Chapter 82 - Beria Touches The Stars
Beria Touches the Stars
One of the events that promoted McCarthy's rise to power was the Rosenberg Affair, when Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were found in 1956 to have spied for the Soviet Union.[1] The pair had been discovered to have been passing on top-secret nuclear secrets from the United States to the Soviet Union, almost continuously from 1944 to 1956. Not only had the Rosenbergs passed on information relating to America's atomic bomb testing at the Manhattan Project, they had passed on information relating to Project Ivy Nike, the newest atomic weapon in the American arsenal. The pair was executed in a remarkably controversial trial that saw most of America's intellectual elites castigate the trial as a frenzied mob, whipped up by demagogues like McCarthy.
Regardless, the Americans were astounded, as they were when the Soviets tested their first atomic weapon in 1949 (only 4 years after the Americans), when the Soviets tested their first thermonuclear weapon in 1953, less than six months after the Americans. As the information for the Soviet thermonuclear bomb had so disproportionately come from the NKVD, NKVD head Beria was put in charge of fulfilling Stalin's orders to create a hydrogen bomb so symbolically powerful, it would act as a deterrent against the West, which had many more nuclear weapons than the Soviet Union. Design work began immediately in 1953, and under Beria's tight control, the project went ahead. By early 1957, the new A620EN design was completed and ready for testing.[2] It was a three-stage bomb that relied on fast fission to reach an estimated 100 megaton explosion, 3,000 times the strength of the bomb used against Hiroshima and 20 times stronger than all bombs used in World War II, combined. At that strength, even testing the bomb would be a suicide mission, because it was viewed as nearly impossible for a bomber to actually escape the blast radius. Beria obviously didn't care. The fast fission model also created far more nuclear fallout than any alternative design, causing scientists to constantly try to switch over to a weaker, cleaner 50 megaton model. However, Beria vetoed any such attempts, since he viewed that as a feature, not a bug.
Beria's selection of a target was closely based on his view that the West had to be divided in order for the Soviet Union to economically prosper. His belief was that the more brutal and devastating an attack it was, the more angry the West would be not only at him, but at the United States itself. The first and most obvious choice was Budapest, where the new regime had directly spurned him. But he viewed Hungary as more or less salvageable. There was a large minority of Communists in Hungary who still supported the ancien regime that Beria's NKVD was in charge in. It was simply too early to give up on Hungary - maybe a counter-coup would allow it to return to the Warsaw Pact.
The other obvious target was Nanking. In terms of the death toll, this would probably create the largest death toll, which was a plus to Beria. However, Beria actually feared the notion of permanent enmity with South China. If it were up to Beria, he would have abandoned North China and tried to establish closer relations with the Republic of China. The problem was that this was seen as anathema among the Soviet military, which was overwhelmingly cheering on "our Chinese little brothers" in fighting America. So Nanking was also vetoed.
Athens was also considered. Greece was not yet in NATO. However, with Greek membership essentially pending, this was also vetoed, simply because when committing a horrifying atrocity, it was probably a bad idea to give the Americans any excuse to respond in force. The economy had truly suffered in the Soviet Union and Beria genuinely believed (largely falsely) that the Soviet Union was on the verge of a Polish-style revolution, causing him to actually want peace more than the Americans, making it remarkable that he got the result at Melbourne that he did.
Istanbul was also consider an option, but this was vetoed for the reason that fallout would immediately blanket Bulgaria, where Soviet-Macedonian forces were trying their best to stabilize. Not to mention that the Soviet Union had made some promises to the Turkish Communists.
The runner-up target was Osaka, the largest city in South Japan outside of divided Tokyo. However, Soviet war planners indicated to Beria that this would collapse support for the regime in North Japan, which was so vehemently anti-nuclear and constantly depicted the atomic bombing of Hiroshima in almost all of its domestic propaganda. Not to mention that the atomic bombing of Mukden proved so despised in Japan, that the Kishi government almost immediately collapsed for being seen as too close to the United States. The situation in Japan was thus...rather delicate, and Beria also saw an opportunity to expand Soviet influence.
Beria decided on his target, which apparently was the consensus pick in the Soviet war planning agencies. At the end of the day, the Soviet Union was technically only at war with one country: Sweden. Not to mention Sweden was viewed as a country that had no reasonable hope of being communized and a country that could not easily retaliate (unlike say, China) if the attack was as devastating as Beria hoped (the heavy concentration of the Swedish population in Stockholm was viewed as a positive). The Communists in Sweden seemed to lose power every single year, so this was viewed as the ideal target.
On June 6th, 1957, a modified Soviet TU-95 (to carry a much larger cargo than normally) flew over from Latvia, arriving over Stockholm around noon (the attack was planned at noon to maximize casualties), causing the seminal event of almost an entire continent's population. Almost every European, during peak waking hours, saw a giant mushroom cloud in the distance, causing mass panic in almost European city and village, including ironically the Soviet Union. The mushroom cloud was estimated to reach roughly 85 miles high, around 14 times higher than Mt. Everest, famously reaching so far, it penetrated the thermosphere, the highest layer of Earth's atmosphere that is often considered part of space. Radio communications around Europe notably short-circuited due to nuclear radiation interfering with radio waves in the thermosphere, causing more panic. Atomic clouds would linger in the thermospere for a surprisingly long time, being nicknamed Beria Fingers.
Almost every Northern European felt the explosion - quite famously, the majority of windows of cities as far as the cathedrals of Berlin and Warsaw shattered under the shockwave. A perceptible shockwave was felt by almost the entire continent, down as far as Crimea and Bordeaux. The bomb was actually stronger than expected, testing in at around 110 megatons, as Beria had decided not to test ahead of time in order to maximize the psychological impact.
Within Sweden itself, almost every single city was impacted (nonlethally) by the shockwave. However, the model of bomb was so dirty, it blanked not only almost all of Sweden with fallout, but also Finland, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, North Poland, parts of Denmark, parts of Norway, Leningrad, and parts of Northern Germany with fallout. As to the actual ground zero, the fireball radius was around 5 to 6 miles, enough to immediately wipe out urban Stockholm with a death toll of around 98%, or around 1.1 million people. The air blast destroyed almost all of the buildings in all of Stockholm County (with a very high fatality rate), with third-degree atomic burns given to anyone outside as far as Uppsala. The strike essentially decapitated the entire government, including almost all of the Parliament, the Government, and the Royal Family. In fact, due to Sweden's agnatic primogeniture (only men could inherit), it was unclear if there was any actual successor to the throne. An estimated 1.8 million people would die in 1957, with innocents dying of fallout complications in the following years being common not only in Sweden, but also neighboring countries, including the Soviet Union. This was actually a plus for Beria, because the fallout deaths were disproportionately in the Baltic nations, and he was already preparing for "demographic change" in the border republics. The death toll was also significantly worsened as Stockholm was the primary port of destination of Finnish refugees, as the Swedish government was in the middle of transferring Finns from crowded refugee camps on the Alands into Sweden proper.
Beria considered this a great victory. A horrified Allied delegation signed the Melbourne Accords, realizing that Beria had not actually violated the terms of his handshake agreement with JFK and believing that Beria was actually willing to escalate to a full thermonuclear war (he was actually not, but his brutality convinced the Americans otherwise). Quickly, European conservatives blamed America for the "betrayal of Melbourne", while the party line propagated by Communist-aligned organizations was that America provoked this with their atomic bombing of Mukden. However, many Europeans also realized that the Americans did not launch their attack with the intent of maximizing civilian casualties (President McCarthy briefly considered using a hydrogen bomb, but Strategic Air Command actually vetoed that and he didn't care that much), in contrast with Beria.
Although President Kennedy came into office only a month ago as a conqueror with a sky-high approval rate, his approval rate immediately tumbled, and it was said that the President's personal demeanor dramatically changed. Kennedy had spent most of his life as a remarkably privileged playboy, who had been raised by his father Joe Kennedy to be remarkably ambitious in search of the presidency that had eluded Joe. Many close Kennedy associates remarked that the boy would take the Presidency and then not know what to do with it, fears confirmed when the Melbourne Conference went rather less than swimmingly. After the thermonuclear bombing of Stockholm, the clever, gregarious, ambitious Kennedy seemed to be a thing of the past. Associates noted that the President became far more reserved but also far sharper, spending almost every waking hour in close contact with the intelligence services and Joint Chiefs of Staff. Ironically, when McCarthy had ignored domestic policy, leaving it almost entirely up to Kennedy, Kennedy was now ignoring domestic policy, leaving it up to his Vice-President. JFK often personally believed McCarthy was clowning when he ranted about Communists, but President Kennedy started to begin that he had a point, McCarthy was just too careless and bombastic (he spent years ranting about State Department and Hollywood Communists, but let the Rosenbergs go until 1956???).
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[1] OTL, they're caught later, because the Red Scare only really hits in 1954 instead of 1950.
[2] OTL, a weaker design was implemented because they realized that 1) any stronger weapon would actually destroy the plane dropping it and 2) it would have too much fallout.
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