The Death of Russia - TL

[aleg1996]

Unfortunately it did become reality in the form of a major nuclear exchange that took 32 million lives and was the final death blow to a major super power. It also caused the destruction of al Queda's Islamic "utopia" in the Caucasus. Given the horrors the Americans and others were finding as they advanced into it and the fact that Bin Laden is now known to be responsible for the Stalingrad bomb I suspect the level of Islamophobia in this timeline will be worse than it was in ours following 9/11.

True, though compared to what he originally wanted

His dream of a Salafist world, more precisely a slaughtered world where only Salafism remained, had never been closer to reality.

it causes damage that will take maybe centuries to heal on a regional level and causes global issues but didn't reach the global apocalypse point, especially in regards to the outcome he predicted.

This was indeed the central premise of Bin Laden’s master plan. He would wait until a moment of maximum tension between the nuclear powers and then explode a nuke right in the heart of one of their territories. This would cause the attacked power to instantly assume, in panic, that the other side had launched first and so without thinking throw their missiles at the enemy, thus tricking them into unleashing a nuclear holocaust upon themselves. Bin Laden’s hope was that the Russian states would throw nukes at the West as they realized what was going on. This would lead to a world where the Western powers were crippled, and lead to Islamist Revolution around the Middle East, resulting in a revived Islamic World ready to conquer the ashes of the infidels.

Overall yes he caused a huge amount of damage but compared to what he envisioned, it didn't reach the level he wanted. The last chapter showed in Pakistan that the West is still capable of using its power and forcing its adversaries to bend the knee, and I haven't seen much mention of his envisioned Islamic uprising.

 

[Neoteros]

I wonder how many refugees of the nuclear holocaust will leave Finland for their old countries once they get less radioactive; by the way, are the Russian Federation in Pushkingrad and the restored Tsardom in Novgorod the same thing, or two different states?

 

[TickTock The Witch's Dead]

Then, on March 7th 1997, a nuclear bomb exploded in Almaty, Kazakhstan.

Oh no.

Anyways shouldn't the depression cause protests in other countries like those in Latin America and Southeast Asia too? The 1997 Asian financial crisis should be a lot worse here.

Also why is Kaliningrad responsible for reparations? I thought they were the NSF's enemy.

 

[Whiteshore]

I wonder how many refugees of the nuclear holocaust will leave Finland for their old countries once they get less radioactive; by the way, are the Russian Federation in Pushkingrad and the restored Tsardom in Novgorod the same thing, or two different states?

IIRC, they're the same entity, and on that note, this actually raises a good question, how would the Tsar being President of the Russian Union work in practice? Would it mean that Russia, Siberia, and the FEK are nominally three kingdoms in personal union under a single Romanov Tsar (or Tsarina after 2015 ad Nicholas III only had daughters IOTL)?

 

[DocBrown]

At Cheyenne Base in Colorado, our servicemen and women saw the missiles coming in from Russia on their monitors. They saw that there was no way to stop the missiles heading straight to them from exploding.

Wasn't Cheyenne Mountain designed to withstand a direct nuclear blast?

 

[rfmcdonald]

Unfortunately it did become reality in the form of a major nuclear exchange that took 32 million lives and was the final death blow to a major super power. It also caused the destruction of al Queda's Islamic "utopia" in the Caucasus. Given the horrors the Americans and others were finding as they advanced into it and the fact that Bin Laden is now known to be responsible for the Stalingrad bomb I suspect the level of Islamophobia in this timeline will be worse than it was in ours following 9/11.

I am a bit skeptical about that.

Al-Qaeda might have been responsible for the first Stalingrad bomb, but apart from the two Russian factions being wholly responsible for choosing to take things up to 12 or 13, there had already been an abundance of atrocities committed. This includes, critically, an outright genocide of the Udmurt. I suspect that world will tend to assign primary responsibility to the Russian factions, on the grounds that they were heading this way. Al Qaeda just provided an excuse.

Beyond that, what happened in the war would seem to argue against any generalized Muslim responsibility. The Chechens, Dagestanis, and Circassians especially were positioned over years as freedom fighters needing liberation both from Russia and from al-Qaeda, while the Muslims of the Volga were subjected to genocide and not only Turkey and the UAE but Saudi Arabia were subjected to nuclear attacks. Al-Qaeda had already been imagined as a big bad distinct from Muslims in the region.

I wonder how many refugees of the nuclear holocaust will leave Finland for their old countries once they get less radioactive

I do not think there will be any significant return. The few survivors are so scattered and their emptied homelands so barren that, in a couple of generations, I would bet that the restored southeast of Finland will be most notable as home to Finns with sad family histories.

 

[rfmcdonald]

^ The above definitely does not mean, of course, that al-Qaeda will not be enthusiastically hunted down, or that there will not be a lot of hard questions.and harder responses.

I do think that the extent to which al Qaeda caused serious harm to Caucasian Muslims even before the war, and the extent to which independent Muslim polities and Russian Muslims alike suffered as a result of actions not under their control, would be relatively likely to be taken into account. I am unsure that, considering how Al Qaeda had been an shared adversary of the US and popular Caucasian Muslims, that you could readily get a general pivot towards Islamophobia.

 

[AstroRangerBeans]

Oh no.

Anyways shouldn't the depression cause protests in other countries like those in Latin America and Southeast Asia too? The 1997 Asian financial crisis should be a lot worse here.

Also why is Kaliningrad responsible for reparations? I thought they were the NSF's enemy.

Worst effects of the Asian Financial Crisis would mean Suharto might be thrown out of power when he tried reelection and I guess a competent Filipino senator will be elected than the corrupt actor.

 

[rfmcdonald]

Kingston is rather more serious - you've just cut off the primary rail lines between Toronto and Montreal and there are likely no ways around it (as both CN and CP's bypasses by then had had the rails removed) and Highway 401 is now definitely out of commission for at least a few weeks. It passes far enough away from RMC (presumably the target here) that it will more than anything be a matter of clearing the debris out of the way. Queens University is now history, which is a major loss for Canadian education, and you've probably just resulted in ~15K-20K civilian deaths and a lot of injuries, which will surely swamp hospitals in Ottawa, Montreal, Toronto and everywhere in between.

With regards to Kingston, where I spent a very good year to at grad school in Queen's and where I visited on an overnight trip just this May, things would be worse. CFB Kingston is literally just across the narrow Cataraqui River from downtown Kingston.

Using Nukemap assuming a 100 kiloton airburst explosion, the whole area of the base would be doused in lethal radiation, while the downtown will be levelled. There is a small possibility, I suppose, that its solid limestone will hold up, but I think it small. The area of Queen's, meanwhile, would be set ablaze.

With Kingston devastated, that whole part of eastern Ontario will be without its natural centre. A small mercy, I suppose, that Kingston is a relatively small city, home to a hundred thousand people at the time, but a small mercy.

 

[HerbertVonKarajan]

In full honesty, there was no symbolic significance to April 10th - it was just the first date that came to mind.

April 10th for me always calls back towards Titanic leaving port. That's just about it.

 

[Kotka]

A map after the end of the Russian Civil War, one day before the Almaty nuclear attack.
Pending corrections by @Sorairo .

 

[Kotka]

I think this would be a nice proposal for the Kingdom of Novgorod, perhaps the crown of Russia added.
Credits: https://www.deviantart.com/tudoysudoy/art/Symbols-of-Novgorod-Republic-853033922

 

[1962strat]

A map after the end of the Russian Civil War, one day before the Almaty nuclear attack.
Pending corrections by @Sorairo .

Ukraine took back Crimea. In fact I was surprised they didn’t take more given their nationalistic government.

 

[Kotka]

Ukraine took back Crimea. In fact I was surprised they didn’t take more given their nationalistic government.

Fixed

 

[rfmcdonald]

Another irony. The NATO member with the most casualties percentagewise is probably Iceland.

For whatever it is worth, when I went over to Nukemap and tried a 100 kiloton airburst, the results were three thousand dead. When I upped it to one megaton, you had a "mere" doubling. Keflavik may be quite accessible to Reykjavik and I am sure its destruction will impact that city, but happily Keflavik is sufficiently remote for Iceland's metropolis to survive intact.

I really am curious, now, as to what Björk would make of this. More, how would this impact the Icelandic music scene generally, or indeed Iceland?

 

[CASSICTOR2]

Ukraine took back Crimea. In fact I was surprised they didn’t take more given their nationalistic government.

I think it just don't want to deal with nuclear fallout and it's just a wasted land after 4/10 Genocide

 

[Whiteshore]

A map after the end of the Russian Civil War, one day before the Almaty nuclear attack.
Pending corrections by @Sorairo .

The UNAMIRU and the Novgorod Kingdom are nominally under the authority of the government in Pushkingrad (which honestly should be the "Tsardom of Russia" or the "Russian State" (in imitation of the "State of Japan") after the restoration of the Romanovs).

 

[Quinkana]

I am unsure that, considering how Al Qaeda had been an shared adversary of the US and popular Caucasian Muslims, that you could readily get a general pivot towards Islamophobia.

Tbf it'd be more directed against Islamists as I think a lot of the Muslims in the Caucasus would be much more nationalistic and secular than the other muslims (prob not 'translate quran to x language' but still) in the ME.

 

[rfmcdonald]

Yeah. I just can't believe that all or even half of these commanders refused from launch due humanitarian reasons. Bigger reasons were pretty surely fear of Anpilov even after his death, many of them just malfuncted and some were destroyed by nashi/NATO missiles.

Not sure what was reason for nashi side. But probably they used many of them commiting genocides, nuking of commie bases and NATO managed to destroy lot of their nukes.

One last point: It really has been quite open to question how many operators of nuclear missile silos would actually turn the key, if the order came to launch. IIRC different exercises have suggested that, even when faced with death, a non-trivial number of operators simply would not launch. When the bluff of deterrence is apparently called, they simply do not want to respond by inflicting potentially megadeaths indiscriminately. IIRC this is a problem for some governments.

We thankfully have had no nuclear wars, so we have no data. I can believe that many missile operators really did decide not to respond to their own deaths by visiting death on others, no matter what oaths they took.

 

[CASSICTOR2]

Also I think someone say that the 2010s would be considered the best years in TLDR I said finally recover the most damages of the Russkies war.

Which is good to me because I still nostalgic to the 2010s