When the Wind Blew: a P&S Open Thread
- Thread starter Gen_Patton
- Start date
See the spinoff list. On the Nordics, you can try my own Land of Sad Songs about the events in Finland (fully completed, it will take a bit of your time to read it through) and JoHansen's Northern Wind (unfortunately uncompleted) about Norway.
I am interested in it, for one, and would definitely like to read a rebooted version.
You know, we haven't had a disscutiom about what Latin America will look like post exchange and as well as the balkens, like greec and Albania and yougoslavea and south east Asia and Spain and Portugal. What would those regions look like and how and also how about chemical and biological weapons as well.
Latin America may be able to scrape by - with superpower funding for proxy wars dried up in a thousand firestorms, it may even go better in some places - but it all depends on how hard both sides decide to hit the neutrals.
The little bits I've said in my TL have Brasilia copping one, and the requisite destruction of Buenos Aires by a British MIRV.
Greece, Spain, and Portugal are cornholed. All three are US allies and NATO members. Spain oughta be interesting; PSOE are the government by this point, so watching them coordinate their response with the military-bureaucratic apparatus which is still not exactly in love with them should be entertainment, if you like.
Chemical weapons were deployed in Central Europe in the hours leading up to the Exchange, but there probably wasn't time enough to break the seals on the biological nastiness (as evidenced by the fact that there's anyone left alive at all ITTL 2010)
Regarding Portugal, IIRC the canon list of targets mentions only Lisbon and Porto. While the detonations would cause a lot of damage and loss of lives, but won't annihilate industrial capacity, it's the interruption of trade that will be worse in terms of feeding the population.
How self-sufficient in food and fuel is Portugal? Assuming a continuity government is able to operate reasonably smoothly from Setubal or Coimbra (which is nice and central, but might be prone to refugee influxes - mind you, everywhere not nuked will be), it may be hard to get things from A to B (I believe it was yourself who posted a transport map of Portugal on either this thread or mine?).
The more I think about it, the more I think in the P&S scenario, most everything north of the Equator will be GONE. But south of the Equator, that's hard to assess. That is unless the Delta III submarines based at Petropavlovsk had a few boats with instructions to fire their missiles at targets in Australia and New Zealand, using the R-29 or R-29RL missile.
Subic Bay and Clark AB were important military US military bases in the western Pacific post-Vietnam War and had large numbers of US planes and ships based there. While the Soviets may not target metro Manila itself, both bases I mentioned would be among the first hit in a Soviet nuclear first strike, and Manila may suffer the effects radioactive fallout from these nuclear strikes.
There's a chance the Soviets may also target central Manila and Manila International Airport just south of town, since they would want to take out the government infrastructure and make the International Airport unusable for military aircraft operations. That's why I think in the P&S scenario, every major international airport in the Northern Hemipshere would be on the first strike list, because they have long enough runways to support B-52 operations.
In post https://www.alternatehistory.com/fo...vive-new-zealand.331647/page-33#post-13512998, I digged a map (which took me quite some time to find in the net)
https://largodoscorreios.files.wordpress.com/2015/05/comboio-1.jpg
Found a map even closer to the POD
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-OYt5jqqH3Q8/VXMtsh4VzJI/AAAAAAAAGeA/N3syGWsc-0k/s1600/mapa+cp+1985.gif
Considering this more accurate map, the nukes won't impact much the train network. If I were an official creating plans for a ww3 scenario, in a scenario where only Lisbon and Port are hit, I would suggest Coimbra or Figueira da Foz as a capital. Setúbal has a good port and shipyards, but is in the middle of a strongly communist area.
If I understood well the data for 1990 on the Agricultural Statistics - 2006 (Estatísticas Agrícolas - 2006), from Statistics Portugal, I couldn't find earlier data.
https://www.ine.pt/xportal/xmain?xp...PUBLICACOESpub_boui=6209833&PUBLICACOESmodo=2
https://www.ine.pt/ngt_server/attachfileu.jsp?look_parentBoui=24172691&att_display=n&att_download=y
Page 104, table 92, and previous pages, Portugal could possibly feed itself, already considering many of the casualties would be from urban areas. If someone with more knowledge on nutrition can offer a better opinion, I would be glad.
Edit:
Regarding fuel sufficiency, this link from the Bank of Portugal, page 5, graph 2, in 1984, it was slightly slower than today, by eye, it seemed to have been around 90% energetic dependency, which means there would be heavy fuel rationing, which could complicate food distribution.
https://www.bportugal.pt/sites/default/files/anexos/papers/ab201007_p.pdf
The easiest would be to relocate some people closer to the food production, even encourage some people to return to the areas they migrated from, but that takes time and it's not easy.
Last edited:
If the Soviets had plans to attack Australia and New Zealand with nuclear warheads out of subs and/or naval ships, I would think it would've made more sense to have subs with assigned targets in the Southern Hemisphere to be based in Vladivostok - or better yet, Cam Ranh Bay in Vietnam (IOTL, there were indeed Soviet subs based there).
PK seems a bit far north, so although it did have a submarine base IOTL and more than likely ITTL, it's much more likely the subs there would've been assigned targets in parts of east Asia, western North America and Hawaii rather than those in the Southern Hemisphere.
In addition to the targets mentioned by Tsar of New Zealand being Wellington and Auckland, I believe in other stories, the Australian cities of Perth, Sydney, Canberra, Cairns and prolly also Darwin were hit. Melbourne was not hit and would later become the new federal capital of Australia. I don't know about Adelaide and Brisbane/Ipswich*, I presume they might have survived in P&S.
There is a short story somewhere in this forum taking place in Hanoi, and it's mentioned as being hit by either a Chinese or US warhead. It's quite likely that Ho Chi Minh City and Cam Ranh would also have been hit by nukes, the latter more than likely targeted by US nukes.
*An RAAF base is located in Ipswich, just west of Brisbane.
So in my TL I followed the continuity established in The Lucky Country so far as strikes on Aussie were concerned: three strikes at the extreme range of missiles from Chita Oblast upon Sydney, Canberra, and Darwin (1MT each), and seven strikes from an SSBN in the Arafura Sea or thereabouts upon Townsville, Cairns, Pine Gap, Alice Springs (there's overkill, if you like), Perth, Fremantle, and Rockhampton (200KT ea).
However, I continue to take issue with the events of that TL, which are rather too sweetly optimistic for my liking.
Likewise, NZ is hit by a Soviet bomber at the edge of its effective range somewhere around the Central Pacific (the implication being Christchurch is spared by a decision to hit Guam (or was it Truk?) instead.
I figure Cam Ranh will get totalled, possibly Nha Trang as well if the Americans are hitting all there can (a pity; I was there last November and it's a lovely part of the world), but there's mention in Ashes of the Dragon of a Vietnamese Federation, implying a surviving state.
I've established that Singapore was hit several times over, as was Kuala Lumpur; the Malaysian government, and feel free to dispute the canonicity of all this as I haven't raised it with the rest of the Cabal, has evacuated to surviving Penang as at ITTL July 1984. Jakarta and maybe Surabaya were also hit; I don't know enough about Suharto's Indonesia to comment on the likely ramifications for it. Survival, reconstruction, crony capitalism??