Seven Days to the River Rhine: the Third World War - a TL

So what happens to all the ground forces in Europe now? The navies will sail back to a safe port and the air forces will find somewhere to land or bail out to.

But the various armies will be operating out in the open with only tents, barns or their vehicles to shelter in. Those that haven't been shot, bombed or nuked will suffer badly from radiation laden winds once their individual NBC gear starts to wear out.
Would they hold the ceasefire line (assuming both sides got the message) or would they retreat to a safer location like a nearby town?
I can’t imagine there are very many left, especially organized units. I’d be shocked if there was much above the company, MAYBE battalion level in terms of units.
 

rndbabylon

Banned
So what happens to all the ground forces in Europe now? The navies will sail back to a safe port and the air forces will find somewhere to land or bail out to.

But the various armies will be operating out in the open with only tents, barns or their vehicles to shelter in. Those that haven't been shot, bombed or nuked will suffer badly from radiation laden winds once their individual NBC gear starts to wear out.
Would they hold the ceasefire line (assuming both sides got the message) or would they retreat to a safer location like a nearby town?
The surviving soldiers will most likely disband or become bandits imo, not much point in keeping things official any longer; what state is there left to be loyal to? Not much
 
I would imaginate that these few surviving units would become just some local armies which either try establish their own statelet or then just go fight some other groups. They are not getting orders and now for them it is clear that war is basically over and their nations mostly destroyed.
 
They were looking at the fact the nations that were against them were allied with the Soviets and would be expecting them to attack afterward.
Also nobody in the middle east will be getting new supplies from the West or East. Each rocket fired, each bomb dropped, will not be replaced. A pre emptive strike to offset the numrical advantage of the Arab states would be an option on the table. On the other hand, let the arab states know what your nucelar arsenal is. There is nobody left to tell you, that you can't use them.
 
I would imaginate that these few surviving units would become just some local armies which either try establish their own statelet or then just go fight some other groups. They are not getting orders and now for them it is clear that war is basically over and their nations mostly destroyed.
I disagree. People aren't instantly going to become Mad Maxers, and unit cohesion still exists. So most likely they all start pulling back to get into contact with other units and make their way to what's left of their homelands.
 
One thing I have always wondered is why were the Soviets at the time so paranoid about Able Archer '83 at the time? Were there not any similar nuclear command and control exercises by NATO before then? One wonders why the Soviets did not complain about them up until 1983.
 
always in these stories South Africa collapses, but in my personal opinion South Africa could become a viable dictatorship by exterminating the opposition (without great powers any South African government would exterminate dissent with all its might and North Korea in the 90s showed that even a famine Could be overcome cruel enough)
 
Chapter X: Immediate Aftermath, 1983-1985.
First post-war update!


Chapter X: Immediate Aftermath, 1983-1985.

The death of 700 million people in a war that had lasted for a grand total of six days, the majority of them in the Tuesday November 15th 1983 Nuclear Exchange, made it the costliest war ever. World War I had led to twenty million deaths and World War II and all its horrors such as Auschwitz had led to sixty million casualties. World War III had probably led to the deaths of more people than the previous three thousand years of warfare, but there were more victims than just the people who died during those six days in that fateful autumn of ’83.

Contrary to expectations, the world was hit by something more akin to a “nuclear autumn” rather than an actual nuclear winter like the one which experts had been predicting and calculating through climate models for years. The reasoning behind the hypothetical phenomenon nuclear winter was that a full scale exchange would result in firestorms in major cities worldwide, ejecting tens of millions of tonnes of soot with carbonaceous smoke that would both block sunlight, resulting in global crop failures and famines. Wild predictions had included -7 ˚C to -30 ˚C temperature drops to last for years and the most pessimistic scenarios assumed five billion deaths, reducing the world to early twentieth century population levels.

This horror scenario didn’t materialize. The reason for that was that many modern cities in the early 80s were made of non-combustible materials like concrete, steel and glass and resulting debris from a nuclear strike mostly covered flammable materials and deprived fires of oxygen. There were certainly fires that destroyed entire areas as there were no fire departments left, but few developed into firestorms. In the US the areas that did turn into firestorms were often residential in nature with regular houses rather than tall armed concrete high rises, as wood was more often used to build these houses. The majority of the firestorms that did occur, however, mostly took place in older cities in Europe, where there were more old buildings made from flammable construction materials like wood.

Nonetheless, enough carbonaceous smoke and soot had been ejected into the stratosphere to block enough sunlight to have a noticeable climatic impact on the world in 1984 and ’85. There was a global temperature drop that varied per region, but which on average amounted to a -1 to -2 ˚C decline. This couldn’t cause any devastating crop failures, but was enough to result in two wet and cool summers in a row, most prominently in the northern hemisphere. This nuclear autumn was certainly interesting to climatologists and meteorologists and food for thought in an academic debate, but the average person probably couldn’t care less about the weather given all the other disastrous consequences of WW III. They probably didn’t care either that this merely slowed down anthropogenic human warming, but didn’t stop it.

Far more disastrous than the 1983-’85 Nuclear Autumn was the effects on the Earth’s ozone layer of the thermonuclear exchange. This nuclear war destroyed ozone because of chemical reactions involving nitrogen oxides produced from the fireballs created by the nuclear weapon explosions. The war resulted in an average global loss of ozone peaking at 75%, severely reducing the protective layer that kept harmful ultraviolet rays from the sun out. High levels of UV rays are associated with certain skin cancer types, cataracts and immunological disorders and needless to say the occurrence of these afflictions exploded worldwide after 1983. On sunny days people were advised to stay at home or, if they had to venture outdoors, cover themselves up or generously apply sunblock to any area of skin exposed to sunlight.

Even more disastrous was the effect of nuclear fallout. Prevailing winds blew the fallout from Europe and the former USSR in an eastern direction, hitting China hard in particular. Crops across had to be destroyed and livestock and poultry had to put down across the country as irradiated crops, meat, dairy products and eggs were too dangerous to eat (and the animals were getting sick, and not putting them down was cruel). Furthermore, a centimetre of top soil had to be scraped off so it would be safe to sow next year, with all the dirt being put in metal containers that were dumped in the Mariana Trench, the deepest oceanic trench in the world.

Worst of all was that Soviet nuclear strikes had hit targets in Manchuria and Xinjiang and some other regions primarily in the north of the country. Twenty-five cities were hit which included industrial cities like Shenyang, Harbin, Changchun, Tianjin and the capital of Beijing. Many of these were hit multiple times, such as Beijing which was annihilated by five 1 megaton strikes. China’s leadership survived in a bunker complex further south and designated Nanjing the temporary capital. China had retaliated against the USSR, using about two hundred out of the 380 nuclear warheads they had at the time (most of them in the higher kiloton to 1 megaton range). The devastation was largely limited to China north of the Yellow River, but that was bad enough.

Rationing was imposed by the Chinese government and strictly enforced, limiting caloric intake to just 500 kilocalories a day, which just a quarter of the needs of an adult person. Entire generations of Chinese children would grew up with little food in the 80s, so much that it developed into an obsession: they would even eat rats, dogs, cats and bugs to get some protein. These dietary deficiencies meant conditions like Rickets, which resulted in weak or soft bones, re-emerged. The famine that hit China was worse than the one that had taken place during the Great Leap Forward, which had caused 15-55 million deaths between 1958 and 1962. The combination of nuclear strikes and famine would result in a total death toll of ~200 million, i.e. 20% of the entire Chinese population. This meant there was no food for refugees, so the army turned back Soviet refugees trying to enter the country from the north by shooting at them with machine guns.

The People’s Republic of China introduced a radical new “Military First Policy” to survive this crisis. Constant hunger of course led to major public discontent, but Deng Xiaoping and the rest of the head honchos of the Communist Party of China (CPC) in Beijing felt too insecure to just assume people would be too weakened to revolt against the communist regime. Besides that, they knew their history, and many older Chinese leaders and officials were even old enough to remember it: after the Qing Dynasty was overthrown and Yuan Shikai’s abortive attempt to establish a new imperial dynasty had failed, New Army commanders had gone their own way, becoming warlords and resulting in China’s fragmentation that had left it vulnerable to subsequent aggression by Japan. Deng and others concluded the army had to be preserved as a coherent force to preserve the regime. If it was allowed to fragment, then China would descend into warlord rule again, leaving it weakened and likely resulting in the demise of the communist regime. In short, the complete and utter loyalty of the People’s Liberation Army was priority number one.

The Chinese Military First Policy was quite similar to what eventually would become known as Songun in North Korea. Initially, prioritizing the needs and wants of the People’s Liberation Army and allocation of resources towards it was a necessity, but it developed into more than that. The Military First Policy led to army officers increasingly dominating the political system, which meant the new policy and its principles led to “military first politics” that in turn resulted in a positive feedback loop that radicalized the original policy. Policy became ideology, resulting in a gradual shift in priorities that emphasized the military over all other aspects of state and society. The Chinese armed forces were elevated as an organization and as a state function to a primary position, from which it guided domestic policy and international interactions whilst forming the heart of the economy. The tragic famine had ended by 1987, but by then the damage was done: the relative freedom after Mao’s death in 1976 was undone and China had become fiercely militaristic.

It was of course much worse in the countries involved in the nuclear exchange, such as the United States where President Ronald Reagan had to mitigate the worst disaster in the nation’s history. Out of a pre-war population of ~233 million people, 98 million remained in a situation wherein food supplies, housing, running water, electricity, heating, medicine, law and order, modern media and so on no longer existed. From New York to San Francisco and from Chicago to Houston entire cities were in ruin and largely uninhabited now, ending the industrial economy entire generations of Americans had always known. Meanwhile, ultraviolet rays did their damage while fallout caused numerous people to succumb to radiation sickness despite potassium iodide pills being issued to mitigate the effects. Out of those 98 million survivors, almost 30 million died in the years that followed due to the effects of malnutrition, radiation sickness and various illnesses that spiked like cancer and others that reappeared like typhoid and cholera. It didn’t help that birth rates dropped, reducing the American population to the level of the late 1800s.

It was up to Reagan and succeeding Presidents to ensure the nation known as the United States would survive. The state of Oklahoma had escaped relatively unscathed, despite the destruction of the city of Cushing and of Vance AFB, Altus AFB and Fort Sill by thirteen warheads in the 300 kiloton to 1 megaton range. Both Oklahoma City and Tulsa had survived through sheer luck, most probably because anti-ballistic missiles of the Safeguard Program had shot those Soviet missiles down or because these missiles were older 60s and 70s vintage that had malfunctioned inflight. Tinker AFB likely survived as one of the few remaining major military installations in the country for the same reason. From their bunker underneath the West Virginia Greenbrier resort Congress voted in favour of making Oklahoma City the “provisional capital” while Tulsa became a secondary site where Congress could convene. Oklahoma was appointed a “Safe Zone” and so were parts of Oregon, Michigan and Kentucky where significant National Guards units and many major towns had survived intact.

The effort to rebuild the United States was one that was projected to take perhaps as much as an entire century: this meant even most of the millennial generation probably wouldn’t live to see the day that the country returned to pre-war living standards. The reason for this was that the near total collapse of the healthcare sector and of pharmaceutical production meant inoculations, antibiotics and other basic treatments were gone. Only the most basic healthcare, almost non-existent hygiene standards and little food remained, which meant people were lucky to live to an average age of 50.

It was a blessing that the state of Oklahoma survived so relatively contact and became the heart of American reconstruction. Pre-war, it was the nation’s third largest producer of natural gas and the fifth largest producer of crude oil while coal was being mined on a large scale in the eastern half of the state. There were several coal-fired and gas-fired power plants still operational, which meant large parts of the state still received electricity. Besides that there was the issue of food: Oklahoma was fifth in the production of both wheat and cattle and a major producer of pork, poultry and dairy products. What helped was that part of the state was mountainous: the mountains blocked part of the fallout. The state’s largest industry, the aerospace sector, was nationalized and repurposed to repair and maintain surviving aircraft. Natural gas and oil extraction as well as coal mining were nationalized too.

Outside the “safe zones” in Oklahoma, Oregon, Michigan, Kentucky and various smaller pockets across the country, the situation was extremely dire. Sick and hungry refugees roamed and they utilized various survival strategies: some became lone wolves and survived through either bushcraft skills or by predating on other people or a combination thereof; others banded together and pooled their resources; in their desperation countless women engaged in survival sex, trading sexual favours for food, shelter or medicine; and some surviving police, National Guard and US Army remnants sometimes devolved into marauders that robbed other groups of their scarce resources; some surviving forces formed local fiefdoms that either supported the federal government or just paid lip service to it. Lawlessness meant survival of the fittest, so survival depended on reaching either a safe zone or the territory of military officers turned warlords. Surviving police forces in less harder hit rural areas weren’t equipped to deal with the situation and were overwhelmed, or resorted to radical measures (in some places gallows were built on town squares again as if the Wild West had come back). In short, anarchy reigned.

Those units still willing to enforce the rule of the federal government, were tasked with local governance for lack of other options and got lots of leeway due to the absence of modern communications (without electricity, messages had to be delivered by couriers on foot, on bicycle or on horseback). In their efforts to maintain law and order, these troops summarily executed marauders, looters, murderers and rapists. They organized people to work and collected taxes in what essentially was a feudal economy: subsistence farming became the main economic activity in large parts of the country, and taxes were paid in produce. Local authorities in turn handed part of the harvests over to state and federal authorities, including FEMA, that redistributed the food and scarce medicine. A lot of technology was gone and more was set to disappear as replacement parts couldn’t be manufactured. This meant industrial activity ceased in large parts of the US, and artisanal types of economic activity returned: black smiths, tanners and other nearly extinct types of craftsmanship experienced a revival.

Living standards and the economy, in short, were both medieval save for Oklahoma, Tulsa and a few other isolated regions. Communications between these regions were limited as the electromagnetic pulses of all these thermonuclear weapons going off had fried most unprotected electrical wiring, circuit boards, transistors and microchips. The government therefore issued an order for any surviving communications like phones, CB radios, television sets and so on to be turned in. Compliance often had to be enforced by a gun though. This made a semi consistent level of communications possible between the safe zones. Messages could also be delivered by aircraft if one could be found and the required air fuel and a person who could pilot it. That was a costly option though, so a courier was preferable. The drawback of that was that such a person could get ambushed on the way by people that wanted to steal his stuff or eat the horse he was riding.

In the meantime, Congress decided the 1984 US Presidential elections should not be postponed, but should continue as scheduled in November. Ronald Reagan secured the nomination for the Republican Party, but the primaries were hotly contested because many surviving Republicans felt the voters would hold Reagan responsible for the unmitigated disaster that had happened under his watch. This showed in the outcome as Reagan was elected as the party’s nominee by a majority of merely 52%. It’s assumed that had there been no war that former Vice President during the Carter Administration, Walter Mondale, would’ve tried to secure the nomination. He, however, seemed to have disappeared into thin air and is widely considered a casualty of WW III as he hasn’t been seen or heard from ever since. Colorado Senator Gary Hart secured the nomination through the sympathy vote as his state had been hard hit. He chose Delaware Senator Joe Biden as his running mate.

The campaign was probably the oddest one in living memory as the aftermath of the war imposed restrictions. Candidates could not go to large swathes of the country because there was either no law and order there to speak of or because radiation levels made it too dangerous. Given almost non-existent modern media, most of the scarce campaign resources of both parties were invested into posters and pamphlets. Reagan was portrayed as the beacon of stability who could guide the country through the worst crisis in its existence by the Republicans. Hart by contrast declared that the same man who was responsible for this disaster shouldn’t lead reconstruction, pointing out how his Evil Empire rhetoric had brought US-Soviet relations to the heightened tensed state that had made the war possible. Reagan of course rebutted that Grishin was the one who had pushed the big red button after ignoring last minute attempts at diplomacy.

It should be no surprise that voter turnout was historically low, but the outcome was indeed disastrous for the Republicans as many of them had feared. Only a handful cared enough to go to a polling station as they were too busy surviving, but those that did dealt the incumbent a devastating blow. The Hart/Biden ticket won 68% of the popular vote, carried 49 states and obtained 490 electoral votes (no elections were held in DC as it had been reduced to a parking lot). The Reagan/Bush ticket only carried Reagan’s home state of California, won 29% of the popular vote and obtained 45 electoral votes (there were two faithless electors, out of the state’s 47, who went with Hart). Gary Hart subsequently became the 41st President of the United States and the first since 1801 who didn’t reside in the White House. His policies would amount to fortifying the existing safe zones, devoting resources to keep up basic utilities in these areas, nationalizing scarce resources and surviving economic and infrastructural assets, setting up new safe zones using remnants of the US Army and National Guard, and trying to secure foreign aid. The US dollar was worthless now, so foreign aid was the only thing the US could hope for.

A refugee crisis hit Latin America. In an ironic reversal of years of illegal immigration, millions of Americans tried to cross the Rio Grande into Mexico and in many cases headed further south, but especially smaller countries like Costa Rica and El Salvador were not equipped to take them in and subsequent conditions in refugee camps are best described as squalor. That was still an improvement over home though. Mexican border police and the Mexican military – whilst also enforcing martial law and turning the country increasingly into an authoritarian state – tried to stop them and right-wing nationalist political leaders called for a border fence or even a wall to stop the “gringos” from coming in and taking jobs or asking for handouts. President Hart pardoned all Latin American debt in return for these countries taking American refugees, and larger countries like Mexico, Peru, and Brazil rose to the challenge of managing these gigantic migration movements (a drawback of this open border to the US was that Mexican drug cartels could now cross into the southwestern United States almost unimpeded and faced little scrutiny from remaining police forces).

Meanwhile, things in Europe and the former USSR were even worse than in the United States. Many of the same things occurred here such as the disappearance of basic amenities, lack of medicine and basic hygiene standards, lack of technology, low levels of modern communications, limited infrastructure, fuel shortages, the breakdown of law and order, reduction of the economy to pre-industrial levels, famine, epidemics and the government using remnants of the armed forces to establish small safe havens. In Britain, the essentially feudal economy was emphasized by the fact that the government and the royal family relocated to Portchester Castle, a baronial medieval fortress built in the eleventh century in Hampshire, England (fuel and food ran out in the Central Government War Headquarters after three months). Portchester became a metonym for the British government in fact.

Compounding the disastrous population die-off through famine, deprivation, chaos and outbreaks of cholera and typhoid was that the Soviet Union had used its biological weapons arsenal as a parting gift in the final hours of the war. Outbreaks of anthrax, smallpox, the bubonic plague, tularaemia, Q-Fever and Marburg Virus resulted through the release from stocks of the Biopreparat agency. Particularly the plague, long thought to have been exterminated in all but Third World countries, spread like wildfire across Eurasia and parts of Africa due to lack of hygiene, weakened immune systems due to famine and fallout, the absence of public sanitation and garbage disposal, the subsequent spread of vermin like rats and of their parasites (lice and fleas) and the total lack of basic antibiotics like penicillin. All of this combined raised the total death toll of the Third World War to one billion in the two years that followed it.
 
Last edited:

badfishy40

Banned
Your story satisfied the Blood God and the skull throne....any chance a post war epilogue to flesh out what the world is like up to maybe 2003. Thinking life in the world of the early 21st century will resemble The movie threads in the northern hemisphere. The southern hemisphere won't be unicorns and Glitter but of course it will be somewhat better.
 

Pangur

Donor
So what happens to all the ground forces in Europe now? The navies will sail back to a safe port and the air forces will find somewhere to land or bail out to.

But the various armies will be operating out in the open with only tents, barns or their vehicles to shelter in. Those that haven't been shot, bombed or nuked will suffer badly from radiation laden winds once their individual NBC gear starts to wear out.
Would they hold the ceasefire line (assuming both sides got the message) or would they retreat to a safer location like a nearby town?
By guess would be European troops would try to make their way home be that as individuals or as unit. The US and Canadians are well and truly stuffed
 
Last edited:
It was up to Reagan and succeeding Presidents to ensure the nation known as the United States would survive. The state of Oklahoma had escaped relatively unscathed, despite the destruction of the city of Cushing and of Tinkers AFB, Vance AFB, Altus AFB and Fort Sill by thirteen warheads in the 300 kiloton to 1 megaton range. Both Oklahoma City and Tulsa had survived through sheer luck, most probably because anti-ballistic missiles of the Safeguard Program had shot those Soviet missiles down or because these missiles were older 60s and 70s vintage that had malfunctioned inflight. From their bunker underneath the West Virginia Greenbrier resort Congress voted in favour of making Oklahoma City the “provisional capital” while Tulsa became a secondary site where Congress could convene. Oklahoma was appointed a “Safe Zone” and so were parts of Oregon, Michigan and Kentucky where significant National Guards units and many major towns had survived intact.
It's Tinker Air Force Base, and a hit on Tinker would cause damage to Oklahoma City--it just depends on how large the warhead is...

Good update, though...
 
Ooops just noticed the above epilogue.....you read my mind.

It's not just an epilogue though. My TL will continue all the way up to 2023, showing how the world might recover from a Nuclear Holocaust.

It's Tinker Air Force Base, and a hit on Tinker would cause damage to Oklahoma City--it just depends on how large the warhead is...

Good update, though...

Good that you mentioned it. Edited the update.
 
Last edited:
I'm surprised America didn't invade Canada in the aftermath. It got off super light in the west and has a massive food and energy surplus with extremely low levels of radiation. And it's already tied into the American infrastructure.
 
With the lack of information, and only a reference to the former USSR, I'm guessing that the Soviet Union did not make it through? The spirit of Stalin wasn't enough to carry the day?
 
I'm surprised America didn't invade Canada in the aftermath. It got off super light in the west and has a massive food and energy surplus with extremely low levels of radiation. And it's already tied into the American infrastructure.
A few of the warlords might try that, but I'm not sure how successful they'd be.
 
I'm surprised America didn't invade Canada in the aftermath. It got off super light in the west and has a massive food and energy surplus with extremely low levels of radiation. And it's already tied into the American infrastructure.
Canada would fare worse than the US in a nuclear war IMO, most of its population is concentated in urban centres to a higher degree than the US. Cities like Vancouver or the Quebec City-Windsor corridor for example. As a Canadian, most of our country consists of huge "islands" of population in a vast sparse emptiness which has a few small towns dotting it every few hunered miles. Since more of their population resides in cities than the US, it's not hard to imagine like 80% of the Canadian population dying as a result of the war. On the plus side, since more people will die initially, Canada won't be as hard hit by the inevitable nuclear famine since there arent that many mouths to feed now

Also it might look pretty bad to other countries that the US chose to invade an ally solely for resourfee and living space, the Latin Americans probably wouldnt be too fond of that now that theyre the world superpowers basically
 
Last edited:
I'm surprised America didn't invade Canada in the aftermath. It got off super light in the west and has a massive food and energy surplus with extremely low levels of radiation. And it's already tied into the American infrastructure.

You are just not going to invade yours friend and ally. It would be really stupid act. And Americans probably can still buy stuff from Canadians altough most international trade is down now. Furthermore USA barely has army which could invade anything since almost all what is left are struggling in Europe or keeping order in USA.

Nordic nations probalby survived mostly from direct hits but probably consueqences are dire. Finland would suffer from Nuclear Autumn and radiation from nearby territories from Baltics and that what was Leningrad. And government now has put strict rationing (probably in such level that they who were living through OTL war years will have really nostalgic memories from 1940's) and deal with refutee waves of millions of Russians and probably thousands of Estonians but it would be bit easier. So army is inevitably mobilised.

I pretty certainly would survive but 1980's and 1990's are not going to be fun.
 
Top