Fireworks Night
There are many strange spectator events; cheese rolling, wife carrying ... golf.
Nuclear orbital bombardment must rank as the most unusual, and by far the most spectacular.
Nine days ago, the ghostly glowing ball of dust had become the largest object visible in the sky. Day by day, it continued to grow, and after the detonation of the Deep Space Interceptors, it became even brighter, and impossible to ignore. It is visible across more than half the world, day or night, shining brighter than the Moon. By the time the impacts are due, depending on where you are, it fills the entire sky and turns night into a peculiarly cold, silver daylight.
Shortly after the last of the Pebbles exploded, 406 Minuteman missiles roared out of their silos across the USA and tilted over to head west. A few minutes later, 98 Trident D5 missiles were blasted out of their launch tubes from on board five US Navy submarines, three of which were sitting on the surface near the Hawaiian Islands, the other two off Alaska. Two of the Tridents had failed to fire, and another lost control shortly after staging, while the rest headed for their targets at carefully selected locations in the middle of nowhere. Spectacular though the results would be, the submarines did not wait around to watch. Once they had fired off their missiles, their Captains were under orders to dive, as a thousand feet of water would protect them from all but the largest of impacts.
Operation Dropkick is the last line of defence, and it is a rather crude one. Although these weapons are powerful ICBMs, their performance is still low in comparison to an orbital rocket. When they were designed, they needed to throw their payloads to the near-orbital speeds that are required to coast a quarter of the way around the world. Today, they are being asked to do something very different, to launch their warheads towards precisely defined positions in space, usually at as high an altitude as can be achieved.
The position of the Earth and the time of day at which the impacts would occur mean that only half of the world is directly threatened, centred over the Pacific Ocean. At this late stage, there is no chance of intercepting everything that is going to hit, so some months ago, the world's nuclear-armed nations all quietly decided to use their arsenals to protect themselves, or their allies, or in the case of Russia, those who were able to pay for protection.
The most dangerous objects would be in the “walls” of the shell of material that had previously been hit by the Pebbles. These walls are not solid, and their edges are not precisely defined, but radar plots and statistical analysis suggest that any remaining “B class” fragments (loosely, pieces over 20m in diameter) are most likely to be found in a region that is a few thousand miles thick. As the orbits of the comet debris and the Earth intersect, there would be two distinct periods of maximum danger, separated by about 14 minutes, and each lasting about 2-3 minutes.
Unlike the carefully controlled DSI and Pebble interceptions, the ICBMs’ warheads could not be actively guided towards a specific target, and there is nothing more than radar and time fusing to detonate them. In the days and months leading up to March 1st, Dropkick and its Anglo-Australian, Russian, French and Chinese sister operations were touted as mankind’s "fourth line of defence". In truth, they were always going to have a very limited objective. Even though some of the rockets carried lighter loads than were normal, the limited performance of the missiles means that none of the weapons would reach higher than 6,000 miles above the Earth.
The publicly stated objective of Dropkick is to try to ensure that there is a clear path (or rather, a path that is free of large objects) through the walls of the shell. Ideally, this would be at least 8,000 miles wide, the same as the Earth, and would allow the entire planet to pass through a “hole” in the debris field. In practice, there are nowhere near enough warheads to achieve this, and the fallout consequences would be unthinkable even if there had.
These last-ditch interceptions would occur no more than two minutes before the fragments would hit the planet, and it is widely understood that the objective is not to stop them hitting, but to break up any larger objects into small pieces that will burn up before they hit the ground. What is not widely understood is that the areas that are being “protected” are very small.
The Pebble interceptions occurred out in space at a similar distance to the orbit of the Moon, about an hour-and-a-half before impact. After those detonations, there would be no time to track anything else, and it would not be possible to realign hundreds of ICBM guidance programs within those last few minutes. No realistic effort could be made to ensure that warheads would be targeted at zones of maximum debris density, all that could be done is to set up a barrage to try to protect key sites.
In the case of Dropkick, the zones that the warheads would attempt to clear were lines extending up along the vector of the comet's approach from the exposed cities on America's western seaboard, San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Diego. Although two others would be just about above the horizon at the start of the critical 15 minutes, Portland would have to take its chances, and where would Las Vegas be without taking a gamble? The risk of impact for these two was very low, and it was thought more important to try to protect the isolated regional hubs of Anchorage and Honolulu.
Contrary to widespread belief, no attempt was being made to protect any other part of the US.
On the other side of the world, it is believed that vast amounts of money had changed hands. The Russian and Chinese equivalent of Dropkick certainly had a humanitarian intent, but it is believed to have benefitted a huge number of people along the way. Both the American government and the Western financial sector are understood to have conspired with officials from both nations to ensure that it was in a lot of influential people’s interests to launch a Russian strike to defend foreign territory.
Strategically, the Americans had one eye on the future; the USA would be firing off the majority of her ICBM force, and it would therefore be in American interests to see Russia expend a significant faction of its nuclear arsenal too.
The Russian and Chinese missiles were leaving their pads, silos, and a Russian submarine, to attempt to provide protection to Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong. Thanks to an undisclosed “loan guarantee package” to Russia from the Japanese government, Tokyo, Osaka and Kobe would also be shielded by three groups of blasts, courtesy of 116 SS-18 missiles.
The weakest, but perhaps the most noble attempt at a defensive barrage is put up by the Marine Nationale, and French sailors deploy 143 warheads from on board the submarines Foudroyant and Tonnant, stationed near Singapore and Melbourne. France herself is not threatened directly, and it was decided that there was no practical defence possible for France’s tiny overseas territories in the Pacific. To be critical of the operation, the relatively small number of low-yield warheads were spread too thinly to offer a comprehensive defence, but for two of the region’s largest cities, it was better than nothing, while the French nation could feel that “every effort is being made”.
In terms of the number of warheads, Operation Wicketkeeper is the smallest of the five last-ditch defence plans. However, individually the warheads were much more powerful than any of the others, and they had one other slight advantage. Four Kraken missiles are launched from on board the partially-complete V-Ship HMS Vindictive, as her orbit carried her over the far side of the planet.
Even though they are not multi-stage ICBMs, the advantage of being launched from orbit meant that the Krakens could reach higher altitudes than the ground-based missiles. With the few extra seconds of interception time that the extra altitude allowed, the 40 warheads could be deployed and detonated in a different sequence. Instead of trying to create a line of near-simultaneous explosions, the program is timed to explode a pair of 1.2Mt bombs every five seconds. The Krakens’ MIRV buses had been programmed to spread the warheads to create a ripple of nuclear detonations, with each successive pair at a slightly lower altitude than the last. Any comet fragments on the relevant approach vector would have to fly through the residual debris and heat pulses from all previous explosions, before being "hit" by a new pair of bombs that are timed for each successive part of the stream. It is hoped that this approach will form a localised version of the “Kessler Syndrome”, a zone of dense debris left over from previously shattered objects, helping to break up any subsequent inbound fragments before they hit the atmosphere. The higher-altitude interception will allow more time for any fragments to break up, further helping to compensate for the small number of bombs that are being used.
With only 40 warheads available, this tactic would only cover the "near" side of the shell of comet debris, and so at 19:30UTC, the final launch of this last line of defence took place from Rainbow Beach. The first stage core of a Delta Star rocket (which had started its life as a Black Anvil missile in the 1970s) had been fitted with the last available Kraken missile instead of its upper stage. Originally intended for a V-Ship, the missile was instead launched directly at the "far" side of the shell, its ten warheads acting as Sydney's final line of defence. At best, it would only provide a partial protection, and as with all the bombardment weapons, the warheads would have to traverse part of the debris field before they reached the zone where they were programmed to detonate. In this case, the lift-off was delayed for as long as they could to allow some of the smaller debris to pass. These pieces would burn up in the atmosphere, but at 72km/s in the vacuum of space, they could be lethal to a satellite or warhead.
It was a probably a forlorn hope, but it was worth a try. Estimates of the density of material close to Earth at this point varied between one particle per 4-10 million cubic metres. That doesn’t sound like much, but at that rate, the MIRV bus could expect to be hit by something once for every 500-1,000km of movement through the field, or approximately once every ten seconds. The busses were built to be tough, and the micro-meteoroid armour on this particular weapon had been improved, but nothing is known of the missile or its warheads from about two minutes after launch. No-one ever confirmed any detonations had taken place. The launch crews had stayed at their posts until the last minute, but once the rocket was away, it was time to take cover. For these “far” side interceptions, it was the same story all over the world.
The sentiment that “every effort must be made” was perhaps the real motive for this last set of operations. No-one could measure whether any of these pinpoint defence strategies made any difference, as they all were too busy taking shelter. There is even uncertainty as to how many bombs went off, how many rockets failed, and how many warheads were destroyed or damaged by debris before they could explode. No doubt someone, someday, will find the remains of a few unexploded Hydrogen bombs at the bottom of the Pacific.
To those who dared to watch, the initial sequence of Dropkick blasts would be one of the most awe-inspiring sights anyone has ever witnessed. The low angle of approach of the debris towards the US mainland means that these explosions are at lower altitude than any of the others, and any observers who remained on the west coast saw a series of thousand-mile-long dotted lines of brilliant thermonuclear fire suddenly appear suspended in the skies over the Pacific.
Meanwhile, nature’s unstoppable fireworks display had begun.
The first shooting stars were seen over Australia, New Zealand and Papua New Guinea at 18:48.
