Chapter VIII: Day Five, November 14th 1983.
It's time for a new update.
Meanwhile, there was trouble in Poland again. Grishin had told Polish leader General Wojciech Jaruzelski to deploy major units of the Polish People’s Army to the front in West Germany. Until then most of the fighting had been done by Soviet forces themselves and to a lesser extent by East German, Czechoslovak and Hungarian divisions, but now Poland was supposed to come into play. Its active units had already been mobilized, but now all the reservists were called up. On paper the Polish People’s Army was a sizeable force as it numbered 350.000 men in five tank divisions, eight motorized rifle divisions, an airborne division, a naval infantry division, fifteen other brigades (five of them artillery brigades), six specialist regiments, 600 combat aircraft, and a navy made up of twenty missile boats, three missile destroyers and twelve submarines. Once its reservists numbering half a million men were mobilized, the Polish People’s Army would have a total theoretical strength of 850.000 men.
In practice, there was fierce resistance from the Polish populace to the mobilization order, which shouldn’t have been a surprise given the rise of the Solidarity movement only three years prior: Polish leader Gierek had not had an answer to fast eroding support for communism in Poland in the face of economic crisis and neither had his successor Kania, resulting in labour turmoil and the rise of the Solidarity trade union led by Lech Wałęsa. Defence Minister Jaruzelski had become the new Prime Minister and First Secretary of the Polish United Workers’ Party, subsequently imposing martial law. He had kept a lid on Polish discontent ever since, but the sentiment that the Soviets were an occupation force hadn’t changed.
On Monday November 14th 1983, Wałęsa called on reservists to dodge the draft and to refuse to fight in a Soviet war of aggression by radio. Major demonstrations against the regime and a campaign of civil disobedience followed. Jaruzelski subsequently ordered the ZOMO paramilitary-police formations, regular riot police and soldiers to open fire on the protestors. Many soldiers and police mutinied and defected because they didn’t want to shoot at crowds that most likely also contained friends and family of theirs, prompting a civil war as Polish military and police forces loyal to Jaruzelski’s regime lost control of several cities.
At the Lenin Shipyard, Wałęsa and the other leaders of the Solidarity Trade Union proclaimed the National Salvation Committee, in essence a rival government aiming to replace the communist regime. It was composed of a wide variety of anti-communist opposition groups – ranging from anti-communist democratic leftists to conservative Catholics and right-wing Polish nationalists – and operated out of Gdańsk. It changed the name of the Lenin Shipyard to Gdańsk Shipyard.
Besides Poland Moscow also became worried about the loyalty of another one of its Warsaw Pact vassal states: the Socialist Republic of Romania. Ceausescu had ordered the mobilization of the Romanian People’s Army, but very few of its forces had been despatched to the frontlines in Germany or to the south to assist Bulgaria against successful Greek and Turkish counteroffensives. Romania’s main contribution to the war until that point was in the naval area: Romania’s Navy was cooperating with the Soviet Navy against the Turkish Naval Forces to make sure the Black Sea was securely in their hands. Two Atilay-class submarines, the Turkish variant of the German Type 209 diesel-electric attack sub, scored some spectacular successes nonetheless.
Ceausescu had not been enthusiastic about this war from the moment that it had begun and seemed to reaffirm his status as the Eastern Bloc’s maverick by questioning its continuation. After all, West Germany had de facto been neutralized due to the devastation there, which would take the West many years and hundreds of billions of dollars to help it recover from. Besides that, the West’s armed forces in Germany had been crippled too. At this point the Soviet Union had little to lose by offering a ceasefire and engaging in armistice negotiations from Ceausescu’s point of view, so he asked what the exact point was of pressing forward.
Using his personal friendship with Zairian dictator Mobutu, Ceausescu was able to provide Kinshasa as a neutral venue for all parties to discuss a negotiated peace. Simultaneously, he threatened that Romania would unilaterally abrogate its membership of the Warsaw Pact and Comecon if the Soviet Union refused to even consider talks with the West within the next 24 hours. This turned out to be a bluff as he backed down when the Soviets threatened him with the “Czechoslovakian treatment” if he broke Warsaw Pact ranks. He didn’t like the idea of Soviet tanks rolling through Bucharest and installing a more compliant leader at gunpoint.
China’s Paramount Leader Deng Xiaoping and North Korean Great Leader Kim Il-Sung nonetheless supported Ceausescu’s initiative and were in touch with the People’s Republic of the Congo, the Derg regime in Ethiopia and Enver Hoxha’s People’s Republic of Albania. Brazzaville, Addis Ababa and Tirana therefore emerged as possible venues for peace talks, which would’ve elevated the Third World. Nothing, however, came of this initiative as the superpowers pressed forward. Decidedly non-communist leaders such as Pope John Paul II and non-aligned Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi joined the bandwagon, creating a coalition of countries willing to mediate a negotiated peace.
Much of Monday November 14th was a relatively calm day, with little to no fighting outside southern Germany, Austria and Berlin, with no more nuclear weapons released on the battlefield. But it was the silence before the storm that would be unleashed that night. The West waited to see if more Warsaw Pact countries would rebel against Soviet hegemony while also proving receptive to the ambassadors of the countries offering to broker a peace. US Secretary of State Shultz discussed the possibility of peace talks with the ambassadors of India and Zaire, for example. Shultz believed that at this point there was a way out of this conflict that didn’t involve a total nuclear exchange. By now the US were willing to agree to a neutral, but not demilitarized, West Germany if all five members of the UN Security Council were willing to guarantee that neutrality (in the same way France and Britain had guaranteed Belgian neutrality in 1914) and Berlin as a free city. In return the US desired war reparations to aid in the reconstruction of Germany. These provisions, which were close to the goals they’d started this war with, were communicated to the Soviet Union.
The Soviet leadership had a completely different appraisal of the status quo by Monday afternoon, which demonstrated growing paranoia and increasing detachment from reality. They believed Poland’s mutiny against Soviet hegemony was being fuelled by Western weapons supplies in an attempt to destabilize the Warsaw Pact. Furthermore, the West’s peace offer was seen as part of that same agenda: they believed the West would tempt more Eastern Bloc countries to turn against Moscow in exchange for being spared nuclear attacks (after all, they had tried the same with the Netherlands and Belgium themselves). Soviet attempts to keep control of a rebellious Warsaw Pact and the “war reparations” to West Germany the West talked about were no doubt enemy schemes to bankrupt the USSR according to the Soviet leadership’s reasoning. Besides that, even if the offer was genuine, the proposed solution for Berlin wasn’t good enough to the Kremlin.
At a time that the West was getting serious about de-escalation, Moscow was seriously considering a full-scale first strike with its arsenal of nuclear bombers and intercontinental ballistic missiles. What really hit home was that Reagan had dared to strike against targets inside the Soviet Union at Babruysk and Semipalatinsk, whereas Grishin and his deputies had consciously refrained from hitting any targets on US soil. They saw it as a dry run for more potential strikes on Soviet soil, each one of which would eliminate ICBMs in their silos, valuable strategic bombers in their hangars or on the tarmac, various command, control and communications (C3) installations, important industrial facilities and weaken the USSR’s ability to prosecute the war and to retaliate.
The debate among the Gang of Eight was feverish, but eventually they deluded themselves into thinking they could strike at the West’s nuclear arsenal and eliminate the threat with a first strike before the West could launch. Their shared delusion that the West was about to launch led them to decide to pre-empt that imaginary threat. Furthermore, they kidded themselves into believing a non-existent window of opportunity was in fact a tiny window of opportunity, which in their cabin fever affected minds grew into a major window of opportunity. What was the likelihood that no NATO radar operator would notice a wave of incoming bombers and missiles? Just like the Warsaw Pact, NATO had warning systems in place with which they could detect an enemy launch.
Regardless of such rational objections, they decided to go through with this and at midnight Moscow time top secret orders went out to the Long Range Aviation force, the branch which controlled all the heavy bomber air regiments, and to the Strategic Missile Forces (this was at 10:00 PM Western European time, 09:00 PM London time and 02:00 PM at the Cheyenne Mountain Complex). They had to hit their designated NATO targets and in a secondary smaller attack also take out dozens in China, often with multiple hits. As a result, the next day of the Third World War would also be its last.[1]
A tremendous burst of communications informed the commanders of the bomber and missile units of their orders. Just like NATO forces, Warsaw Pact forces used a two-man rule as a verification that the orders were authentic and to prevent one man from intentionally or mistakenly releasing nuclear weapons. The time of the launch was set at Tuesday November 15th at 04:00 AM Moscow time. ICBMs were readied in their silos and transporter-erector-launchers elevated their medium range and intermediate range missiles at their launch sites behind the Iron Curtain. Tu-95 and Tu-16 strategic bombers were fuelled and taxied to the airstrips that they would take off from once it was time, unless a recall order followed: many Soviet officers hoped that such an order would come at the last minute, but would nonetheless carry out their orders.
Western intelligence services of course didn’t miss the sudden enormous uptake in encrypted communications and the hives of activity at sites known to belong to the Soviet strategic bomber and missile forces. Reagan, Thatcher, Mitterand, Kohl and other Western leaders were warned that a massive first strike might be on its way and prepared accordingly. Last minute feverish diplomacy yielded no results as the Soviet leadership had become incommunicado. Doomsday had become not only inevitable now but also imminent.
[1]Author's note: if anyone were to consider a spin-off where a nuclear holocaust is avoided, the PoD would be here with the Soviets getting a grip and shaking off their cabin fever induced paranoia and realizing the NATO offer to negotiate is their big golden ticket.
Chapter VIII: Day Five, November 14th 1983.
Meanwhile, there was trouble in Poland again. Grishin had told Polish leader General Wojciech Jaruzelski to deploy major units of the Polish People’s Army to the front in West Germany. Until then most of the fighting had been done by Soviet forces themselves and to a lesser extent by East German, Czechoslovak and Hungarian divisions, but now Poland was supposed to come into play. Its active units had already been mobilized, but now all the reservists were called up. On paper the Polish People’s Army was a sizeable force as it numbered 350.000 men in five tank divisions, eight motorized rifle divisions, an airborne division, a naval infantry division, fifteen other brigades (five of them artillery brigades), six specialist regiments, 600 combat aircraft, and a navy made up of twenty missile boats, three missile destroyers and twelve submarines. Once its reservists numbering half a million men were mobilized, the Polish People’s Army would have a total theoretical strength of 850.000 men.
In practice, there was fierce resistance from the Polish populace to the mobilization order, which shouldn’t have been a surprise given the rise of the Solidarity movement only three years prior: Polish leader Gierek had not had an answer to fast eroding support for communism in Poland in the face of economic crisis and neither had his successor Kania, resulting in labour turmoil and the rise of the Solidarity trade union led by Lech Wałęsa. Defence Minister Jaruzelski had become the new Prime Minister and First Secretary of the Polish United Workers’ Party, subsequently imposing martial law. He had kept a lid on Polish discontent ever since, but the sentiment that the Soviets were an occupation force hadn’t changed.
On Monday November 14th 1983, Wałęsa called on reservists to dodge the draft and to refuse to fight in a Soviet war of aggression by radio. Major demonstrations against the regime and a campaign of civil disobedience followed. Jaruzelski subsequently ordered the ZOMO paramilitary-police formations, regular riot police and soldiers to open fire on the protestors. Many soldiers and police mutinied and defected because they didn’t want to shoot at crowds that most likely also contained friends and family of theirs, prompting a civil war as Polish military and police forces loyal to Jaruzelski’s regime lost control of several cities.
At the Lenin Shipyard, Wałęsa and the other leaders of the Solidarity Trade Union proclaimed the National Salvation Committee, in essence a rival government aiming to replace the communist regime. It was composed of a wide variety of anti-communist opposition groups – ranging from anti-communist democratic leftists to conservative Catholics and right-wing Polish nationalists – and operated out of Gdańsk. It changed the name of the Lenin Shipyard to Gdańsk Shipyard.
Besides Poland Moscow also became worried about the loyalty of another one of its Warsaw Pact vassal states: the Socialist Republic of Romania. Ceausescu had ordered the mobilization of the Romanian People’s Army, but very few of its forces had been despatched to the frontlines in Germany or to the south to assist Bulgaria against successful Greek and Turkish counteroffensives. Romania’s main contribution to the war until that point was in the naval area: Romania’s Navy was cooperating with the Soviet Navy against the Turkish Naval Forces to make sure the Black Sea was securely in their hands. Two Atilay-class submarines, the Turkish variant of the German Type 209 diesel-electric attack sub, scored some spectacular successes nonetheless.
Ceausescu had not been enthusiastic about this war from the moment that it had begun and seemed to reaffirm his status as the Eastern Bloc’s maverick by questioning its continuation. After all, West Germany had de facto been neutralized due to the devastation there, which would take the West many years and hundreds of billions of dollars to help it recover from. Besides that, the West’s armed forces in Germany had been crippled too. At this point the Soviet Union had little to lose by offering a ceasefire and engaging in armistice negotiations from Ceausescu’s point of view, so he asked what the exact point was of pressing forward.
Using his personal friendship with Zairian dictator Mobutu, Ceausescu was able to provide Kinshasa as a neutral venue for all parties to discuss a negotiated peace. Simultaneously, he threatened that Romania would unilaterally abrogate its membership of the Warsaw Pact and Comecon if the Soviet Union refused to even consider talks with the West within the next 24 hours. This turned out to be a bluff as he backed down when the Soviets threatened him with the “Czechoslovakian treatment” if he broke Warsaw Pact ranks. He didn’t like the idea of Soviet tanks rolling through Bucharest and installing a more compliant leader at gunpoint.
China’s Paramount Leader Deng Xiaoping and North Korean Great Leader Kim Il-Sung nonetheless supported Ceausescu’s initiative and were in touch with the People’s Republic of the Congo, the Derg regime in Ethiopia and Enver Hoxha’s People’s Republic of Albania. Brazzaville, Addis Ababa and Tirana therefore emerged as possible venues for peace talks, which would’ve elevated the Third World. Nothing, however, came of this initiative as the superpowers pressed forward. Decidedly non-communist leaders such as Pope John Paul II and non-aligned Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi joined the bandwagon, creating a coalition of countries willing to mediate a negotiated peace.
Much of Monday November 14th was a relatively calm day, with little to no fighting outside southern Germany, Austria and Berlin, with no more nuclear weapons released on the battlefield. But it was the silence before the storm that would be unleashed that night. The West waited to see if more Warsaw Pact countries would rebel against Soviet hegemony while also proving receptive to the ambassadors of the countries offering to broker a peace. US Secretary of State Shultz discussed the possibility of peace talks with the ambassadors of India and Zaire, for example. Shultz believed that at this point there was a way out of this conflict that didn’t involve a total nuclear exchange. By now the US were willing to agree to a neutral, but not demilitarized, West Germany if all five members of the UN Security Council were willing to guarantee that neutrality (in the same way France and Britain had guaranteed Belgian neutrality in 1914) and Berlin as a free city. In return the US desired war reparations to aid in the reconstruction of Germany. These provisions, which were close to the goals they’d started this war with, were communicated to the Soviet Union.
The Soviet leadership had a completely different appraisal of the status quo by Monday afternoon, which demonstrated growing paranoia and increasing detachment from reality. They believed Poland’s mutiny against Soviet hegemony was being fuelled by Western weapons supplies in an attempt to destabilize the Warsaw Pact. Furthermore, the West’s peace offer was seen as part of that same agenda: they believed the West would tempt more Eastern Bloc countries to turn against Moscow in exchange for being spared nuclear attacks (after all, they had tried the same with the Netherlands and Belgium themselves). Soviet attempts to keep control of a rebellious Warsaw Pact and the “war reparations” to West Germany the West talked about were no doubt enemy schemes to bankrupt the USSR according to the Soviet leadership’s reasoning. Besides that, even if the offer was genuine, the proposed solution for Berlin wasn’t good enough to the Kremlin.
At a time that the West was getting serious about de-escalation, Moscow was seriously considering a full-scale first strike with its arsenal of nuclear bombers and intercontinental ballistic missiles. What really hit home was that Reagan had dared to strike against targets inside the Soviet Union at Babruysk and Semipalatinsk, whereas Grishin and his deputies had consciously refrained from hitting any targets on US soil. They saw it as a dry run for more potential strikes on Soviet soil, each one of which would eliminate ICBMs in their silos, valuable strategic bombers in their hangars or on the tarmac, various command, control and communications (C3) installations, important industrial facilities and weaken the USSR’s ability to prosecute the war and to retaliate.
The debate among the Gang of Eight was feverish, but eventually they deluded themselves into thinking they could strike at the West’s nuclear arsenal and eliminate the threat with a first strike before the West could launch. Their shared delusion that the West was about to launch led them to decide to pre-empt that imaginary threat. Furthermore, they kidded themselves into believing a non-existent window of opportunity was in fact a tiny window of opportunity, which in their cabin fever affected minds grew into a major window of opportunity. What was the likelihood that no NATO radar operator would notice a wave of incoming bombers and missiles? Just like the Warsaw Pact, NATO had warning systems in place with which they could detect an enemy launch.
Regardless of such rational objections, they decided to go through with this and at midnight Moscow time top secret orders went out to the Long Range Aviation force, the branch which controlled all the heavy bomber air regiments, and to the Strategic Missile Forces (this was at 10:00 PM Western European time, 09:00 PM London time and 02:00 PM at the Cheyenne Mountain Complex). They had to hit their designated NATO targets and in a secondary smaller attack also take out dozens in China, often with multiple hits. As a result, the next day of the Third World War would also be its last.[1]
A tremendous burst of communications informed the commanders of the bomber and missile units of their orders. Just like NATO forces, Warsaw Pact forces used a two-man rule as a verification that the orders were authentic and to prevent one man from intentionally or mistakenly releasing nuclear weapons. The time of the launch was set at Tuesday November 15th at 04:00 AM Moscow time. ICBMs were readied in their silos and transporter-erector-launchers elevated their medium range and intermediate range missiles at their launch sites behind the Iron Curtain. Tu-95 and Tu-16 strategic bombers were fuelled and taxied to the airstrips that they would take off from once it was time, unless a recall order followed: many Soviet officers hoped that such an order would come at the last minute, but would nonetheless carry out their orders.
Western intelligence services of course didn’t miss the sudden enormous uptake in encrypted communications and the hives of activity at sites known to belong to the Soviet strategic bomber and missile forces. Reagan, Thatcher, Mitterand, Kohl and other Western leaders were warned that a massive first strike might be on its way and prepared accordingly. Last minute feverish diplomacy yielded no results as the Soviet leadership had become incommunicado. Doomsday had become not only inevitable now but also imminent.
[1]Author's note: if anyone were to consider a spin-off where a nuclear holocaust is avoided, the PoD would be here with the Soviets getting a grip and shaking off their cabin fever induced paranoia and realizing the NATO offer to negotiate is their big golden ticket.
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