And the story continues.
Chapter XI: Nuclear Proliferation and the Iran-Arab War, 1986-1992.
In American foreign policy the boosted hostility toward China translated to several responses. After WW III, there was massive public opposition in Japan to the presence of American nuclear weapons anywhere in Japanese territory. Negotiations to base American nuclear bombers in Japan had foundered, as the authoritarian militarist regime had sided with the population. After China’s nuclear test, the Americans floated the idea again and the Japanese government, feeling threatened by China, reconsidered and allowed nuclear weapons and the necessary B-52s to deliver them on a to be built new airbase. The police suppressed civilian protests against this decision. For similar reasons, Korea accepted the placement of Pershing II medium range ballistic missiles on its soil despite public discontent.
India was a different case. It didn’t want US nuclear weapons on its soil and wouldn’t settle for anything less than a nuclear deterrent of its own. The first research efforts into nuclear energy had begun not long after Indian independence, but the pursuit of weapons had started in earnest in 1960. In the post-war crisis years in the 60s and to a lesser extent the 70s funds for the program had been reduced to a bare minimum as India had more pressing concerns. Procuring aid to build nuclear fuel processing plants and a nuclear power plant, which could only come from the United States, proved impossible: for a long time the US proved unwilling to help India get nuclear weapons and this meant it had to develop a nuclear fuel cycle from scratch. India entered a secret agreement with Australia to jointly develop nuclear weapons as the latter was a uranium producer, giving the Indian nuclear scientists plenty of nuclear fuel.
After China’s emergence as a nuclear power, America’s position toward India’s nuclear weapons program changed. President Robert Kennedy paid a visit to New Delhi in 1986, and offered Indira Gandhi a deal to build a nuclear power station and fuel processing plant as well as adding US nuclear scientists to the program. Gandhi accepted and this vastly accelerated the Indian nuclear weapons program and concentrated its focus on plutonium production. In March 1989, India tested an implosion-type device that produced an explosive yield of 20 kilotons and began missile tests. India also announced it adopted a “no first use” policy.
Australia followed not much later that same year, followed by several more countries in the 90s. South Africa had six nuclear weapons by the end of the 1980s and Israel had a stockpile of unknown size, though estimated at a few dozen, by that time as well. Brazil was suspected of having a nuclear weapons program, which was in line with its great power ambitions as it was the Latin America’s largest economy by far and the second in the world (after the United States and ahead of India and China). Zaire’s leader Mobutu felt that as the dominant power of sub-Saharan Africa his country should develop a response to the nuclear capabilities of Apartheid South Africa, and with the completion of the Inga Project he had the national income and industrial capacity for it. Iran had begun its nuclear weapons program in 1974 and had an easy time (easier than India) procuring nuclear power and fuel-cycle facilities with civilian as well as military applications from the US. Iran tested its first nuclear weapon in 1991, Brazil in 1993 and Zaire in 1998.
Meanwhile, the American economy continued to grow throughout the 80s and in an election year that was always a good thing for the incumbent President. After his overwhelming victory in 1984 it was speculated that Robert F. Kennedy might become a post-war third termer, but like his brother he refused to seek re-election even if the term limit set by the 22nd Amendment was overruled by a new amendment. The movement against the 22nd Amendment died down again. Instead Kennedy fully endorsed his Vice President Walter Mondale, who chose Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton as his running mate. In the GOP, Kansas Senator Bob Dole tried again and chose the fairly liberal Republican Congressman Jack Kemp as his running mate to draw in pro-Democratic swing voters. During the campaign the Democrats focused on the economy, while the Republicans criticized Kennedy’s foreign policy for allowing nuclear proliferation to occur. In the 1988 Presidential election, the Republicans made a major comeback after their ’84 knockout but still lost: the Mondale/Clinton ticket won 24 states, 305 electoral votes and 50.9% of the popular vote; the Dole/Kemp ticket won 26 states, 230 electoral votes and 48.1% of the popular vote. In January 1989, Walter Mondale was sworn in as the new President of the United States of America and would be the first to reside in the New White House upon its completion in 1992.
The year 1992 would see the solemn opening of the National World War III Remembrance Museum in St. Louis, which had acted as the capital of the United States for thirty years by then. Robert Kennedy had proposed it in 1986 as he considered it “paramount that the story of the greatest tragedy in not only national but world history is passed on to the post-war generations, so it will never happen again.” It took three years to build and has 15.000 square metres for its permanent exhibition (and 5.000 square metres for temporary exhibitions), which up until today displays archival film material, radio broadcasts, pictures and newspaper clippings about the Cold War and the leadup to WW III. This is followed by numerous exhibits about the war including dioramas of battles, photographs of wartime activities, weapons, uniforms, awards, newsreels, letters, model aircraft, model missiles and mock-up nuclear weapons. After the military themed part of the exhibition, visitors move onto the segment detailing the suffering during and after the war: the death and destruction, pillaging, martial law, disease hunger and rationing. This section also includes the original suicide note written by Colonel General Baklanov, the official who’d signed the Soviet Instrument of Surrender as he was the highest ranking figure that could be found. After this, visitors encounter a prayer room (for all major religions) to commemorate the dead before moving on to the gift shop and the exit.
The year 1989 began normal, but a few months into Mondale’s presidency an interesting development faced him in the foreign policy arena because of a radio message heard around the world: on July 17th 1989, the 71st anniversary of the murder of the last Tsar and his family, the foundation of the Tsardom of New Muscovy was proclaimed under the aegis of Tsar Ivan VII. The history of this new state could be traced back to the aftermath of WW III: a surviving colonel with a handful of tanks and armoured vehicles had seized control of a surviving fuel depot and had then taken control of an unhit rural village and the surrounding kolkhozes 150 kilometres east of the burning ruins of Moscow. These soldiers with their weapons provided protection in exchange for food and shelter, resulting in a kind of feudal settlement that commander Ivan Pochenko dubbed Novaya Moskva (New Moscow).
The town was in a pocket with relatively low radiation levels and a bit removed from larger cities, explaining how this became an undamaged oasis. With the protection of a military unit and the construction of earth walls and palisades it stayed that way, but Pochenko had greater ambitions and imbued his speeches to his subjects with ultranationalist and conservative Orthodox Christian ideas. Communism was denounced as satanic, for it had unleashed hell on earth on Mother Russia. He didn’t just create a symbiotic food for protection relation, but created a shared identity and loyalty structure by presenting their microstate as the beginning of a new Russia. In 1963, he was forty years old.
Starting in the late 60s, early 70s he started to send out scouting parties for supplies and they brought back firewood, construction materials taken from ruined or abandoned buildings and surviving pieces of industrial machinery or parts thereof. This allowed them to maintain at least their small arms and produce ammunitions, though fuel was so scarce the tanks and vehicles weren’t moved unless absolutely necessary and instead used as fixed field fortifications. At one point, enough material had been collected to build a primitive zeppelin named the “Flying Ivan”: basically a cigar shaped frame covered in cloth and filled with hot air, carrying a basket big enough for 4-5 people, propelled by a 20 hp engine that drove a propellor. It was used to find other surviving towns. Inevitably, survivors were found and invited to come back and Novaya Moskva’s population grew as a result. A second factor was that, based on Christian rhetoric, Pochenko encouraged married couples to have very many children. Families with 10+ children weren’t uncommon, leading to a steady annual population growth of ~2%. From 1.500 souls in 1962, the original town had grown to almost 2.000 by 1975 and by now territorial expansion was already underway. This led to people migrating to Novaya Moskva.
Pochenko expanded to neighbouring pockets of survivors, who often graciously accepted his rule as his representatives brought food and were impressed by the Flying Ivan (people who’d grown up after the war had never seen flying machines and regarded them as miracles). If violence was necessary, the Flying Ivan was used as a bomber and that was usually enough to scare opponents into surrendering. In the “new territories”, initially a collection of hamlets, superintendents were installed to maintain order, control the distribution of food and scarce medication, and to collect taxes.
Eventually, larger settlements were found similar to Novaya Moskva, but Pochenko’s sense of self-importance had grown to the point that he offered feudal submission rather than cooperation, rejecting the model of a confederation of towns with equal rights and a say in a governing council. This had been proposed by Vladimir, a new town built next to the ruins of the original city and 50 km north of Novaya Moskva. In 1977, a war erupted between Vladimir and a few allied towns and Pochenko’s little fiefdom of Novaya Moskva. He’d studied military history extensively and proved very tactically adept, defeating the armies of Vladimir in a series of pitched battles. He conquered his closest rival, but treated his defeated opponents mildly because, after all, they were fellow Russians. He recruited them for his cause, expanding his legions for new wars of expansion during the late 70s and the entire 80s.
By the end of the 1980s, Ivan Pochenko controlled an area three times the size of France west of the Urals with a population of roughly 3 million people and he entertained monarchist ambitions. The economy of his realm was based on agriculture, but coal and the mining of ferrous and nonferrous metals had been resumed as well. This provided fuel and the metal needed for a basic metallurgic industry able to build the necessary tools or replace broken ones to support the farmers and an emerging class of artisans. With the cornerstone industries of coal and steel up and running, Novaya Moskva tried to set up new industries such as textile production and food processing. With difficulty, small scale production of radio sets began, and the centrepiece of the effort was a large and powerful rotatable shortwave antenna system that had taken four years to build. In July 1989 it was used for the very first time to proclaim the Tsardom of New Muscovy to the entire world and to broadcast its aggressive claim to all territories formerly belonging to the Soviet Union.
The newly crowned Tsar Ivan VII – still feeling self-important and seeing himself as the ruler of all Russians more and more as time went by – now desired diplomatic recognition as the ruler of all of Russia, which would legitimize his wars of conquest. A US carrier group centred on USS America (a Kitty Hawk-class carrier completed much later than planned due to WW III) appeared in the Finnish Gulf. She carried out reconnaissance flights to get clear intel on the nature of this Tsardom of New Muscovy and what it was capable of, ascertaining that it was the dominant power in European Russia (others new states included the Kiev Hetmanate, the Kuban Cossack Republic and the Yakutia Republic while Sweden entered the fray as it extended its influence into the Baltic States, who were worried about a Russian resurgence). In 1990, the Mondale Administration established diplomatic relations with the regime of Tsar Ivan VII, followed by countless other nations. A few years later an American embassy was established in the capital city of Novaya Moskva, which had grown into a city of 75.000 people by the early 90s. John F. Matlock Jr., who had his first assignment to Moscow in 1961, was appointed ambassador and saw a country reduced to pre-1500 population levels and on the cusp of primitive industrialization. New Muscovy had to reinvent much of what had been invented that the Western world had known since the 1800s and 1900s. In the final decade of the twentieth century it would conquer all of European Russia, Belarus and eastern Ukraine. The Tsardom became a regional power toward the year 2000.
In 1990, a crisis erupted in the Middle East with a long background. Part of the cause was the gradual deterioration of relations between Saudi Arabia and Imperial Iran. King Faisal had visited Iran in 1966, followed by a reciprocal visit by Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, after which the Shah supported Faisal’s efforts at Islamic solidarity and actively contributed to the creation of multinational Islamic institutions. Because the British had left the Persian Gulf in 1962, a demarcation line between Saudi Arabia and Iran had been agreed upon in 1968. There were also tensions. Firstly, the Shah’s Westernization policies as part of the White Revolution differed greatly from the reactionary policies in Saudi Arabia. The Shah sent letters to King Faisal saying “Please, my brother, modernize. Open up your country. Make the schools mixed women and men. Let women wear miniskirts. Have discos. Be modern. Otherwise I cannot guarantee you will stay on your throne." In response, King Faisal wrote, “Your majesty, I appreciate your advice. May I remind you, you are not the Shah of France. You are not in the Elysée. You are in Iran. Your population is ninety percent Muslim. Please don't forget that.” Secondly, Iran repossessed the islands Big Tunb, Little Tunb and Abu Moussa despite competing claims by the United Arab Emirates. This caused friction.
Friction continued to grow during the regency of Empress Farah as the countries’ political systems diverged further and further. Saudi Arabia stuck with its existing model: a theocratic absolute monarchy not much different from China with its torture and executions, and with almost non-existent rights for women. As regent Dowager Empress Farah developed a model of cooperation and consultation between the court and the cabinet on one side and the Majles (parliament) on the other, resulting in a consensus. This modus operandi, in which parliament was left with a lot of legislative initiative, resulted in a new constitution in 1978 that limited the powers of the Shah to refusal of royal assent (which could be overturned by a two thirds parliamentary majority), command of the armed forces in wartime and the vague power to “take the initiative” in foreign policy.
Iran became a constitutional monarchy with a constitution that guaranteed maximal religious freedom, but also Western-style liberties. It was a Westminster-style system, with a few differences. The ulama, Iran’s scholars, were angered that the Empress Dowager and the Majles didn’t enshrine a role for Shia Islam in the political process aside from some non-voting advisors to parliament. The proposal by the ulama for a fixed number of guaranteed parliamentary seats for them was rejected. People were left free to choose between Western dress or conservative religious clothing, between secular co-ed or more conservative gender separated schools, between drinking alcohol as in the West or not, between following Muslim dietary rules or not etcetera. Those that wanted to were free to follow the strict rules of the ulama, but more and more dressed and behaved in a secular, Western way. Outrageously shocking to conservative religious leaders – Wahhabi or Shiite, Iranian or Saudi – was the decriminalization of prostitution and pornography in the early 80s.
Internal tension between proponents of Western freedom and those favouring more religious influence in the government translated to the growing Saudi-Iranian friction. A major incident was a state visit by Empress Dowager Farah during which she refused to wear the veil, which was mandatory for women in Saudi Arabia. To avoid an embarrassing crisis, she wasn’t made to wear it. A crisis resulted nonetheless as King Khalid cancelled a visit to Iran. Moreover, not long thereafter Farah commented on the rights of women in Saudi Arabia, stating “women in that country are domestic slaves to their male relatives. It’s so primitive and sexist. Women there have no choice.” As if that comment didn’t anger King Faisal enough, given how it painted his country in foreign news outlets, in 1980 the young Shah Reza II added insult to injury by saying “religion, including clothing and composure, is a private matter, not something a democratically elected government should concern itself with. Arabs and Iranians can govern themselves in that regard.” On October 31st 1981, Shah Reza II reached his majority at the age of 21 and started to rule independently and was immediately confronted by a challenge to his rule as well as that of his dynasty: an ultraconservative clique of officers backed by Iran’s ulama and with Saudi support staged a coup d’état, but failed. The leaders of the conspiracy were executed for treason by firing squad. The affair caused Saudi-Iranian relations to reach a freezing point.
The 1990 crisis centred on the Shatt al-Arab waterway, the confluence of the Euphrates and Tigris rivers. Since a treaty in 1937, the entire waterway had been under Iraqi control and Iranian ships had to pay a toll. The Shah had argued that this was unfair to Iran as river borders were usually in the thalweg, i.e. the middle of the river, and had military vessels escort tankers and other ships in 1969. Iraq, militarily the weaker of the two, had done nothing. Iran had abrogated the treaty, something which Iraqi President Saddam Hussein sought to rectify. Given the hostility between Iran and Saudi Arabia, he was able to easily secure the latter’s support and that emboldened him into a foolish move.
In May 1990, Iraqi missile boats tried to enforce the tolls that Iran had consistently refused to pay since 1969 by stopping an Iranian tanker. When the tanker’s captain refused to stop, one of the Iraqi missile boat captains unwisely decided to fire at the tanker and caused an inferno. Within a month the conflict had escalated into a shooting war as both sides mobilized more and more army and navy assets, a situation that became a war definitively when Iran declared war on Iraq, going down in history as the 90-’91 Iran-Arab War.
Iran had one of the finest militaries in the world. Its army equipped with M60 tanks and its air force with the F-4 Phantom II was top of the line. The navy had modern American ships like destroyers, Tang-class nuclear attack submarines and aircraft carrier Cyrus. Cyrus was the Independence-class light aircraft carrier USS Cabot, loaned to Iran in the 70s and modernized to act as a helicopter carrier. In the 1980s refit, ordered by Iran before buying the carrier, two M. 141 quad cell launchers for Harpoon anti-ship missiles and torpedo tubes were added and Phalanx CIWS replaced most of the twenty-six 40 mm guns. Qualitatively, the Imperial Iranian Armed Forces were the world’s second best after the United States Army, and in terms of active troops it was also the world’s fourth largest after China, the US and India with 800.000 men. Iraq by contrast could mobilize only a quarter of a million men and lots of it equipment was of 1950s and early 60s vintage.
In June 1990, the Iranian Army launched Operation Avenger, a massive armoured thrust with massive air cover towards Baghdad intended to split the country in two. Two smaller armoured prongs had Mosul and Basra as their objectives. If the capital of Baghdad was lost to Iran, the Tigris River would be unusable for the Iraqis. With their air superiority and the ability to advance further west, Iran would be able to utterly disrupt north-south connections if it took Baghdad and nearby air bases. The Iranian blitz alarmed Arab leaders. The war escalated as Khalid’s successor King Fahd of Saudi Arabia, unwilling to stand by idly and watch an Iraqi military collapse, proclaimed a jihad against the “Iranian heretics.” He feared the Sunni minority regime would be replaced by a Shia dominated pro-Iranian government, knowing Iran had expansionist ambitions as it had begun expanding into the former Soviet Union’s Central Asian republics in the 70s. Saudi Arabia sent military reinforcements and so did other (Arab) countries like Jordan, Yemen, Lebanon and Egypt. Others, like Libya, Tunisia and Algeria, sent volunteer divisions. Israel and Syria’s Shia dominated regime, by contrast, supported Iran. The matter had devolved into a general war in the Middle East in a matter of weeks.
Iran’s outstanding military notwithstanding, with reinforcements flowing into Iraq from the Arab world Saddam was able to stymie the mass of Iranian tanks before they could reach Baghdad. All along the front, Arab and Iranian forces dug in, creating trench systems WW I style with the accompanying terrors like chemical warfare with mustard and chlorine gas. The trench line straddled the border, but the better part was on the Iraqi side. Both sides launched offensives to break the stalemate, but their efforts shifted the frontline by a few hundred metres at the most. Saddam started to use terror tactics by firing ballistic missiles, mostly at Iranian, Syrian and Israeli cities. A stalemate had emerged that neither side was able to end and which persisted into 1991.
Mondale’s mediation attempts had failed from the start of the crisis, as he’d tried to avoid appearing as aggressive, rejecting the advice to send a carrier group or two to sternly tell the Iraqis to back down and apologize to Iran. The latter had been the advice of the Chiefs of Staff, but the State Department reminded Mondale that the US Embassy in Riyadh had reported Saudi Arabia’s complete commitment to support Iraq and contain Iran. If the US openly sided with Iran in this matter, they risked losing the support of Saudi Arabia, which might then turn to China. The State Department was aware that. Beijing was actively courting several governments in the Middle East. This in turn meant India supported Iran by buying its oil and selling it weapons, such as locally produced version of the M60 tank and the F-4 Phantom II fighter. The US quietly endorsed Indian support for Iran, as it allowed them to keep their hands clean.
Though there were tactical successes on both sides, for over a year neither side could produce a strategic victory to end the stalemate and decide the war. That changed in August 1991 when an experimental weapon was driven out from an underground concrete bunker in the Great Salt Desert (Dasht-e Kavir) in northern Iran and mounted atop a steel tower with an altitude of 75 metres. The country’s leading physicists were located in a hardened concrete observation bunker twenty kilometres away. A program that had begun more than twenty years before was about to bear fruit. Iran had painstakingly built fuel-cycle facilities and nuclear power stations of its own design with limited foreign assistance. It had obtained some designs and had hired experts from Great Britain (a nuclear power, though with less than half a dozen warheads left after 1962) in return for free deliveries of petroleum for several years. The CIA had correctly briefed Mondale in 1989 when they told him Iran was less than five years away from successfully testing a nuclear weapon. The weapon, codenamed Darius, was detonated on Tuesday August 20th 1991 and became the largest first test bomb to date, with a yield of 60 kilotons. It was a plutonium based implosion-type design. In 1995, a 3 megaton thermonuclear test was carried out.
This completely changed the course of the Iran-Arab War. Apart from Iraq, all participating Arab powers pulled out as fast as they could and signed separate peace agreements. All of them wanted to avoid becoming the victim of a one-sided regional nuclear war. Even Saudi Arabia abandoned Saddam, and with a 3:1 numerical disadvantage he couldn’t stop the successful Iranian invasion. In November 1991, the Battle of Baghdad began and Republican Guard units fanatically loyal to Saddam as well as Sunni dominated divisions fiercely defended the city as it was surrounded while Iranian forces split the country in two. Iraqi resistance collapsed. Saddam and his family fled the country and went into exile in Switzerland, taking with him hundreds of millions of dollars, priceless artwork, sports cars, bonds and shares. Saddam rightly feared a new Shia dominated regime would sentence him to death for his crimes.
Saddam’s flight led to a total Iraqi collapse and resulted in an Iranian occupation of Iraq. Following Saddam in exile, a Baathist government-in-exile was set up in Geneva, which didn’t recognize the government that emerged after parliamentary elections in October 1992. The Shia dominated government that emerged tried Saddam in absentia and indeed sentenced him to death, forcing Hussein and his family to stay in Switzerland because otherwise he could end up being extradited to Iraq. His unrecognized government-in-exile continues until the present day, without much success. Iraq and Iran established a “special relationship” after the war, exercising a dominant influence in the Middle East. Iran had become a great power.