Thanks to Stingray10111, OechsnerC, CajunBear73, and Atomicsub927 for their reviews and input.
=O=
Chapter 37: Strategic Nuclear War
JGS Zheng Chenggong (DEG-36)
Bay of Bengal
The little destroyer escort drifted noiselessly on the calm blue waters of the Bay of Bengal, basking in the golden rays of the rising sun.
Built during World War II as a destroyer, the little grey ship had been extensively modernized under the FRAM program, as befitting a ship of the Atomic Age, and reclassified as an anti-submarine destroyer escort, as befitting an obsolete piece of junk. Its rapid-fire guns and hedgehog depth charge launchers had been ripped out, replaced instead with a boxy anti-submarine rocket (ASROC) launcher, anti-air missile system, canisterized Harpoon antiship missiles, and a cute little helicopter pad (and tiny hangar) for pilotless antisubmarine helicopters.
The tranquility of the ocean notwithstanding, the little FRAM can – as the crew called the fragile destroyer escort - was in a whole lot of trouble. The satellite communications suite had just authorized nuclear release, and everyone on board knew that meant that the Indians had nuclear release too.
"Contact! Bearing two-two-zero, range ten kilometers! It's close, sir!"
"Prosecute contact! One ASROC, nuclear!"
"Commander Cao? After this, we're down to one ASROC."
From his ship's Combat Information Center (CIC), deep in the bowels of the FRAM can, the Commander gave a nod. Sweat dripped from his brow, and his shirt clung uncomfortably to his chest in the humid air of the Indian Ocean, which the air-conditioning could never quite make go away.
The boxy launcher amidships spun skyward, and a nuclear-tipped anti-submarine rocket blasted skyward in a cloud of smoke, plunging into the ocean a mere fifteen kilometers away. Its ten-kiloton nuclear depth charge detonated, sending a jet of water high into the air, destroying any submarine within a kilometer or two, and deafening whales, dolphins, and sonars far beyond that.
The FRAM can rocked gently as the blast wave shook the ocean.
"Did we get him?" Someone asked.
The Commander wasn't taking any chances. A single nuclear torpedo could sink his flimsy ship – but then again, so might a conventional one.
"Sir, new orders from the satellite link!"
"Are we getting out of here?" The Commander hoped that it was the case. He desperately wanted to get out of range of every damned bomber in the entire Indian Navy. Carrier air had been skittish ever since the war went nuclear, and he was pretty sure he didn't have air cover worth a damn.
The night before, SASCOM had ordered the carriers pulled back – away from Indian shores, to defend the critical shipping lanes leading to Karachi, the Persian Gulf, Rangoon, and Chittagong. Zheng Chenggong and part of the anti-air screen had been left behind, radars intermittently turned on and off, in mimicry of the Saratoga battle group, both to dupe the Indians into thinking that Saratoga still menaced their shores and to act as bait for Indian attacks.
Not bait, the Commander thought; flypaper. Bait implied a trap, a worthwhile sacrifice to destroy a greater foe. They were just here to keep the heat off Saratoga and her escorts, and weren't even expected to take any aircraft with them. Ergo, flypaper.
His radars had been off all day. Being flypaper was a lot more… survivable when carrier air was still reliable and when the enemy was not using nuclear weapons.
"Yes, sir. We're to withdraw to the east immediately. Navy wants us under the carrier air umbrella, stat!"
The sighed with relief – and a shrill alarm pierced the room. "What the heck?!"
"Sea search radar! 40 kilometers, due west! Indian Air Force B-57!"
The destroyer escort roared to life, steam turbines straining mightily as it began to plow its way through the Bay of Bengal, leaving a white trail in its wake. Coffee cups rattled off the tables of the CIC as the ship began to gain speed.
"Decoys!"
The FRAM can dropped a little buoy in the water with a splash – a decoy, covered in radar reflectors to seduce enemy missiles and confuse enemy radar operators.
"They've got us! Radars on!" The Commander gulped. His bare-bones Tartar suite stood a good chance against the B-57s, he convinced himself.
Over twenty kilometers away, two B-57s of India's Naval Air Arm dove sharply for the wavetops as angry beams of microwave energy swept the skies above them, eager to guide puny nuclear-tipped SAMs onto the silver twin-engined bombers.
"Damnit! We don't have them!"
The bombers split up, and circled around for a two-pronged attack.
The bombers climbed to toss altitude.
One missile left its armature launcher, covering the foredeck in smoke. With agonizing slowness, the launcher rose itself erect, rotated home, and loaded another missile.
A small nuclear flash shone across the Indian Ocean, downing one bomber, and utterly wrecking its single forty-kiloton nuclear bomb.
Puffs of smoke emerged from the FRAM can, sending chaff rockets skyward. In their final moments, the crew of the little destroyer escort was treated to a spectacular lightshow as golden clouds of chaff, drifting slowly across the sky, glittered in the dawn light.
It was a futile gesture. The Canberras did not have radar-guided missiles, and a rough track of the destroyer was more than adequate for the mission. Target acquired, the Canberra tossed its bomb, and broke away.
It missed by a kilometer – a direct hit as far as the forty-kiloton nuclear bomb was concerned.
A new sun shone upon the Indian Ocean. Even a kilometer away, the light was bright enough to blacken and blister the hull of the FRAM can as the paint on its surface caught fire. The missile on the launch rail immediately exploded under the heat, followed by the gasoline tank for the helicopter.
A hail of neutron radiation tore through the ship, ghosting through the steel hull and poisoning all within.
The blast wave arrived three seconds later. While being tail-on to the blast provided some limited protection, it was completely inadequate against the "small" forty-kiloton bomb, which crushed the little destroyer like the tin can it was, bursting seams open and bending load-bearing hull members.
Irradiated, burning, and crumpled, the destroyer escort sank within the hour, lost with all hands.
=O=
Hiccup took a peek outside his blackout curtains. The morning was shaping up to be a glorious autumn day.
Fine weather for air-launched missiles, freefall bombs, and short-range attack rockets.
Fine weather for nuclear war.
A tiny flash snapped by outside, causing him to duck back under the curtains.
Hiccup stared down at his gloved hands, his instruments, and the grey fabric of his bulky pressure suit. His eyes were fine. Damnit, that had been stupid.
He resisted the urge to turn on his radar. That would give away their position, and at this point, it was safer to stay silent and invisible… so long as nobody lit them up with a radar.
His threat board lit up. "Astrid, we've got radar! Huh. One of ours. Navy fire control. Why the heck are they lighting up?"
A brighter flash, and the radar went silent.
Another radar popped up on his display. And another.
Navy SAM radars, glued to the blue waters far below, crowed in anger as the shrieks of Canberra radars washed over them, sending waves of banal noise above the clouds. High above them, in the serene reaches of the stratosphere, scores of Air Force jets, painted white, silver, green, and black, circled lazily, sucking fuel greedily from silver tankers as they awaited orders to strike. Gentle flashes and the electronic screeches of distant nuclear explosions, large and small, echoed across the sky, and a few small mushroom clouds soared skyward, but none succeeded in intruding upon the bombers' stratospheric domain.
"Astrid, I'm picking up a lot of Navy radars… oh look, Indian B-57 radars. And… here come the Tomcat radars. They're shooting down there."
"This is Mordor. Bluebell. I repeat, Bluebell."
Astrid nodded matter-of-factly as the go-code echoed above the calm waters of the Indian Ocean. "Wow. That was quick."
He checked his weapons – three 200 kiloton Short-Range Attack Missiles (SRAM), and a single Falcon nuclear air-to-air missile. Toothless was ready for anything.
"We're good back here." He sighed gently with relief as he rechecked his briefing packets. Bluebell was the go-code for the counter-nuclear attack option – an attack on all nuclear-capable weapons platforms, which theoretically included trucks, roads that might support trucks, small missile boats and naval vessels, ports that could hold anything bigger than a small missile boat, and airports.
At least they wouldn't have to hit economic and industrial targets.
"…execute formation turn-around by the numbers." Mordor came in over the radio.
Orders for attacks on ad-hoc targets rolled in as Astrid took Toothless out of his stately figure-eight orbit, banking left and right as Toothless rocketed ahead of the B-58Bs. Across two thousand kilometers of ocean, a dozen Blackbirds did the same, overtaking the slower B-58Bs and staying abreast of two pairs of B-70s. Behind the supersonic aircraft, a brace of slow B-52s, a dozen SRAMs hanging from their pylons and eight more in their weapons bays, dove majestically for the wavetops, bound for poorly-defended targets near the coast.
Hiccup checked his target list. As before, the Blackbirds had mainly been assigned air defense targets, leaving most of the actual bombing to be done by the B-58s and B-52s.
Astrid killed the throttle, and Toothless slid smoothly in position fifty-odd kilometers behind a formation of three Blackbirds, a hundred kilometers apart.
"Viper flight, this is Viper lead. Viper 3, 4. You know your targets. Hit them all. If they don't go down, Viper 2 and me mop up."
Hiccup's mouth went dry. This was his flight. He was in charge.
The bombers came in over the radio. "Viper lead, this is Mamba lead. We're counting on you. Good luck."
The B-58B flight disappeared in the rear-view mirror as they approached the shores of India.
"Don't worry, Hiccup. We'll be fine. We did fine last time, and this time, we get to nuke every SAM site in our way. I mean, it's not like the Indians had a lot of them nationwide."
Hiccup winced. "Eh, about forty, fifty Gammons."
The calm waters of the Indian Ocean, inky-black on radar, stood in stark contrast to the hazy blur of land, far to his west, as they traced the shoreline of India at just under a kilometer a second.
"SA-5 site, dead ahead. Viper 3, this one's yours!"
"Rifle! Missile away!"
Viper 3's missile bay doors opened, and a SRAM Short-Range Attack Missile fell into the slipstream, turned a sharp corner, and screamed across the sky, surfing the stratosphere at 70,000 feet and Mach 3.5.
Above the SAM site, it tipped its nose down, and plunged downward at three times the speed of sound, missing the pre-located SA-5 site by three-quarters of a kilometer. Under repair after a half-kilometer miss by a 2-kiloton Falcon ARM the day before, the SA-5 site was powerless to respond, and disappeared under the blast wave of a 200-kiloton nuclear fireball, along with two small fishing villages and twenty-odd square kilometers of farmland.
"Moving on! Viper 4, you're up.!"
Two more SRAMs left the little strike package, and streaked two hundred kilometers landward towards another SA-5 site on the outskirts of the port city of Visakhapatnam.
Toothless chirped, prompting Hiccup to examine his display. An SA-5 radar, three SA-2 radars, and even an odd ship-based radar roared to life as the SRAMs began their supersonic dive.
The radars were not after them. The Blackbirds were well out of SA-5 range.
Hiccup watched his radar display in fascination as nuclear-tipped SA-5 missiles and SA-2s blasted skywards, aimed straight at the huge, plunging nuclear attack missiles.
The Indians had learned the critical lesson of nuclear air defense. Turning off your radars can no longer save you.
The missiles collided in blossoms of atomic fire, sending Indian naval officers and civilians scrambling for cover far below.
"Viper 2, take over and engage. Two missiles." Hiccup locked on. "Viper 1. Locked on. Rifle. Missile away."
Toothless rocked gently as the one-tonne SRAM fell into the supersonic slipstream, ignited its motor and blasted towards the SAM sites far below.
Three SRAMs bore down on the SA-5, and began their supersonic dives. More Gammons rose to meet the challengers – a mark of a healthy SAM battery. An important one too, covering the approaches to Naval Air Force Station Dega, co-located with Visakhapatnam International Airport.
One pair of missiles collided in a defensive nuclear fireball.
A second tiny fireball blossomed to life five kilometers above the ground, shattering windowpanes and sending lethal glass shards flying across the city.
Goodly chunks of semi-urban landscape disappeared under a kilometer-wide nuclear fireball as the SA-5 site finally failed, sending a vast dust plume skyward that blotted out vast chunks of Hiccup's radar display.
Two massive mushroom clouds loomed over the terrified inhabitants of the port city, belaying the fact that the city itself had been carefully and deliberately spared. Thousands still died in the sparsely inhabited outskirts, killed by flying glass or collapsing houses. Fallout from the airbursts, while minimal, might sicken hundreds more.
Hiccup chuckled darkly. While "minimizing collateral damage" seemed a perverse fig-leaf of a directive in a war where two-hundred-kiloton warheads were being thrown about like candy, the egghead in Hiccup knew that direct attacks on population centers could have killed far more people with far less kilotonnage, and were indeed undesirable for both moral and strategic reasons.
For in the theory of limited nuclear war, civilians were far more valuable as hostages than as corpses.
Enemy civilians still alive to be incinerated at the touch of a button incentivized the enemy to surrender, and deterred the enemy from incinerating your own civilians, encouraging both parties to limit nuclear attacks to military targets and hopefully end nuclear wars in peace treaties instead of total destruction. Dead enemy civilians simply cried out to be avenged – probably by turning your civilians into corpses.
Hiccup sighed sadly. Theory was being put into practice today, and from his ejection seat, "minimizing collateral damage" was looking about as bad as it sounded.
Behind them, B-58Bs, afterburners blazing at Mach 2.5, unleashed a pattern of SRAMs at SA-2 sites, and followed up with a pair of five-kiloton guided nuclear bombs on Visakhapatnam International's two runways. The headquarters for Eastern Naval Command was annihilated by a similar low-yield weapon, as was the main civilian port, mistaken for the adjacent military dockyard by B-58 pilots confused by their hasty addition to the target list and palls of smoke cluttering their radar screens.
Oops.
Astrid cursed as Hiccup continued to rattle off targets struck. The military dockyard and nearby naval academy would have escaped severe damage, and would have to be reattacked.
If only they had used bigger nukes…
Another B-58 launched a SRAM at an isolated airstrip down the coast, obliterating it entirely.
The irony that the defense suppression had caused far more casualties than the destruction of the actual targets themselves was not considered funny by anyone involved.
"Astrid! More targets, coming up fast!" Hiccup hastily swapped out the map in his folder, and began marking it with a grease pencil.
"Holding steady." Astrid noted.
"Viper 4. Rifle! Missile away! Damnit! Site's live!"
"Viper lead, Rifle! Missile away." Hiccup hollered.
"Viper 2, Rifle. Missile away."
Astrid took them into a zig, and the whole flight followed as SRAM after SRAM screamed earthward, literally blasting a hole in India's remaining air defenses, and sending flashes snaking under their curtains.
"This is Viper 3, we've got a bandit on radar. Mach 0.6, 3,000 feet, trying to hit the deck."
"Get a visual!" Hiccup hollered.
"Crap! TV telescope's whited-out… uhh… looks like a Canberra. Fox three!"
Astrid raised an eyebrow. "Woah. They had Canberras in the air."
"Got him! Scratch one bandit!"
Hiccup shook his head in disbelief.
Flash. An Indian radar station, already hit several times earlier, was silenced permanently under a mushroom cloud.
Flash. An airstrip disappeared in a nuclear fireball, along with a half-dozen B-57 Canberras hidden in the woods nearby.
Flash. An SA-5 site disappeared off threat lists, along with a quaint little town a half-mile away.
Flash. A damaged SA-5 site, abandoned by its operators, was permanently destroyed as a nuclear fireball burst overhead.
Flash. Flash. Flash. Hyderabad International, on the outskirts of Hyderabad, went down under a medium-sized groundburst, followed shortly after by two other military airbases around the city.
Hiccup scratched his head. "Astrid, you think this is overkill?"
Flash.
Flash.
Flash.
Astrid shrugged. "No moreso than nuclear SAMs are. Eyes on target, Hiccup."
"This is Mamba 4, we're being engaged, aft quadrants! Jamming!"
"Radar on!" Toothless banked sharply, and roared into a countrysized turn even as he swept microwaves across the sky, desperately searching for the interloper.
"Afterburners on! Evasive maneuvers!" Mamba flight broke formation, glowing rocket plumes roaring from their engines as they powered through the slipstream.
Hiccup swore as the minutes ticked by. Against a backdrop of vast, stratospheric mushroom clouds sixteen kilometers tall, friendly blips scattered to the winds or dove to the deck. "Astrid, I can't find them! Viper 2, do you have target?"
Snotlout's backseater chirped up. "Negative, negative! Darnit, this is so much harder without Sauron."
"This is Mamba 3, they have missile lock! I can't shake 'em!"
Astrid climbed for altitude as they broke towards Mamba 3, and they dove on the target. "Got him!" Hiccup whooped. "Bandit's at Mach 2, 50,000 feet and descending. Hang in there, Mamba 3."
"Running him over." Astrid gritted her teeth. If they could just…
"He's got me in his basket! I need…"
Mamba 3 disintegrated into a burning ball of aluminium as a missile found its mark.
"Tone! Fox three! Missile away!" A nuclear Falcon streaked earthward, and Toothless shot back up towards the stratosphere even as he kept the target in sight.
A soft flash snaked under Hiccup's windows as the two-kiloton missile obliterated the enemy interceptor.
"We got him!" Hiccup cheered. "Scratch one MiG!"
Astrid joined him. "All right Hiccup!"
Toothless went into an S-turn, rejoining the rest of Viper flight as they hit their last targets and headed back out to sea, dodging mushroom caps as they went.
Mamba flight followed them out, one aircraft short.
=O=
The Indian officer drove across the countryside as the apocalypse unfolded around him. Everywhere he looked, mushroom clouds rose skyward, roiling clouds of hot air sucking in dust and dirt from vast firestorms – miles and miles of burning countryside - at ground level. Assam had become a mushroom farm from hell.
His young nation – crippled at birth, divided against itself by cynical imperialists, harangued with legalese when it tried to assert its rightful place in the sun, and threatened with superior and overwhelming force at every turn by smiling diplomats professing reasonableness – was burning. India, the land of his fathers and forefathers, the land he loved so much – was being set alight.
His leaders had been less than wise, true, but the nation had to do something.
This was not their fault! The Pacificans had used nuclear weapons first! Launching the battlefield nuclear rockets had been the only way to salvage Indian and Soviet prestige in a deteriorating situation. His leaders had seen it. He had seen it. Those damned Soviets had refused to see it, insisting to the end that escalation was suicidal and that no tactical military advantage could be gained from hitting back at the Pacifican invaders with nuclear weapons because, yet again, the imperialists had tactical and strategic nuclear superiority.
He gritted his teeth.
Under his suit, his skin itched, he felt nauseous, and he had a nasty red welt where, he presumed, some especially radioactive piece of dirt had clung to his suit – perhaps the other day, perhaps now. It mattered not. He would do his duty.
He was on his own now. No matter how hard he tried, he could not raise New Delhi on the radio – or any of his nominal superiors. His orders had been to keep the strategic weapons hidden, to be used as a force-in-being, to retaliate against "unacceptable attacks".
He glanced again upon the dozens of mushroom clouds around him. How was this acceptable?
Palls of smoke drifted across the sky, and his Geiger counter ticked appreciably.
He checked the target list he had been given.
Lhasa, Provincial Capital and road and rail hub for all of Tibet.
Naqu City, road and rail junction and home to 10,000.
Changguan, road and rail junction and home to 50,000.
Mangkang, road and rail junction.
Jiegu, Headquarters of South Asian Command, site of a major airbase, and road and rail junction.
Others, if he had any missiles leftover. Two missiles per target would be optimal – but he would probably have to skimp. This list would not destroy the imperialists – or even kill very many of them. But it would maximally disrupt Pacifican road and rail access to the Himalayas, defending his nation from the Pacifican onslaught that was sure to come.
And it would send a message. A very clear message.
The cliff loomed ahead, and the Indian Officer plowed forward, eager to inspect the missiles.
Miraculously, thankfully, his missiles were safe in their hides. He barked orders, and teams of technicians entered the caves, meticulously checking the missiles for damage. The task done, they rolled the missiles into the sunlight, ready to raise them, fuel them, and launch them – a process that would take perhaps two or three hours with his moderately-trained crews.
He urged them on, eager to launch.
Every minute the missiles spent on the ground was another minute they could be destroyed.