Thanks to CajunBear73, Bdog3601, and OechsnerC for their reviews and input
=O=
Chapter 36: Tactical Nuclear War
"Sir. Tactical and strategic forces are on alert, and forward troops should be receiving warning orders momentarily. Tactical nuclear forces are ready to respond automatically to enemy nuclear use. If called upon, strategic forces are in position to respond with selective and major attack options within the hour." The attaché, his easel at the ready, nodded sharply.
The Advisor thanked the attaché, and offered a cup of hot coffee to the President, who was leaning forward over his desk, exhausted from sixteen hours of backbreaking negotiations with the Indians.
The Advisor grimaced. All that effort – and the inevitable had merely been forestalled by one day.
He spoke. "You think the Indians'll wait a bit before attacking?"
She shook her head. "Nope. Not at all. Stalemate is… not their thing."
The Secretary stormed into the situation room, shaking his head. "Well, the Soviets were most unhelpful. So what's the plan, Mr. President? Do we preempt?"
"No." The President whispered. "We will not preempt."
The Advisor nodded in agreement. "Preemption only grants us limited advantages. On the other hand, letting the Indians shoot first gives us political carte blanche to use as much nuclear firepower as we want."
The Secretary frowned as he examined the board. "Up to and including a major attack option?"
The Advisor nodded. "Richard, I know you wanted to keep this war limited to the borderlands, but the Indian bombers constitute a major threat to our allies in the region. Unless the Indians back down immediately after they salvo, they have to go."
The Secretary frowned. "Do we have any other options? In case the Indians do something… completely unexpected?"
"Unfortunately, our options are rather limited at this point." The Advisor put down her coffee cup. "SAC's bomber force is currently locked in a high-readiness retaliatory posture to execute a major attack option. To reconfigure would take hours – hours during which the Indian nuclear force could escape and/or launch an attack. Striking fast and hard is our best option."
The Secretary nodded. "No objections here."
"We gave peace a chance." The President's jaw was set hard. "Now, we'll let them shoot first, and then shoot 'em until they can't shoot back. We win this thing."
=O=
The Captain ran as fast as he could. His breath fogged the plastic-coated eye-holes of his gas mask, and sweat ran down the insides of his nuclear, biological, and chemical (NBC) protection suit in rivulets. Given the circumstances, though, he was exceedingly grateful for the horribly encumbering suit.
Through his fogged mask, he could just make out a massive pillar of smoke and dust, still riding the air currents into a mushroom cap somewhere in the dark grey sky above.
The strike hadn't been a complete surprise – which was why he was still alive, and which was why his company was still mostly intact.
It had happened so fast. One minute, he'd been in the thick of a firefight with Indian reconnaissance troops, and the next, he had followed orders to duck duck duck, a massive fist had slammed into his foxhole, a mushroom cloud had erupted over their rear area, the entire valley was on fire, and battalion had fallen off the radio net.
He looked in awe at the valley below. Literally everything that could possibly catch fire was on fire, turning the forested valley floor into a sea of flame. Even patches of moss on the barren upper slopes smoked gently, having absorbed too much heat from the flash.
He made his way to the weapons platoon. The Sergeant, almost unrecognizable in full NBC gear – gasmask, rubber suit, bottoms, gloves – was already handing out the nuclear rockets. "Good job, Sergeant!"
As usual, the combination for the storage case had been set to 000 – a combination not even the greenest private could ever forget. "What the hell's going on, sir?!"
The Captain shrugged. "Hell if I know! I can't raise battalion!"
"There's a radio's working back with third platoon, sir! We can call arty!"
"Excellent! Get a runner over to third platoon, call in a strike, and have them move the radio over to first! Call down fire on reference points two and three now! We've got enemy armor massing at the pass! I want artillery to put nukes on those tank columns now! And I want enemy arty out of the picture when it rears its ugly head!"
"Private! You heard the man!"
The soldier looked lost. "I dunno how, sir."
"Just repeat what I said. They'll figure it out! Remember, Two and Three!"
The Captain glanced at the watermelon-sized nuclear warhead before him, ensconced in a carrying bag. He picked it up, and slung the thirty-odd-kilogram weight over his back. "Follow me! Nuclear weapons platoon up to the ridge!"
In the valley below, a surviving segmented jeep barreled around wildfires, a nuclear rocket launcher mounted on a pintle. Good. Everyone had the same idea.
More mushroom clouds – really big ones, from the looks of it – rose over the hills as they made their way back to the ridge, tightly clutching their precious nuclear antitank rockets.
They got to the ridge, panting in their bulky, hot NBC suits. Enemy artillery landed all around them, forcing them to the deck as shrapnel tore through the air like supersonic confetti. Three men didn't get back up.
The explosions stopped, and the trooper hastily set up the launcher, pushing it above the ridgeline.
The Captain hastily dialed in the yield: twenty tons of TNT-equivalent, maximum. A firecracker, really – barely enough to level a city block or blow up a bridge, no more powerful than a B-52 strike.
He looked down the length of the valley. This really wasn't very good tank country.
Elsewhere on the ridge, an antitank missile roared down the valley as a tank platoon, in single file, rumbled into view. It missed the lead Soviet-made tank, leaving trails of command wire all over the turret as it exploded ineffectually behind it.
The company had spread itself thin on purpose so a single nuclear warhead wouldn't get them all, which had greatly cut into their ability to fight as a team. A single tank should have been hit with two or three antitank missiles at once, damnit!
Heck, the whole division had spread itself thin. The rest of the brigade had started pulling back the previous night, leaving a battalion in place to hold the passes with help from lots and lots of firepower. But the B-52 strikes had dried up – scuttlebutt had it that their base had been badly hit – and orders from brigade had gotten increasing confused.
Unlike the forces to the rear, who could evade detection and targeting by nuclear artillery simply by moving around a bit, his boys had been fixed in place, and gotten nuked for his trouble.
He turned his attention back to the task at hand. The yield dialed, he hurriedly screwed the warhead onto the rocket motor, and mounted the oversized bulb-headed contraption – a stubby cotton swab of a rocket - on the tripod-mounted launch tube with a click. He surveyed the scene below. The tank trundled forward, spraying the ridge with machine-gun fire as it advanced.
This was what these puppies had been built for. An honest-to-god nuclear battlefield, where communications were so screwed up, and where tanks moved so fast, that you wouldn't live to call in a nuclear artillery strike, and it would be off-target by the time it arrived.
Better to have the nukes with the infantry: See tank, shoot tank; simple, reliable, dependable.
In war, sheer simplicity counted for a lot.
"Get the lead tank!"
The operator took aim. "Ready!"
"Fire!" He let loose the rocket, and everyone ducked for cover as a massive, twenty-tonne explosion rocked the valley. The blast rolled over them, and a tiny, misshapen mushroom cloud, a big plume barely a kilometer tall, slowly rose into the sky.
The Captain poked his head over the ridge, eager to see the results.
The lead tank was a smoking wreck, but the second tank, while shaken, seemed scarcely affected by the blast, emerging from the dust cloud with little more than smashed optics, shattered antennas, and damaged externals… before grinding to halt.
Probably blast and radiation effect, the Captain thought. A forty-tonne tank might physically survive a nuclear blast, but its crew might not survive being tossed around inside a steel box with lots of hard objects, nor would it survive the prompt neutron radiation from any small atomic weapon.
The last two tanks belched thick clouds of white smoke, and reversed course as fast as they could, hoping to disappear into the smokescreen.
"Ready!" The operator shouted.
"Fire! DUCK!"
Another nuclear rocket barreled down the valley, exploding with an earth-shattering kaboom somewhere in the cloud of smoke. Damnit.
The enemy column disappeared behind banks of man-made fog.
There was a lull before enemy artillery shells came screaming down once more, exploding in puffs of smoke and thunder. How the heck were their radios still working?!
A nuclear flash washed over the valley, turning everything golden-white.
"DUCK AND COVER!"
Six massive explosions, one after the other, erupted in the near distance as the artillery, in a panic, did their job, smothering enemy artillery positions and presumed columns of armor in 0.1-kiloton baby nukes – hopefully enough firepower to break up the attack.
Hurricanes of dust roared over their position as the Captain pressed himself as flat against the dirt as he could, trying his best to block out the hammer blows echoing across the valley.
Someone screamed. The Captain got up, and continued screwing nuclear warheads onto rocket motors.
Six small mushroom clouds, each barely two kilometers tall, rose from down-valley, adding to the smoke and dust.
A tank emerged from the blast zone. And another. With this much smoke, and fire on pre-registered positions, there was a fair chance the artillery had missed the column entirely. Firepower, even nuclear firepower, was not quite helpful when there was nobody to aim it.
Nor were the nuclear artillery shells particularly large nukes - against tanks, they had a kill radius of a hundred meters from impact at best. That was not a bad thing – had the nukes been any bigger, he'd have been vaporized along with the tanks.
The tanks had spread out as much as they could, and had begun firing enthusiastically even as they continued to lay down smokescreens, fearful of nuclear attack.
No artillery support for them either this time…
"Ready!"
"Fire! DUCK!"
Another nuclear warhead streaked down the valley, obliterating the enemy tank in the middle, and stopping the others in their tracks.
Chinook gunships popped up across the ridge, loosing TOW missiles on surviving tanks, and raking the battlefield in autocannon fire before withdrawing. No antiaircraft fire rose to meet them. Hah! The 'soft' antiaircraft guns, with delicate radars, had not survived on the nuclear battlefield!
Ragged holes emerged in the smokescreen, allowing the captain to glimpse a tank column in the fog.
"Sir!" A radioman, huffing and puffing in his heatstroke-inducing radiation suit, screeched to a halt in front of him. "Radio!"
The Captain barked quickly into the radio, almost unable to believe the words spilling from his mouth.
He was calling for nuclear artillery fire, danger close – under a kilometer away.
He was authorizing more nuclear counterbattery fires.
He was observing shells as they fell amongst the tanks, ready to call down a nuclear coup de grace.
But he was saying the words, and the man on the other end was confirming them.
"Shot, over."
The Captain turned white. "DUCK AND COVER!"
The valley was bathed in light. Blast after blast rocked the valley, and a massive dust cloud smothered his position in hopefully non-radioactive powder. The tops of an additional four mushroom clouds began to poke over the ridge as the lead tank columns were smothered in two nuclear artillery rounds each. More men screamed as atomic shrapnel tore across the battlefield.
"Splash, out."
Another tank emerged from the gloom. The projections had been right - a single nuclear artillery round was only effective against half a tank company.
The Captain cursed the delays in the neutron bomb program. With less blast and more armor-piercing, crew-killing neutron radiation, neutron bombs would have worked much better on tanks while being far less dangerous to his men.
"Ready!" The nuclear rocket launcher had relocated, and was aiming downslope.
"Fire! DUCK!"
The lead tank disappeared in another massive explosion.
The Sergeant spoke. "Sir! We're running low on nuclear rockets and shells! We need to raise battalion or higher, fast!"
The Captain swore. "We have to hold until brigade sends support down here!"
The Sergeant was incredulous. "We can hold for six more hours maybe, twelve if arty lays down extra kaboom! Then we're out of ammo and stuck out here!"
"That's nuclear war for you, Sergeant! I need to get to first platoon!" The Captain left. Nuclear war had never been about blasting every infantryman out of his hidey-hole (although that was possible, he supposed). The point had always been to demolish the resupply and command system, causing armies to grind to a halt.
Now to find first platoon. He hoped the nuclear demolition charge was still intact, but given that they hadn't blown it yet, it seemed unlikely.
His radiation meter was clickling angrily, but the Captain ignored it. If the Indians rolled over his position within the hour, fallout would be the least of his worries.
=O=
They headed south.
As a warm white glow seeped under his flash curtain, Hiccup resisted the urge to peak out his left window, where the sun was rising above a curved horizon into a blue-black sky.
Toothless swept beams of microwaves across the Himalayas, eagerly taking in the scenery on radar – and watching for enemy aircraft. In the distance, B-58Bs crisscrossed the skies above Assam, shiny white one-megaton bombs and Short-Range Attack Missiles (SRAMs) hanging beside their gigantic centerline fuel pods, ready to pounce on any FROG rocket batteries that revealed themselves.
The mountains crested fifteen kilometers below them, and the valleys of the disputed area, the plains of Assam, and East Pakistan came into view, the world stretching out before them to a pale blue horizon five hundred kilometers distant.
Hiccup blanched in horror.
Palls of dust obscured the barren valleys, obscuring their crisp, sharp ridges with staticky blurs.
"Astrid, they launched! I count two… three initiations over the disputed area. Tactical weapons, maybe a hundred kilotons. Adjust heading eleven o'clock."
Astrid inhaled sharply. "Looks like our odds of going downtown just went way up." She smiled a little smile, eager for payback and not just a little saddened by what payback might bring. She took Toothless higher, hoping to gain altitude before the retaliatory strikes began.
"Topaz flight, this is Mordor. Daisy, I repeat, Daisy."
Far below, more rockets launched skywards from the backs of light trucks as Indian troops desperately tried to fire all their weapons before they were destroyed. Desperate men methodically loaded spare missiles onto launch rails even as some turned their eyes skyward, searching in vain for the weapons that would end them.
Toothless swept his radar across the valleys, searching intently for enemy launches.
"Astrid, we've got more nuclear rocket artillery! Seven. Nine. Twelve… multiple launches! They're headed right for our supply lines on the ground!" Even more dots appeared on his screen, heading higher and faster than before. "Scuds! Headed for support bases!"
On cue, a flurry of dots rose above the mountains from the Pacifican side of the border, arcing towards pre-registered targets across Assam. "And… here come our Pershings. Coming our way now."
Little nuclear rockets, travelling in opposite directions, arced past Toothless, crisscrossing the heavens as they fell past each other towards targets on the far side of the massive mountain range.
Hiccup pictured the great battles beloved of epics and sagas, where, amongst and above great clashes of armies of pike and sword, men on horse- and dragon-back charged hither and yon across open fields, even as arrows and catapult-launched-projectiles filled the skies.
Well, technology put the battles envisaged by even the greatest of epics to shame. For the fields now stretched across vast mountain ranges, nay, across whole continents, and the aeronautical battlefields above them stretched into infinity, far above the bottom eight kilometers of sky where men could breathe the air and live. Pike and sword had given way to guns that could punch through feet of solid steel, cannon that blasted death across the horizon, and missile launchers that could hit a target more surely than the best longbowman. And with the dawn of the Atomic Age, each blast of a gun, each rocket, each missile… could obliterate in instants unbeatable armies, impregnable cities, great nations that would have otherwise have taken years to vanquish.
No cities were to be incinerated yet. Despite the fearsome firepower under consideration, the ongoing nuclear war appeared to be a tactical one – constrained to the battlefield, albeit one that seemed to grow larger by the minute.
A bright light snaked its way beneath the flash curtain, and the radar picture changed unrecognizably. Eight flashes tore across Assam as the B-58Bs of Topaz flight dropped their one-megaton bombs on uncovered and suspected FROG and Scud batteries, hopefully destroying as many of them as possible before they could get off the ground.
This was not like the surgical nuclear strikes against missile launchers and SAM sites of the day before. This was wholesale destruction of whole areas with weapons a thousand times more powerful – death sentences for largish patches of countryside. The only consolation would be that they were using airbursts, with minimal wide-area fallout.
One megaton groundbursts – necessary against bridges, railway yards, and other hardened targets - would have spread fallout over an area the size of a small country.
From horizon to horizon, mushroom caps rose in their dozens high into the stratosphere, terminating in billowing pillows of turbulent air and slightly radioactive dust that loomed large on Hiccup's radar screen.
"Hiccup, snap out of it. Mushroom caps!"
"Alter course zero-one-zero."
"You got it, Hiccup."
Toothless rocked gently as the blast wave of a nearby weapon reached them through a distance of forty kilometers, having sucked missiles out of revetments out to three kilometers and blown down farmhouses and villages out to six.
From beneath the rising mushroom clouds, amidst gestating firestorms, one or two dots continued to rise into the sky as the Indians flung what was left of their tactical arsenal into the sky, attracting the attention of yet more B-58Bs.
More mushroom clouds soared skywards as they went feet wet over the Bay of Bengal.
"Okay, Astrid. Continue southwest, and we should be at our hold points in no time."
=O=
Ruffnut blasted through the foothills of the Himalayas, methodically banking and rolling Meatlug as she flew well below the height of the surrounding ridges. Meatlug roared past treeless gravelly slopes, rockfalls, and raging mountain streams as Ruffnut kept her eye on the altimeter.
Some distance away, an F-111 lugging a reconnaissance pod roared past, bobbing leisurely up and down under the guidance of automatic terrain-following radar – lucky bastards – as it headed to southern Assam to determine whether targets had been sufficiently nuked.
Hey, this wasn't a strategic nuclear war, where you were allowed to double-up or even triple-up the ICBMs on targets "just to be sure".
Ruffnut laughed. Nuclear war! She was fighting an honest-to-god nuclear war! And she looked so cool! To prevent crews being completely flash-blinded by nuclear explosions, TAC aircrews flying in nuclear environments always wore eyepatches – so you could hope to survive one nuclear flash and not crash your plane because you were, like, totally blind.
Yeah, sure, she was probably not going to see Astrid again, and cleaning the radioactive dust out of every nook and cranny in Meatlug had been a chore, but the adrenaline was more than adequate consolation for the time being.
Ruffnut Thorsten, Atomic Sky Pirate. It had a nice ring to it, Ruffnut thought.
Barren valleys soon gave way to lush forest as they crossed into Indian airspace.
A mighty flash pulsed across the sky as an army tactical nuclear missile incinerated the valley next door, and Fishlegs trembled in awe as a gargantuan mushroom cloud rose fifteen kilometers into the sky, towering over the mountain peaks.
"Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Ruff, that's at least a hundred kilotons right there."
"Less talking, more nuking!"
The terrain leveled out, and Ruffnut hit the deck, roaring across the treetops at just under the speed of sound.
Fishlegs checked his map. "Ruff, SAM site, eleven o'clock. We should try to stay…"
"Target of opportunity!" Meatlug banked left, and Ruffnut scanned the ground below for…
"Eight kilometers, dead ahead!" She barked.
Fishlegs checked his cathode-ray-tube and locked on. "Rifle! Missile away!"
A Maverick TV-guided anti-tank missile, tipped with a two-kiloton nuclear warhead, roared off the launch rail, and Meatlug banked sharply right, crushing Fishlegs as Ruff turned as far away from the site as possible.
A gentle flash flittered across her instruments, and a sharp crack was heard over the roar of the turbojets.
They continued to barrel across the plain as nuclear flashes crackled in the sky like flashes of lightning. In the distance, Fishlegs watched in horror as two massive mushroom clouds rose over the horizon, each perhaps thirty kilometers wide and peaking at twenty kilometers. "Uhh… that looks like a megatonnner."
"We've got a megaton right here, Fishlegs. Eyes on target!" A patch of low hills and valleys rose in the distance.
Fishlegs gulped. "Okay… adjust heading zero-zero-nine… steady… loft in three… two… one…" The computer readied itself.
"UP!" Ruffnut brought Meatlug into a steep climb, and Fishlegs authorized it to drop the bomb.
At a carefully computed moment, the computer released the slim one-megaton thermonuclear bomb. The console beeped, and Meatlug lurched upward, suddenly one metric tonne lighter.
"Gogogogogo!" Fishlegs fought the urge to close his eyes even as Ruffnut banked sharply left to point Meatlug's tail at the imminent thermonuclear blast. Ruffnut pushed her throttle to the max, engaged afterburners, and whooped maniacally as she put as much distance between herself and the bomb as possible.
The one tonne bomb sailed through the air. Full of momentum from the Phantom's climb, it continued upwards even as the Phantom banked clear away, arcing towards its target like a thrown baseball.
It was clear from statistics like these that nuclear power was at least a million times more powerful than chemical power, Fishlegs thought. Why else would a nuclear bomb with the power of a million tonnes (or a 'megaton') of chemical explosive weigh but one tonne?
Somewhere over a hilly area of farms, villages, and suspected hide positions for an Indian armored brigade, the white-painted bomb deployed a slim parachute as its radar altimeter flickered to life.
"six… five…" Fishlegs closed his eyes, and Ruffnut kept her eyes on the ground
A massive fireball, over a kilometer across, erupted over the hills, and a searing flash burned through exposed skin over a circle twenty kilometers across. A blast wave thundered across the region, demolishing even concrete houses up to three kilometers away. Every window in a fifteen-kilometer radius shattered, flying through the air in a deadly hail of glass, slicing through those who had not known to duck-and-cover or worse, risen to seek the origin of the flash.
"Cowabunga!" Meatlug rocked as the blast wave passed the jet. "Onward to our secondary target!"
She racked her brain for the correct procedures. Man, she hadn't flown close air support in years. Did Fishlegs even know how to do close air support?
"Hey Fishlegs, you remember how to do close air support?"
"Uh… no. But look! This is a free-fire zone. Anything in this box is hostile."
Ruffnut groaned. "Do I have to do everything around here?!" She painstakingly worked the radio even while trying to fly her aircraft.
They rocketed above a dirt road, and her Geiger counter beeped alarmingly as they passed scorched valleys.
"Hey! A bunch of trucks!"
Ruffnut shrugged. "Might as well pop them all off so we can call Winchester and go home."
"Rifle! Missile away!" A nuclear Maverick sped towards the truck convoy, and they banked away from their third little mushroom cloud of the day. Two left.
"Holy hell." Fishlegs called out.
Ruffnut looked down. Before and atop a large landslide, a dozen armored vehicles – half of them burning – charged forward, frantically exchanging fire with someone on the other side. She racked her head as she tried to remember what she needed to check for.
A flashbulb went off somewhere around them, and Ruffnut swore as black stars shot through her vision.
It's daytime. You're not blind. It's probably temporary.
She lifted her other eyepatch, and yanked hard on her stick as the lush green hills filled her canopy. Meatlug's engines roared to life, and Ruffnut was crushed in her seat as Meatlug climbed for safer skies.
"We're a little cooked, but we'll be fine. Low dose." Fishlegs stated.
"Goddamnit! If you've got nuclear arty coming in, tell us!" She yelled at nobody in particular.
She sighed as blue-black blotches appeared over her instruments, and put her patch over her bad eye. "Okay, there's no FAC on the line, so we'll just shoot what we see from a safe distance."
They dove towards the valley, and Ruffnut caught a glimpse of tanks mounting attacks even as little mushroom clouds intermittently covered them in dust and smoke. Ruffnut couldn't blame 'em. If you didn't move, you got hit by nuclear arty. If you moved, the man-portable nuclear rocket launchers might at least miss.
But they hadn't counted on fighter jets with two-kiloton nuclear anti-tank missiles.
"Rifle." Fishlegs launched a Maverick at the tanks still charging forward.
It fell off its launch rail without igniting. Ruffnut groaned. A 100,000-dollar nuclear missile - wasted just because someone in the arming crew forgot to pull off a fuse plug.
"Oops. Rifle." Fishlegs launched a second Maverick at the tanks. "Winchester."
They banked away as another flash rocked the valley. A great column of smoke and dust rose from the valley floor, terminating in a cap high above them.
"Don't you want to see how we did?" Fishlegs asked.
"Nope! Home for seconds!" Rad as the destruction was, Ruffnut had no interest in sticking around to be shot down in the middle of a nuclear battlefield.
An F-111 fighter-bomber, wings swept back, pylons clean, and two thermonuclear bombs nestled snugly in its bomb bay, blew past them at Mach 1.1 towards insufficiently-nuked targets in southern Assam.
Ruffnut whooped happily as scenes from the apocalypse unfolded around her.
=O=
Author's note: I know it doesn't quite make sense to send a Wild Weasel driver out on a nuclear strike mission (that's a fighter pilot's job), but I couldn't resist giving everyone MOAR NUCLEAR WARFARE from near ground level. Plus, Atomic Sky Pirates!