasoned out. Where I seriously parted ways, and stopped reading the original TL, is the part where
The most relevant "flaw" in the root TL if we don't regard it as the last word in 1980s WWIII realism (as I don't) is the fundamental premise in the title "Protect and Survive." Given that the Third World War is certain to occur, as much civil defense as possible is a good thing, but the basic focus of the TL is that actually we should stop being so apocalyptic about WWIII, that civilization and society will persist. I think this biased the author into an unrealistic estimate as to how much and how well people would survive. It may be a salutary counterweight to ones that don't bother to go past pushing the Button, ringing down the stage with Porky Pig saying "Th-h-th-h-thi-that's All Folks!" or as someone here says, Bender with a "We're Boned!" (Matt Groening, the creator of Bender, might or might not have the character of proto-Bender live in his mind at this time from his childhood, but he was earning bread and butter drawing Life in Hell--Bender then is anachronistic unfortunately). Groening, along with probably me, is doomed to a short and Hellish fate indeed in these TLs since we were in Los Angeles. Conceivably we might separately take steps to get the heck out, but I have no idea where I might have gone and whom I might have lived with--maybe an uncle in New Mexico but probably not. Matt Groening might have found it possible to go to his home state of Washington or of course relocated to some sticks refuge unlikely to be targeted.
Anyway, if we take the premise seriously that a strong civil defense culture could have saved a lot more of civilization (given the success the original root TL attributes to the half-assed, last minute "program" promoted by the British Government, one assumes another society devoting really substantial resources to shelter and stockpiling resources for recovery could make out really well in the postwar world.
What this suggests to me is that if post-apocalyptic recovery is something one seriously plans for, the Soviet Bloc would have something of an advantage. It would be more possible for them to divert large amounts of resources enabling only a handpicked minority to survive and relatively "prosper." Consider the infamous shelter mania of Enver Hoxha, dictator of Albania. In the P&S context we have to give the man credit for undertakings that might indeed raise the number of surviving Albanians. To be sure given the general blighting of both cropland and the industrial infrastructure making it more productive, beyond a certain point the more survivors you have the more desperate civil war over the limited food supplies remaining, but if Albanians have survived and say Yugoslavs or Greeks have not, presumably the surviving nation expands out of its prewar borders using salvaged military kit and conquers and plunders its neighbors. In this context surviving manpower is quite useful; it is quite possible the authoritarian Communist state structure survives, maybe Hoxha himself is in a position to direct things.
In the Western context of course private parties have been free to stockpile and build shelters, but the staggering cost would tend to minimize these efforts, which are dead losses assuming the dreaded war does not ever happen, whereas survival without the minions of underclass employees someone rich enough to eat the cost of a serious shelter, particularly one that can survive nearby blasts people who reside in "mover and shaker" neighborhoods that would be targeted basically for the very reason that the rich and powerful do congregate there can expect to plague the most upscale residences, rely on in normal pre-war life to work for them so they can focus on the really profitable roles they focus on, will be a misery to most of these glitterati. Only a program that aims at trying to preserve the lives of all citizens, at least at say 90 pr 80 percent of them, will command popular political support and leverage the massive investment required to offer those prospects. Realistically, the majority of people cannot run far enough on the short notice a war crisis would give them to escape the blasts; like the minority rich enough to afford personal shelters, they have to ride out the blast where they normally live and work, not by accident in major target zones, and then either figure out how to feed themselves in a massively contaminated as well as devastated, infrastructure-free zone or migrate to the few relatively undamaged regions-which, if the entire population or anyway the vast majority of it can survive the initial attack, will be massively overburdened.
The fact is, the USA or even a western European nation might in a meaningful sense survive a 1980s peak arms war, provided the majority of the population is stoically prepared to be collectively and universally taxed for bastions and shelters that realistically can only enable survival of a minority. Drilling the general public in preparedness and plans for post-strike recovery can increase both the surviving population and the resources they have to survive after the fact--especially if an established form of government prevails that people generally obey--such a government can requisition and salvage resources that in a purely private, self-propelled situation would be contested as "looting" by rival gangs each keen to appropriate as much as possible for themselves. But unless the state can afford a massive complex of blast-resistant, well stocked shelters and post-exchange strategies to at least feed the survivors, the survivors will be in essentially two classes--those who either could afford private, self-made shelters, or were slotted into the limited supply of urban shelter spaces based on their desirability to the post-war regime set up by the government system, versus others who manage to muddle through on improvised shelters and recovery. Quite naturally people in the latter category are going to resent the privilege of those favored, as a general rule--it may be that postwar the reality is they have to just suck it in and be grateful the organized sheltered group might have use of their services and thus might gradually extend partial or eventually complete inclusion to them, when they can afford it, and be grateful they managed to live at all. But the guilt involved in the privileged reserving their own places at general expense of the majority probably will greatly inflame and exacerbate the persistence of social stigmas based on whether one was of the chosen elite or one of the catch as catch can survivors. Obviously private parties capable of deciding to develop shelter for themselves must either compound their costs with elaborate preparations for post-exchange self defense or else integrate their resources with a government coordinated plan that will amount to a massive tax on self-sheltering by the rich. Purely private, wildcat shelter complexes are perfectly legal if economically dubious in the pre-war world, but suspect and dangerous to government order in the post-exchange one--the state authorities will want to have massive military resources at their command to awe the private survivalists into cooperation and compliance, the truly rich might thus build ten or twenty times the shelter they need for themselves in order to provide places for their private employees chosen as survivalist assets to defend their base and at least deter the government from high handed actions and force negotiations.
All of this is to say, the cost of protecting large percentages of the population for survival would be terribly high; more moderate investments in keeping a core of the population going would have to be either left entirely to the private sector, or buried as hopefully unnoticed line items in much larger still government budgets. If a western nation were to invest heavily in survivalist training for its citizens--say, making this a regular course in high school--then the unruly mobs of a post-exchange situation would be all the worse, as everyone is savvy to what helps them survive the massive destruction of the infrastructure they normally rely on, and thus more liable to fight over it--including appropriating government and private shelters they neither qualified for nor could afford privately before the war.
Under these circumstances, Western governments including the USA adopted a largely fatalist attitude, saving considerable drag on the economy by failing to invest to any serious degree in a shelter and survivable infrastructure for the average citizen. For a brief period, a shelter mania did exist but it was given up, apparently anyway, as futile--a paranoid person might imagine that the very rich have managed to build some comprehensive shelters on the sly, without anyone in the larger public noticing, but this seems pretty much impossible to me. We are all hostages to Mutual Assured Destruction. We do have some shelters for very high ranking government officials and presumably the military has not let on the full extent of shelter they can provide some handpicked soldiers and sailors--but this is presumably good for only a small fraction of the uniformed personnel, never mind their dependents too.
But in the Leninist "Communist" nations, including the Soviet bloc but also nonaligned ones like Albania, society is more regimented. It would be possible for the collective wealth of the nations to be lavished on effective shelters and stockpiles for a relative few; it would be possible for citizens, perhaps via universal service of a stint in the army, to be trained systematically in the rudiments of "Protect and survive" methods. Given the decades the Hoxha regime had before 1984, for instance, it is possible a shelter program initially designed to merely give the appearance of general survival, but really intended to shelter only a select few, might gradually be expanded until the general population does have a good chance at riding out a heavy nuclear plastering, then being kept alive for long enough to be useful seizing more assets from hapless neighbors to be recruited as the Albanian regime sees fit, driven off or killed outright to make way. In addition to Army training, the regime has Party youth groups who could form the backbone of a regional grassroots presence, and of course each major enterprise can be equipped with its own shelters for management and selected shift workers, and maybe some essential equipment can be replicated in sheltered workspaces.
To sum up, if the P&S premise that by paying attention to some survival tips large numbers of Britons (and other Westerners) could survive and carry on is reasonable, then by that same token a more limited diversion of resources in the Soviet bloc ought to have "hardened" Eastern Bloc societies surviving about equally well.
Instead the TL assumes that in the Exchange, the Eastern bloc collapses completely, but the Western bloc has islands of stability--such as the Florida emerging here--which serve as nuclei of reconstruction. While I can accept that Soviet rule in the Eastern European satellite states was based on the Red Army retaining the upper hand, and this would fail in the post-exchange so that the Soviets would regret any hardening of their serf subordinate nations (and therefore not encourage it) in the USSR itself, or in autonomous states like Albania or Yugoslavia, serious efforts along these lines should have enabled stable and mutually cooperative nuclei of Soviet society to survive and persist after the Exchange in Russia itself. Therefore they might in turn leverage their satellites into a limited and very centrally controlled shelter program for anticipated Red Army and other loyal Soviet presences in country, along with as much of the loyal satellite Party apparatus as are deemed such, and a controllable penumbra of local citizens, presumably also selected for demonstrated and probable future loyalty--which turns the Eastern bloc nations from being wide moats of utter desolation to a fortified trench system of defenses around the Soviet Motherland, with more or less continuous if limited communications coordinating the collective defense.
Thus the more likely outcome of a "Protect and Survive Exchange" I would think would be the atomization of the USA into very few bastions of dubious capability, the mere survival but practical irrelevance of a surviving Federal regime and very weak and scattered efforts of state governments and local warlords to build islands of organization. Much of this will be built around surviving military groups, which gives some hope they will cooperate with each other and with central Federal coordination--as much as they judge their margin of survival allows cooperation and sharing anyway.
But in the Soviet bloc, a much more elaborate shelter infrastructure and the pre-war stratification already in place continues. The Soviet bloc might be militarily depleted, its subs and other ships sunk, its aircraft nearly all shot down, its tanks blown to bits---but with a larger population density and more systematic carry over of skills and facilities, and more balanced skill set preserved, neither can the equally decimated Western nations come in to overthrow them as failed states, nor will the example of Western wealth exist to subvert the command economy any longer.
It might almost seem that the Soviets win the nuclear war, and I think maybe if survival seemed like a realistic option to both sides, in an ATL with heavy Civil Defense investment on both sides, that might be the outcome--not in say 1963 where the Soviets just could not inflict anything like the level of destruction on America they would suffer themselves, but some 5 years later when their ICBM stocks would be sufficient to bring comparable destruction on CONUS, at that point the Western nations would have to swallow a massive economic cost to enable a combined shelter and reconstruction investment to match Soviet bloc capabilities, and as I tried to show, I think a system enabling partial survival is politically impossible whereas one allowing near universal survival is economically and fiscally impossible.
Thus the Soviet bloc would be presented with a perverse incentive--if they go to war, the majority of their own people die and the survivors have a harsh and difficult life with little hope of rapid improvement--but they can be orders of magnitude better off than their Western counterparts, unless the latter either near-bankrupt themselves building super-shelter complexes or impose some sort of massive political strain in the form of building a partial one for a select few.
The basic incentive is, don't go to nuclear war. But if P&S is a realistic thing, then my expectation would be that the Soviet bloc does better if it does happen.
The British bunker government (in the Chanticleer shelter bastion) orders a surviving RN Polaris sub to nuke Buenos Aires. They did this for Reasons (having as one might guess to do with their opportunistic seizure of the Falklands in the wake of the general war) but it seemed to me they had realistic alternatives of at least using the nukes as a threat for bargaining for the outcome they desired (total withdrawal of all Argentinian occupation and acknowledgement of the British claim once and for all) without killing any more cities--an ultimatum threatening to destroy the capital would be a different thing from what the author figured Her Majesty's Government would order. Long before this point a number of things grated on me; it was from my point of view fundamentally an exercise in "there, now, see, nuclear war is not so unthinkable, and look, we beat the bad guys!" The TL showed a lot of horror, but seeing the author veer in a direction of might makes right I stopped giving them credit for good intentions which put a lot of what might look like strengths and virtues of the TL in quite a different light.
The most relevant "flaw" in the root TL if we don't regard it as the last word in 1980s WWIII realism (as I don't) is the fundamental premise in the title "Protect and Survive." Given that the Third World War is certain to occur, as much civil defense as possible is a good thing, but the basic focus of the TL is that actually we should stop being so apocalyptic about WWIII, that civilization and society will persist. I think this biased the author into an unrealistic estimate as to how much and how well people would survive. It may be a salutary counterweight to ones that don't bother to go past pushing the Button, ringing down the stage with Porky Pig saying "Th-h-th-h-thi-that's All Folks!" or as someone here says, Bender with a "We're Boned!" (Matt Groening, the creator of Bender, might or might not have the character of proto-Bender live in his mind at this time from his childhood, but he was earning bread and butter drawing Life in Hell--Bender then is anachronistic unfortunately). Groening, along with probably me, is doomed to a short and Hellish fate indeed in these TLs since we were in Los Angeles. Conceivably we might separately take steps to get the heck out, but I have no idea where I might have gone and whom I might have lived with--maybe an uncle in New Mexico but probably not. Matt Groening might have found it possible to go to his home state of Washington or of course relocated to some sticks refuge unlikely to be targeted.
Anyway, if we take the premise seriously that a strong civil defense culture could have saved a lot more of civilization (given the success the original root TL attributes to the half-assed, last minute "program" promoted by the British Government, one assumes another society devoting really substantial resources to shelter and stockpiling resources for recovery could make out really well in the postwar world.
What this suggests to me is that if post-apocalyptic recovery is something one seriously plans for, the Soviet Bloc would have something of an advantage. It would be more possible for them to divert large amounts of resources enabling only a handpicked minority to survive and relatively "prosper." Consider the infamous shelter mania of Enver Hoxha, dictator of Albania. In the P&S context we have to give the man credit for undertakings that might indeed raise the number of surviving Albanians. To be sure given the general blighting of both cropland and the industrial infrastructure making it more productive, beyond a certain point the more survivors you have the more desperate civil war over the limited food supplies remaining, but if Albanians have survived and say Yugoslavs or Greeks have not, presumably the surviving nation expands out of its prewar borders using salvaged military kit and conquers and plunders its neighbors. In this context surviving manpower is quite useful; it is quite possible the authoritarian Communist state structure survives, maybe Hoxha himself is in a position to direct things.
In the Western context of course private parties have been free to stockpile and build shelters, but the staggering cost would tend to minimize these efforts, which are dead losses assuming the dreaded war does not ever happen, whereas survival without the minions of underclass employees someone rich enough to eat the cost of a serious shelter, particularly one that can survive nearby blasts people who reside in "mover and shaker" neighborhoods that would be targeted basically for the very reason that the rich and powerful do congregate there can expect to plague the most upscale residences, rely on in normal pre-war life to work for them so they can focus on the really profitable roles they focus on, will be a misery to most of these glitterati. Only a program that aims at trying to preserve the lives of all citizens, at least at say 90 pr 80 percent of them, will command popular political support and leverage the massive investment required to offer those prospects. Realistically, the majority of people cannot run far enough on the short notice a war crisis would give them to escape the blasts; like the minority rich enough to afford personal shelters, they have to ride out the blast where they normally live and work, not by accident in major target zones, and then either figure out how to feed themselves in a massively contaminated as well as devastated, infrastructure-free zone or migrate to the few relatively undamaged regions-which, if the entire population or anyway the vast majority of it can survive the initial attack, will be massively overburdened.
The fact is, the USA or even a western European nation might in a meaningful sense survive a 1980s peak arms war, provided the majority of the population is stoically prepared to be collectively and universally taxed for bastions and shelters that realistically can only enable survival of a minority. Drilling the general public in preparedness and plans for post-strike recovery can increase both the surviving population and the resources they have to survive after the fact--especially if an established form of government prevails that people generally obey--such a government can requisition and salvage resources that in a purely private, self-propelled situation would be contested as "looting" by rival gangs each keen to appropriate as much as possible for themselves. But unless the state can afford a massive complex of blast-resistant, well stocked shelters and post-exchange strategies to at least feed the survivors, the survivors will be in essentially two classes--those who either could afford private, self-made shelters, or were slotted into the limited supply of urban shelter spaces based on their desirability to the post-war regime set up by the government system, versus others who manage to muddle through on improvised shelters and recovery. Quite naturally people in the latter category are going to resent the privilege of those favored, as a general rule--it may be that postwar the reality is they have to just suck it in and be grateful the organized sheltered group might have use of their services and thus might gradually extend partial or eventually complete inclusion to them, when they can afford it, and be grateful they managed to live at all. But the guilt involved in the privileged reserving their own places at general expense of the majority probably will greatly inflame and exacerbate the persistence of social stigmas based on whether one was of the chosen elite or one of the catch as catch can survivors. Obviously private parties capable of deciding to develop shelter for themselves must either compound their costs with elaborate preparations for post-exchange self defense or else integrate their resources with a government coordinated plan that will amount to a massive tax on self-sheltering by the rich. Purely private, wildcat shelter complexes are perfectly legal if economically dubious in the pre-war world, but suspect and dangerous to government order in the post-exchange one--the state authorities will want to have massive military resources at their command to awe the private survivalists into cooperation and compliance, the truly rich might thus build ten or twenty times the shelter they need for themselves in order to provide places for their private employees chosen as survivalist assets to defend their base and at least deter the government from high handed actions and force negotiations.
All of this is to say, the cost of protecting large percentages of the population for survival would be terribly high; more moderate investments in keeping a core of the population going would have to be either left entirely to the private sector, or buried as hopefully unnoticed line items in much larger still government budgets. If a western nation were to invest heavily in survivalist training for its citizens--say, making this a regular course in high school--then the unruly mobs of a post-exchange situation would be all the worse, as everyone is savvy to what helps them survive the massive destruction of the infrastructure they normally rely on, and thus more liable to fight over it--including appropriating government and private shelters they neither qualified for nor could afford privately before the war.
Under these circumstances, Western governments including the USA adopted a largely fatalist attitude, saving considerable drag on the economy by failing to invest to any serious degree in a shelter and survivable infrastructure for the average citizen. For a brief period, a shelter mania did exist but it was given up, apparently anyway, as futile--a paranoid person might imagine that the very rich have managed to build some comprehensive shelters on the sly, without anyone in the larger public noticing, but this seems pretty much impossible to me. We are all hostages to Mutual Assured Destruction. We do have some shelters for very high ranking government officials and presumably the military has not let on the full extent of shelter they can provide some handpicked soldiers and sailors--but this is presumably good for only a small fraction of the uniformed personnel, never mind their dependents too.
But in the Leninist "Communist" nations, including the Soviet bloc but also nonaligned ones like Albania, society is more regimented. It would be possible for the collective wealth of the nations to be lavished on effective shelters and stockpiles for a relative few; it would be possible for citizens, perhaps via universal service of a stint in the army, to be trained systematically in the rudiments of "Protect and survive" methods. Given the decades the Hoxha regime had before 1984, for instance, it is possible a shelter program initially designed to merely give the appearance of general survival, but really intended to shelter only a select few, might gradually be expanded until the general population does have a good chance at riding out a heavy nuclear plastering, then being kept alive for long enough to be useful seizing more assets from hapless neighbors to be recruited as the Albanian regime sees fit, driven off or killed outright to make way. In addition to Army training, the regime has Party youth groups who could form the backbone of a regional grassroots presence, and of course each major enterprise can be equipped with its own shelters for management and selected shift workers, and maybe some essential equipment can be replicated in sheltered workspaces.
To sum up, if the P&S premise that by paying attention to some survival tips large numbers of Britons (and other Westerners) could survive and carry on is reasonable, then by that same token a more limited diversion of resources in the Soviet bloc ought to have "hardened" Eastern Bloc societies surviving about equally well.
Instead the TL assumes that in the Exchange, the Eastern bloc collapses completely, but the Western bloc has islands of stability--such as the Florida emerging here--which serve as nuclei of reconstruction. While I can accept that Soviet rule in the Eastern European satellite states was based on the Red Army retaining the upper hand, and this would fail in the post-exchange so that the Soviets would regret any hardening of their serf subordinate nations (and therefore not encourage it) in the USSR itself, or in autonomous states like Albania or Yugoslavia, serious efforts along these lines should have enabled stable and mutually cooperative nuclei of Soviet society to survive and persist after the Exchange in Russia itself. Therefore they might in turn leverage their satellites into a limited and very centrally controlled shelter program for anticipated Red Army and other loyal Soviet presences in country, along with as much of the loyal satellite Party apparatus as are deemed such, and a controllable penumbra of local citizens, presumably also selected for demonstrated and probable future loyalty--which turns the Eastern bloc nations from being wide moats of utter desolation to a fortified trench system of defenses around the Soviet Motherland, with more or less continuous if limited communications coordinating the collective defense.
Thus the more likely outcome of a "Protect and Survive Exchange" I would think would be the atomization of the USA into very few bastions of dubious capability, the mere survival but practical irrelevance of a surviving Federal regime and very weak and scattered efforts of state governments and local warlords to build islands of organization. Much of this will be built around surviving military groups, which gives some hope they will cooperate with each other and with central Federal coordination--as much as they judge their margin of survival allows cooperation and sharing anyway.
But in the Soviet bloc, a much more elaborate shelter infrastructure and the pre-war stratification already in place continues. The Soviet bloc might be militarily depleted, its subs and other ships sunk, its aircraft nearly all shot down, its tanks blown to bits---but with a larger population density and more systematic carry over of skills and facilities, and more balanced skill set preserved, neither can the equally decimated Western nations come in to overthrow them as failed states, nor will the example of Western wealth exist to subvert the command economy any longer.
It might almost seem that the Soviets win the nuclear war, and I think maybe if survival seemed like a realistic option to both sides, in an ATL with heavy Civil Defense investment on both sides, that might be the outcome--not in say 1963 where the Soviets just could not inflict anything like the level of destruction on America they would suffer themselves, but some 5 years later when their ICBM stocks would be sufficient to bring comparable destruction on CONUS, at that point the Western nations would have to swallow a massive economic cost to enable a combined shelter and reconstruction investment to match Soviet bloc capabilities, and as I tried to show, I think a system enabling partial survival is politically impossible whereas one allowing near universal survival is economically and fiscally impossible.
Thus the Soviet bloc would be presented with a perverse incentive--if they go to war, the majority of their own people die and the survivors have a harsh and difficult life with little hope of rapid improvement--but they can be orders of magnitude better off than their Western counterparts, unless the latter either near-bankrupt themselves building super-shelter complexes or impose some sort of massive political strain in the form of building a partial one for a select few.
The basic incentive is, don't go to nuclear war. But if P&S is a realistic thing, then my expectation would be that the Soviet bloc does better if it does happen.
In short: agree on Buenos Aires being a Bridge too far (but hey, Willie Whitelaw was the "short, sharp shock" guy), but disagree on this point. A heavily-centralised state and a mess of rather accurate NATO warheads don't make for a viable long-term survival plan. I don't think there's nothing east of the Munich Pocket, more that the P&Sverse has yet to fill those blanks.
As might be expected, I have some thoughts here.
@Shevek23, it's important to note that there is a substantive difference between "targeted" and "hit." I don't think the list of known strikes is remotely close to what happened, in fact, I'd argue it's why so many of us have worked to fill in the gaps. In a nuclear war, communications will be terribly fragmented, what is known to have been hit came from a teleprinter readout in a B-52 that crashed and the rudimentary information collected by the "Caesar" of Rome (Interior Secretary Bill Clark). That's a minor portion of what actually happened. It's not that its projection of events is unrealistic, it's just incomplete, like so much of everything in the scenario. Secondly, to say the Soviets would do better ignores a few facts in play:
- Chinese, American, British, and French missiles/bombs would all land on the Soviet Union.
- The Soviets had a massive target list to go after, spanning far more nations. One nation dividing its warheads over far more targets than four nations primarily focused on one target.
- The balance between strategic and tactical missiles.
- Post-Cold War research showed up to 30% of Soviet missiles would fail due to maintenance issues.
- Soviet structure was focused so much on urban areas, especially with all of their mania for industrialization, that targeting those cities would yield great results.
- Also of note is that the U.S. still had the Titan-II in its inventory at the time. Those were 8 MT "city-busters" that would just mean instant destruction of cities, where shelters wouldn't do a thing.
- Finally, it's important to remember that far more of the Soviet ICBM inventory was liquid-fueled, including the SS-18's which made up the majority of it. Liquid fueled missiles were much harder to maintenance and couldn't be launched as quickly, even under first-strike conditions.
As to the Buenos Aires strike, I get it. I get it for these reasons: First, communications are going to be next to nil. They barely know about what's happened in nearby nations, how the hell are they supposed to communicate with Buenos Aires? Secondly, this is 1984. If someone makes a move on the Falklands, then Gibraltar, Hong Kong, and other possessions become targets. Pandora's Box was well and truly opened, and maybe it's an overreaction, but maybe it isn't, either. The worst has already happened. Hitting Argentina is nothing more than an exclamation point now. Some nations will see Britain as a pariah, others will be (to Corsham's pleasure) scared shitless, and happy to cooperate.
That still isn't as bad as the hospital scene from that movie.
*shudders*. I'm so glad that I was born 5 years after the USSR fell. Threads makes "The Day After" look like peanuts.
Being 3 years old during this TL is a blessing for alt me, in that I have NO idea how bad it is, really. As I got older, and read up about 1983, I can't imagine how messed up I would've been if I were older at the time.
That's why I tried to mention the Far East Republic in my updates on Siberia. I figured that smaller settlements like Magadan would probably survive the immediate strikes, as NATO commanders wouldn't waste valuable warheads on targets under 50K residents. Those smaller Siberian cities, and probably more than a few smaller cities in Central Asia very likely survived the war and ended up as political centers.
My own headcanon scrubs the conveniently-timed junta and invasion force (democracy was restored by 1983, and it'd take a lot for the military to not only reassert control, but attempt a second round in the Falklands, which was only ever intended to distract the public from domestic issues - somehow, launching a coup and then reheating a lost war seems unlikely to poll well in Buenos Aires) and holds that the RFA vessel was fired on by an overeager Argentine Navy vessel - the destruction of Buenos Aires on a misunderstanding which turned out to be nothing seems to gel with the tone of TTL (also, "Tierra del Fuego" is bloody vague - where did the British bomb? Especially weird given that there are few major ports there)
All we really know of what happened in the South Atlantic was that an RFA was fired on and badly damaged by an ARA vessel. The British cabinet under immense pressure and with incomplete information (e.g. there was no comms with the FI garrison to confirm one way or another) massively over-reacted under the assumption that Argentina was attacking the FI and the only way they felt they could react was to use a remaining Polaris missile.
I also liked the EAN in the last chapter being based off the WGN EAN on YouTube, wolverinethad; plus, the last speech of Chancellor and Brokaw being cut off by the EAS is realistic, too...
Just waiting for the next chapter, where the Florida locations (and, to some extent, areas in some areas of the country) hit will be hopefully revealed...
The chances of Pensacola NAS being the base where the Operation Vulcan survivors arrive at are high (especially since Key West and Corpus Christi (1) NAS are confirmed as gone)...
(1) Yeah, I lived in Corpus as a two-year-old with my parents (who divorced later that year), so I'm dead, unless my mom and me went up to my maternal grandparents' place in Ohio.
Just waiting for the next chapter, where the Florida locations (and, to some extent, areas in some areas of the country) hit will be hopefully revealed...
The chances of Pensacola NAS being the base where the Operation Vulcan survivors arrive at are high (especially since Key West and Corpus Christi (1) NAS are confirmed as gone)...
(1) Yeah, I lived in Corpus as a two-year-old with my parents (who divorced later that year), so I'm dead, unless my mom and me went up to my maternal grandparents' place in Ohio.
That's a reasonable point, though it's worth noting that ITTL, the Russians didn't seem particularly worried about an American first strike when they evacuated Moscow and put senior leadership in a bunker (I can't find a reference to when Ogarkov was evacuated, but in Land of Flatwater, HUMINT firmed up where Ogarkov was on the 20th, so he was in the bunker at least 24 hours before the exchange, and likely earlier than that).
Meanwhile, I'm really starting to wonder about whether the timing of Reagan's evacuation is even possible. According to the timeline, he evacuated from the White House and authorized the strategic release at the same time that the Soviets launched their strategic arsenal — 12:53 p.m. EST. The timeline also has Washington as "confirmed destroyed" in an EBS message in Nebraska at 1:05. Even if we assume that Reagan was already at Andrews at 12:53 and not en route — the chapter where this takes place leaves that vague — but realistically, what are the chances that he can be in the air and out of D.C.'s destruction zone in 12 minutes? If it were a BOOB attack, then it is what it is (and a successful escape is actually more likely since Soviet subs wouldn't be on war footing, meaning D.C.-bound missiles would take a little longer to get there). But with a lengthy buildup to war and then three days of conventional warfare, I'm surprised that he'd still be in such a vulnerable spot for so long. It seems like they'd get him to some sort of safety, either NEACP or a bunker, no later than the Eschwege detonation that morning.
(The Cuban Missile War provided an elegant solution by having Kennedy insist on staying at the White House in the face of incoming weapons because he felt that he failed the country by allowing war, so he would go down with the ship).
It's canon, so any discussion about the point is strictly theoretical, but it's been gnawing at me reading and rereading the timeline.
HMX-1, the Presidential helo squadron, drilled endlessly for this. In such circumstances, AF1 was in standby mode to ramp up as fast as possible. It is the only 747 capable of extreme takeoff procedures with a steep pitch. Now, with a war on, and airports closed, there's a couple of options that could conceivably have happened. The first is to station AF1 at National Airport, which would taken two minutes, literally, to reach by helicopter, and takeoff within two minutes afterwards. AF1 could be well clear of the blast by the time it happened. The second is to go through with Andrews, which is seven miles southeast of Penn. Ave. Longer flight time by a bit, but still within the window of reason, especially since a 1 MT airburst over DC would not touch Andrews. It would require at least a 3 MT airburst at optimal height for the thermal radiation ring to touch Andrews, at which point the plane would likely be at a height and distance to not be touched.
It's worth noting that Bill Clark's version of events in the Prospero substory of the P&S original should potentially be taken with a grain of salt. As Interior Secretary, he wasn't in the inner circle, even though he was a former National Security Advisor, and under any COG plan should've long ago left Washington (who's paying attention to the Interior Secretary during WWIII?). There may be embellishment on his part about being with Reagan at the fatal moment, and the shooting going on outside (he described darkness when it was noontime and the sun should've been shining, certainly he'd be able to see what was being shot at), so what Clark says versus the truth has a good degree of wiggle room, so to say.
In short, Reagan escapes, but with nukes going off everywhere (why is he going to NORAD HQ is my biggest unresolved question--when Reagan received a briefing there in 1979, he was told that the Soviets had a missile regiment trained on the place and that it wouldn't survive attack of that force, so why would President Reagan fly to a known target and not Mt. Weather, Raven Rock, or stay aloft for days, which AF1 plus the support tankers were designed to do?), he ends up going down and landing in Columbine (talk about ghostly echoes of death!).
James G
Gone Fishin'
I can't remember which president it was, and I'm not sure if the story is true, BUT wasn't there one president who was briefed straight after taking office about Marine One and emergency evacuation orders. He was told they would come in an instant so he said 'okay, what about now?'. And there were some problems with that.
Chapter 45
Chapter 45
February 21, 1984
1530 hours
Gainesville, Florida
It went without saying that the day had been the worst of Governor Bob Graham's life. He'd spent the past three hours in the basement as his state became a battlefield resembling that of Central Europe, and there was nothing to do but listen. General Ensslin had his own EC-121s up after Heidelberg, along with the Air Force's E-3s, and so had kept a running tally of known detonations. In many cases, the yields were approximated, as the Warning Stars were too far away to receive good data in that regard. Between the Warning Stars and the Sentries, the map posted on a rolling chalkboard in the basement had a number of concentric circles around known targets that were hit. Assumptions were being made as to what type of detonations had occurred and the size of them. 1 MT was the baseline for each detonation, and groundbursts were considered to be the majority of strikes, given how many targets involved air bases (targeters believed runways would be usable after an airburst, and so air bases were always fused for groundburst).
By 3:30, the all clear had been signaled, and people emerged from hallways, bathrooms, basements, and storage rooms around Gainesville to their normal spaces. Everyone had been warned to seal doorways and windows as a safety measure, and going outdoors was verboten for the time being. The Emergency Broadcast System had yielded to Florida Public Radio, who made its first broadcast at 3:30, updating those who could hear it to stay inside, keep all doors and windows sealed, and, if they were in certain areas, to stay in basements or interior rooms. The hotel housing the state government was not only sealed, but was running a slight overpressure in its HVAC system, ensuring its safety, despite no indications of fallout heading its way. Graham was now in the operations room with Ensslin, the civil defense director, and the AG. The map that Ensslin had been marking was now hung on a wall.
"Gentlemen, this is the situation as best as we can tell. The reports in the south of the state are based on CAP aircraft and an EC-121, all of whom are believed to have landed safely in Sarasota and Fort Myers. We have not been able to communicate with them since they've landed, though. The central part of the state got hammered, and that comes from the EC-121 I had based here, so that report has been received firsthand. Canaveral, Orlando, and Tampa-St. Pete are as dead as can be, and the fallout is going to be so heavy that our only hope of getting there is by water, and our only usable ports are on the east side of the state, which would send them right through that fallout. I'm afraid that until conditions in the air get better, we're not going to be able to talk to anyone south of The Villages. I have a colonel based out of the Guard armory in the southern half, and whenever those CAP aircraft lift off, we can talk to them, but regardless, we need to consider the southern half of the state off the grid for the next week, probably, maybe longer.
Moving along, up here, Jacksonville is gone, and supposedly, the river has busted through floodgates, probably after NAS Jacksonville ate a warhead. It was right on the river, and between the rain and that....it's going to kill a lot of people who might have lived otherwise. I've no idea about the coast on the east side, it appears Augustine and Daytona made it okay, save for potential fallout. Panama City is gone, and Eglin got multiple hits, probably had an ICBM aimed at it because it's so damned big. Not a word from Pensacola. If they got hit, we can write off the Panhandle completely, but I don't want to assume anything there. The last transmission indicated an air battle east and south of the city and the bases, so maybe they lucked out. If so, I hope they're under cover, I imagine a shitload of fallout is headed east from Barksdale, Mobile, and elsewhere. We will keep trying to raise them. Tallahassee was not hit, for whatever reason, we lucked out there, but the fallout headed that way is substantial. We will work to get more information, but right now, we're two states, and there's nothing we can do about the second other than to pray that they are safe. Along that line, we haven't heard from the Independence carrier group. If they're out there, they are probably buttoned up and trying to avoid fallout. It'd be great if they came around west into the Gulf, but for all I know, they're trying to find a safe place in the Caribbean somewhere. All those islands have cruise ship docks that they could park at, so to say.
Finally, we've had some communication with the Georgia government at Valdosta. They know that Atlanta, Savannah, Athens, and Augusta were hit. Maybe some other places, too, but their comms are worse than ours, since they waited to prepare. They do have patrols from their armory in full NBC gear ready to undertake patrols soon. That will be helpful, of course, and I plan to get our own patrols going as soon as it's safe. We've caught some shortwave broadcasts from overseas, small snatches, and it sounds like an awful lot of bystanders got whacked from what we can make out. Brazil, places in Africa, things of that sort. That's the situation right now."
Those receiving the briefing could be excused from the open-mouthed, fish-out-of-water gulping faces they had. What they saw in their state alone represented an immediate casualty count of over a million people, with likely another two million more dead from radiation and other effects by week's end. Three million corpses in a state with the population of 9.7 million meant a third of the state was dead, and God knows how many more from what would follow. The civil defense director raised his hand, like a child in school. "General, what about the Mount Dora bunker? Have we heard from them?" "We did, actually. They provided the information about Orlando via burst transmission. Fallout is extremely heavy in the area, so they are staying bunked in tight. We have thirty days for things to subside enough to rescue them, after that, unless they're stretching food stocks, people will start dying off. They packed for a month, and they have everything they need to keep an eye on things, but eventually we'll need to go get them. Whether the fallout readings allow it is a different story."
Graham nodded. It was such a late plan to put into place that he knew it'd be almost sacrificial, but maybe things would work out. "General, when can we start distributing supplies?"
"Governor, I would not recommend such an action until at least a week has passed. Just because the shooting has stopped doesn't mean it's over. Between us and the Soviets, we have somewhere in the neighborhood of 50,000 warheads. God knows not all of them were shot off at once, so we could face additional exchanges. So, yes, at least a week, probably two, before we consider it safe to go outside and get people working and pass out food," concluded the man in charge of Florida's military. "Wait, General, did you say there might be more exchanges of nukes?" That question came from the Attorney General. "Yes, sir, I did. There is no way of telling what was hit, what survived, how many weapons were used, who they were aimed at in totality. If the Reds decided to throw missiles at Brazil, Angola, and other random-ass places, they might have some remaining in missile subs or some silo we haven't found. We're goddamn lucky to be alive, because they easily could've decided to target every single population center over 50,000 people, but fratricide likely kicks in then, so they avoided it. As is, we're hurting pretty badly."
*****
Fort Myers, FL
1700 hours
"....the following areas are unsafe: south of Route 44, north of Route 70, Dade County, Broward County, the West Palm Beach metropolitan area, the Jacksonville metropolitan area, the Keys, and west of Route 71. It is 5 pm Eastern time. Fallout levels are high in many areas of the state. Do not go outside unless it is absolutely necessary, and if so, you must limit your time outside to less than five minutes. If you do, wear protective clothing and thoroughly wash yourself and your clothing before re-entering your shelter. We will broadcast on the hour, every hour. Conserve power and turn your radios off when we are not broadcasting. This is Florida Public Radio."
"Christ, sir, we're cut off," Klima said as he turned off the radio. Simmons cocked his head at Klima. "Son, just call me Ron. Rank doesn't matter, not right now. There was one good piece of news, though. Nothing got hit near us. At worst, we might have to deal with fallout, but it sounds like this corner got through. The question is, how long can we hold out?" "Well, us inside of this apartment are set for probably a month, tops. It won't be pretty, we'll probably go nuts within a week, but at least we'll be alive. Wonder if we have power?" Klima turned on a light, and surprisingly, it worked. He turned it right back off. "Well, don't know how long that'll last, but it's a small glimmer of hope, I suppose. I didn't even know there was a power plant in the area until I saw it when we flew in."
February 21, 1984
1530 hours
Gainesville, Florida
It went without saying that the day had been the worst of Governor Bob Graham's life. He'd spent the past three hours in the basement as his state became a battlefield resembling that of Central Europe, and there was nothing to do but listen. General Ensslin had his own EC-121s up after Heidelberg, along with the Air Force's E-3s, and so had kept a running tally of known detonations. In many cases, the yields were approximated, as the Warning Stars were too far away to receive good data in that regard. Between the Warning Stars and the Sentries, the map posted on a rolling chalkboard in the basement had a number of concentric circles around known targets that were hit. Assumptions were being made as to what type of detonations had occurred and the size of them. 1 MT was the baseline for each detonation, and groundbursts were considered to be the majority of strikes, given how many targets involved air bases (targeters believed runways would be usable after an airburst, and so air bases were always fused for groundburst).
By 3:30, the all clear had been signaled, and people emerged from hallways, bathrooms, basements, and storage rooms around Gainesville to their normal spaces. Everyone had been warned to seal doorways and windows as a safety measure, and going outdoors was verboten for the time being. The Emergency Broadcast System had yielded to Florida Public Radio, who made its first broadcast at 3:30, updating those who could hear it to stay inside, keep all doors and windows sealed, and, if they were in certain areas, to stay in basements or interior rooms. The hotel housing the state government was not only sealed, but was running a slight overpressure in its HVAC system, ensuring its safety, despite no indications of fallout heading its way. Graham was now in the operations room with Ensslin, the civil defense director, and the AG. The map that Ensslin had been marking was now hung on a wall.
"Gentlemen, this is the situation as best as we can tell. The reports in the south of the state are based on CAP aircraft and an EC-121, all of whom are believed to have landed safely in Sarasota and Fort Myers. We have not been able to communicate with them since they've landed, though. The central part of the state got hammered, and that comes from the EC-121 I had based here, so that report has been received firsthand. Canaveral, Orlando, and Tampa-St. Pete are as dead as can be, and the fallout is going to be so heavy that our only hope of getting there is by water, and our only usable ports are on the east side of the state, which would send them right through that fallout. I'm afraid that until conditions in the air get better, we're not going to be able to talk to anyone south of The Villages. I have a colonel based out of the Guard armory in the southern half, and whenever those CAP aircraft lift off, we can talk to them, but regardless, we need to consider the southern half of the state off the grid for the next week, probably, maybe longer.
Moving along, up here, Jacksonville is gone, and supposedly, the river has busted through floodgates, probably after NAS Jacksonville ate a warhead. It was right on the river, and between the rain and that....it's going to kill a lot of people who might have lived otherwise. I've no idea about the coast on the east side, it appears Augustine and Daytona made it okay, save for potential fallout. Panama City is gone, and Eglin got multiple hits, probably had an ICBM aimed at it because it's so damned big. Not a word from Pensacola. If they got hit, we can write off the Panhandle completely, but I don't want to assume anything there. The last transmission indicated an air battle east and south of the city and the bases, so maybe they lucked out. If so, I hope they're under cover, I imagine a shitload of fallout is headed east from Barksdale, Mobile, and elsewhere. We will keep trying to raise them. Tallahassee was not hit, for whatever reason, we lucked out there, but the fallout headed that way is substantial. We will work to get more information, but right now, we're two states, and there's nothing we can do about the second other than to pray that they are safe. Along that line, we haven't heard from the Independence carrier group. If they're out there, they are probably buttoned up and trying to avoid fallout. It'd be great if they came around west into the Gulf, but for all I know, they're trying to find a safe place in the Caribbean somewhere. All those islands have cruise ship docks that they could park at, so to say.
Finally, we've had some communication with the Georgia government at Valdosta. They know that Atlanta, Savannah, Athens, and Augusta were hit. Maybe some other places, too, but their comms are worse than ours, since they waited to prepare. They do have patrols from their armory in full NBC gear ready to undertake patrols soon. That will be helpful, of course, and I plan to get our own patrols going as soon as it's safe. We've caught some shortwave broadcasts from overseas, small snatches, and it sounds like an awful lot of bystanders got whacked from what we can make out. Brazil, places in Africa, things of that sort. That's the situation right now."
Those receiving the briefing could be excused from the open-mouthed, fish-out-of-water gulping faces they had. What they saw in their state alone represented an immediate casualty count of over a million people, with likely another two million more dead from radiation and other effects by week's end. Three million corpses in a state with the population of 9.7 million meant a third of the state was dead, and God knows how many more from what would follow. The civil defense director raised his hand, like a child in school. "General, what about the Mount Dora bunker? Have we heard from them?" "We did, actually. They provided the information about Orlando via burst transmission. Fallout is extremely heavy in the area, so they are staying bunked in tight. We have thirty days for things to subside enough to rescue them, after that, unless they're stretching food stocks, people will start dying off. They packed for a month, and they have everything they need to keep an eye on things, but eventually we'll need to go get them. Whether the fallout readings allow it is a different story."
Graham nodded. It was such a late plan to put into place that he knew it'd be almost sacrificial, but maybe things would work out. "General, when can we start distributing supplies?"
"Governor, I would not recommend such an action until at least a week has passed. Just because the shooting has stopped doesn't mean it's over. Between us and the Soviets, we have somewhere in the neighborhood of 50,000 warheads. God knows not all of them were shot off at once, so we could face additional exchanges. So, yes, at least a week, probably two, before we consider it safe to go outside and get people working and pass out food," concluded the man in charge of Florida's military. "Wait, General, did you say there might be more exchanges of nukes?" That question came from the Attorney General. "Yes, sir, I did. There is no way of telling what was hit, what survived, how many weapons were used, who they were aimed at in totality. If the Reds decided to throw missiles at Brazil, Angola, and other random-ass places, they might have some remaining in missile subs or some silo we haven't found. We're goddamn lucky to be alive, because they easily could've decided to target every single population center over 50,000 people, but fratricide likely kicks in then, so they avoided it. As is, we're hurting pretty badly."
*****
Fort Myers, FL
1700 hours
"....the following areas are unsafe: south of Route 44, north of Route 70, Dade County, Broward County, the West Palm Beach metropolitan area, the Jacksonville metropolitan area, the Keys, and west of Route 71. It is 5 pm Eastern time. Fallout levels are high in many areas of the state. Do not go outside unless it is absolutely necessary, and if so, you must limit your time outside to less than five minutes. If you do, wear protective clothing and thoroughly wash yourself and your clothing before re-entering your shelter. We will broadcast on the hour, every hour. Conserve power and turn your radios off when we are not broadcasting. This is Florida Public Radio."
"Christ, sir, we're cut off," Klima said as he turned off the radio. Simmons cocked his head at Klima. "Son, just call me Ron. Rank doesn't matter, not right now. There was one good piece of news, though. Nothing got hit near us. At worst, we might have to deal with fallout, but it sounds like this corner got through. The question is, how long can we hold out?" "Well, us inside of this apartment are set for probably a month, tops. It won't be pretty, we'll probably go nuts within a week, but at least we'll be alive. Wonder if we have power?" Klima turned on a light, and surprisingly, it worked. He turned it right back off. "Well, don't know how long that'll last, but it's a small glimmer of hope, I suppose. I didn't even know there was a power plant in the area until I saw it when we flew in."
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I would imagine the E4-B NEACP of the day was capable of quite a few takeoff and landing feats. That being said it certainly has never been tested under nuclear war conditions and perhaps an unknown problem sprung up and caused the plane to go down near Columbine, Colorado related to its close escape from DC. As to why the E4-B Air Force One was heading west, other P&S stories established a sort of western redoubt for the Federal Government and NCA in Walla Walla, Washington, which is then renamed Columbia. So its possible Reagan and company were heading there when the plane went down.