Thanks to CajunBear73, OechsnerC, Ridersofrowan, and Atomicsub927 for their reviews and input
=O=
Chapter 40: Counterforce
"ADC confirms missiles in the air. We'll have their target list momentarily."
The National Security Advisor put down her folder, and shook her head. "Mr. President, the targets of this launch are immaterial. The fact of the matter is that, in Assam alone, out of the seventy-odd missiles they had initially, the Indians had eight medium-range SS-4 remaining after two weeks of Air Force reconnaissance flights and airstrikes. Assam was the best-surveilled missile complex of the bunch. If the ratios hold, over sixteen MRBMs and IRBMs might remain in the Deccan and elsewhere – capable of inflicting unacceptable damage to the mainland."
The Secretary frowned. "Janet, while Tutti Frutti I and II clearly weren't quite as effective as we'd hoped, I don't think we should throw out the playbook just yet. We need to see what they hit, and how badly, before we decide what to throw back at them. Exercising restraint is critical if we are to limit escalation."
"We don't need a retaliatory strike, or a tit-for-tat, Richard!" The Advisor threw her hands in the air. "What we need is counterforce. Our barely-nuclear disarming strike failed. We got distracted by the damned Indians throwing bombers at us, and blew our second wad on runways. Now it's time to do the job properly! And we need to do it now. Every second we waste is another second for those bastards to get their missiles in the air!"
The ADC officer put down his phone. "Chongqing informs me that all missiles are headed for key communications hubs – cities and towns - across Tibet. It looks like an attempt to cut off Tibet from the rest of the country. We're also going to lose SASCOM HQ."
The Secretary frowned. He might not have particularly liked Stoick Haddock, but the idea that a man he knew personally might have been killed in a nuclear strike was… unsettling.
On the monitor, the Vice President rubbed his chin. "What do you think, Richard, are we looking at an escalatory strike or a tit-for-tat?"
"It could be tactical. A prelude to an invasion of Tibet in the worst case, or a defensive move if they expect us to invade in a few months." The Secretary said. "Alternatively, it could be strategic - an escalatory attempt to dismember the country, since we never targeted Indian communications with Assam before. On the other hand, they can't really target our missile launchers either, so it could just be a tit-for-tat after we used megatonners on Indian soil."
The President nodded. "We wait for the damage assessment, and for the Soviet response to our offer."
The Advisor shook her head. "We need to take out India's surviving missiles before they launch, and we need to do it now."
The Vice President frowned. "Will this actually work?"
The Air Force attaché nodded. "Before Tutti Frutti, we had a contingency attack option drawn up against possible hide areas for nuclear missiles, in case we received indicators that they were preparing to launch and needed them destroyed immediately. We… continued to update it as the situation progressed, in case we missed a few missiles. About five hundred or so megatons will be needed to destroy this target set. Missiles can be in the air in five minutes, and will reach their targets in ten more."
"If we have these target lists, why were they not attacked?" The President questioned.
"These are area targets, sir. Large areas suspected to contain nuclear missiles – not individual missiles which were found and attacked with precision nuclear weapons. This selective attack option amounts to a carpet-nuking of large chunks of countryside deep in the Indian heartland. A largish valley the size of Long Island, for instance, might be carpeted with twenty nuclear warheads – ten to destroy the valley, and ten spares in case the first ten missiles fail. All airbursts, with very little fallout." The attaché shrugged.
"Five hundred megatons to destroy a dozen missiles that might or might not be present?" The Secretary was incredulous.
The attaché raised a finger. "Of those five hundred megatons, only four hundred megatons will be used to destroy Indian missiles on the ground. The rest will be expended in what we call a 'pindown' attack, in which we will detonate a steady stream of nuclear warheads in low earth orbit above the suspected missile hides. The continuous nuclear explosions should have a good chance of knocking out any missiles that try to launch just before or immediately after our strike."
"That'll kill any space station in range, and wipe dozens of satellites from the sky." The Secretary blanched.
"Space stations are cheaper than cities, and we hardened all our most important ones with armor plating." The Advisor pointed out. Radiation shielding with lunar material had been just one of the spin-offs from the civilian moon mining program.
The President whispered. "Five hundred megatons…"
"We've already blanketed suspected hide sites of Scud and FROG launchers in nuclear airbursts, and blasted every SA-5 site in the country - this is the same thing!" The Advisor exclaimed.
"Yes, but you're talking about quadrupling the total amount of firepower…" The Secretary shook his head.
"Firepower is cheap! Lives are expensive!" The Advisor threw her hands in the air.
"We also plan to carpet-nuke the airspace around Soviet bomber bases with nuclear missiles to catch bombers as they leave their airbases." The attaché nodded. "It's one of the reasons we requested funding for ten thousand nuclear missiles for the ballistic missile program. But the heavyweight IRBMs needed for this attack are still only a small fraction of our currently inadequate two-thousand-missile arsenal. We won't miss them."
The Secretary scowled. He had never been a fan of the heavyweight IRBMs - ICBMs so overstuffed with independently-targetable warheads that they only had enough range to reach any point in Eurasia from their silos in Sichuan (nobody having seen much point to popping nukes at South America or South Africa).
"It'll demonstrate our escalation dominance and end this threat – look, Richard. The number-crunchers say this option has a good chance of cutting the Indo-Soviet arsenal down to six missiles from sixteen. We can save up to fifteen million Pacifican lives with this strike, but only if we strike now."
It all depends on the assumptions…
The President stared at his desk in thought.
"Every minute we waste is a minute for the Indians to use 'em or lose 'em." The Advisor stared at the clock.
"Do you want the missiles warmed up, sir?"
The President nodded.
Ten minutes passed before the ADC officer picked up the phone. "Sirs. We have battle damage assessments."
The worst hit was Chengguan, a town of 50,000 which, according to a report from an F-4 Phantom, was now a smoking hole in the ground. A miss had eviscerated a mountaintop near SASCOM headquarters, causing moderate damage to a nearby town and smothering it in very heavy radioactive fallout. A few other small mountain towns had been blasted from the face of the earth, railway lines had buried by radioactive rockslides, and forward bases had been utterly destroyed, but that was it. Lhasa, the largest city under threat, was completely intact, save for reports of a few pilots who had been blinded by the nuclear-tipped SAMs that had blasted the Soviet missiles from the sky.
The Secretary spoke first. "On the face of it, this looks like a pretty well-calibrated response. Big enough to draw our attention, not big enough for us to break out the Drago sundae. War's still limited. Pretty encouraging, actually."
"Richard, they are not sticking to our plan! The plan was to fight this war with the Indian long-range missile threat off the table!" She yelled. "They are not off the table! The plan needs to change!"
The Advisor stood. "I'll tell you what's going to happen. If we go tit-for-tat and hit Indian lines of communications with Assam, the Indians will retaliate by taking out additional road and rail junctions to Qinghai and Xinjiang. That means Chengdu and Kunming go up in mushroom clouds – possibly several of them. Then we need to escalate to nuking Indian cities, and get a whole new war on our hands. We need to nip this in the bud."
A staffer ran, panting, into the room. "Sir. This just came in from the Embassy in Moscow. The Kremlin just called. They say that the nuclear strike was unauthorized, and are calling on us not to retaliate or face the consequences."
"Bullshit!" The Secretary bellowed. "That was a calculated retaliatory strike! Whoever launched it had instructions from someone!"
"What do they say about our proposal for a mutual withdrawal and negotiations?" The President asked flatly.
"They're asking us to take the matter up with the Indians, sir." The staffer shook his head.
"Have the Indians responded yet?" Thee Vice-President asked.
The staffer just shook his head. "They're still stonewalling. To be honest, they're still insisting that they haven't launched any missiles."
Well, it wasn't like the Indians had infrared satellites in high orbit…
The Secretary nodded at the Advisor, who was already shaking her head. "That's it. I'm through. If the bastards are trying to screw with us, they should have picked a subject safer than limited nuclear war – football, the Space Race, anything! Their response is unacceptable if they're lying, and if they're telling the truth, the Soviets have openly admitted to losing positive control of their nuclear forces in India." He got to his feet, and turned his gaze upon the President. "Their position is bullshit. We should launch."
The President looked around the room. "All in favor?"
Everyone nodded. The President gave a stiff nod in response. "We launch."
=O=
Missile Launch Complex
Qinghai Province
The Sergeant slurped his thin congee – rice porridge - as the brand-new computer in front of him whirred and clicked, straining to load thousands of lines of instructions into the state-of-the-art magnetic rotor, an artificial "memory" for the IRBM in the missile silo a few hundred meters away. The powerful computer finished with a beep.
His partner unloaded the new missile guidance disk onto his cart with a thud. "Okay, sir. That's the latest targeting information. We'll turn off missile one, and get ready to send the boys out to load the disk."
"It might have to wait. Choppers have been a little scarce lately."
A marvel of space-age engineering, each disk contained precise instructions for the missile to fly to any one of literally dozens of pre-located targets – instructions accurate enough, it was said, to land the warheads somewhere in the parking lot of a football stadium half a continent away – a tremendous improvement in accuracy and capability over the first-generation weapons of half a decade ago, which could only have fewer than ten targets programmed into memory.
The phone rang, and the Sergeant's heart sank into his stomach. He stowed his bowl of congee (and the scrumptious steamed dough bits within…), and picked up the phone.
Even being buried dozens of meters underground in an airtight capsule was cold comfort for the two lonely missileers.
Across the barren plateau outside, spaced tens of kilometers apart from each other and the launch control center, twelve buried silos sat, each housing a state-of-the-art nuclear missile, six stories tall, tipped by seven independently targetable warheads. Each was a probable target for multiple Soviet nuclear warheads – as was the launch control center itself. And all knew that two dozen meters of dirt would provide scant protection against a direct hit.
The airman picked up his phone, and independently verified the orders they had both been given. A third airman ran into the room, speechless at the spectacle. Phones were slammed onto receivers.
"Is it another drill?"
Keys were inserted, computers initialized, gyroscopes spun up, and circuits tested. Six agonizing minutes passed as the missiles, dormant since they had been planted in the barren soil of the Qingzang Plateau eight months ago, woke from their slumber, stretched, yawned, and brushed their teeth.
The airman gulped.
Six more minutes ticked by without any indication that this was a practice run.
"This can't be the real thing, can it? It has to be a drill."
A fresh set of codes came through. Both men verified them.
The indicator light for a live launch lit up.
"It's a live launch."
The Sergeant nodded, and they twisted the keys simultaneously.
On the barren plateau beyond the capsule, hardened concrete slabs were flung thirty meters into the air by pyrotechnic ejectors as gouts of flame erupted around them. From the flames emerged twenty-four slim nuclear missiles, JGAF and SAC insignia proudly painted between the orange roll stripes on their white fuselages, roaring out of their silos into clear blue skies.
=O=
"Mr. President. This is Longhouse. We have confirmed missile launch. All twenty-four missiles of Salvo Alpha are in the air. Awaiting Salvo Bravo. The pindown barrage will follow."
Not all the missiles would launch at once. Missiles targeted at targets further away (in southern India) would be launched first, and missiles targeted at nearer targets (in north-central India) later. That way, all the missiles would arrive on target more-or-less at the same time.
Thusly, there would be no problems with 'friendly' nuclear blasts disrupting sensitive missile guidance systems, thermonuclearly heated air currents pushing hypersonic nuclear warheads off-course, and nuclear dust clouds damaging nuclear warheads. No problems with fratricide.
The first stage solid rocket motors cut out, falling to earth as the second stage rocket motors ignited, sending the heavyweight IRBMs rocketing towards their targets. Nosecones broke away, revealing seven gleaming W-56 nuclear warheads, each shaped like a stubby little rocket with a conical nose, cylindrical body and frustrum-shaped boat-tail, and each capable of delivering over a megaton of thermonuclear firepower across continents with adequate accuracy.
The second stage solid rocket motors cut out.
The warhead bus – a spidery silver fuel tank and thruster assembly, with seven little white cone-shaped warheads stuck on top, drifted noiselessly across the heavens. For a brief minute, the little spacecraft joined the ballet of the cosmos, falling free, as all things do.
"Salvo Bravo away."
Across the plains far below, twenty-four more missiles rocketed skyward atop plumes of flame.
"Pindown barrage launching."
Below dissipating trails of smoke, slightly older missiles roared out of their silos into the sky, one after another, headed to points in space hundreds of kilometers above Indian missile complexes – along the projected egress routes for Indian nuclear missiles.
High above the Himalayas, the buses reached apogee.
Arcing earthward amongst an unblinking starfield, one of the buses, jets of hot gas puffing from stubby thrusters, made the final corrections to its trajectory.
It was now perfectly on course for the first target in its tiny transistorized brain.
With nary a shudder, the missile bus parted with its first passenger, letting go of the rocket-shaped warhead as gently as a mother putting down a baby. Thrusters puffed again, separating the bus from its little passenger, still travelling on its original course with nary a milliarcsecond of deviation, as if ignorant and uncaring of the departure of its maneuvering, forceful mother. Such is the nature of all things, as decreed by the First Law of Isaac Newton.
Thrusters puffed again as the bus sought to put itself on course for its next target. That course achieved, another passenger was gently released into the void.
Again and again the bus repeated the maneuver, placing warhead after warhead after warhead on course for their targets, until only one remained.
High above the plains of the Ganges, dozens of missile buses relentlessly placed hundreds of warheads on precisely calculated trajectories. On the radars of Aerospace Defense Command, the enemy sky filled with nuclear warheads, decoy balloons, and bits of random debris as the Pacifican strike arced towards its targets.
The final warhead on one bus shuddered gently as the air began to thicken around it. As if despairing of the aerodynamic burden it would impose on its cargo, the bus gently let go, and disintegrated in the howling hypersonic slipstream even as a ball of plasma enveloped the warhead's protective coating.
Across the skies of central India, hundreds of fiery arrows pierced the sky in perfect synchrony, blazing trails of plasma across clear blue skies as they descended, two by two, onto their targets…
Across the length and breadth of India, over three hundred new suns blossomed into existence in the space of two minutes - four missiles, five buses, and a few dozen warheads having failed-in-flight, misplaced their warshots, or dudded respectively (this is why you double up your warheads, people!). Heat scorched, blast tore, and radiation shone across valleys, rivers, and seas, destroying men and machines alike.
Mushroom clouds erupted from shattered, burning countryside, staining the skies grey with dust and ash. Most of the strikes had been airbursts, so fallout was light… relatively speaking.
Even targeted against military targets in the countryside, the counterforce strike would claim more lives in days than years of insurgency had in East Pakistan.
"Salvos Alpha and Bravo have splashed. Pindown barrage will be arriving momentarily."
Above the mushroom clouds, the sky glowed angrily with streams of red, orange, and green, visible even in the golden light of a setting sun, as six nuclear weapons detonated in low earth orbit above India every minute, sending waves of missile-killing, electronics-scambling X-rays screaming through the rarefied gruel of the upper atmosphere.
The Indian response was not long in coming.
Theoretically, it was a pointless gesture. The Indian nuclear force, once expended, could no longer deter any action by the Joint Government, and destruction of Pacifican cities would merely invite retaliation in kind. Launching immediately, into the jaws of the Pacifican pindown strike, would severely degrade the Indian response. Better to ride it out, negotiate, and use the remaining weapons to preserve the cities of India and the power of its Communist Party, instead of launching under attack.
Such theoretical concerns were far from the minds of the people who had just had a few hundred megatons of nuclear firepower dumped onto their heads in the space of a few minutes, regardless of how 'rural' the blast zones were.
=O=
From the cockpit of Bewilderbeast III, General Drago Bludvist gazed upon the ocean of mushroom clouds before him, and was pleased. Truly gone was the age of heroes – of individuals making great marks on war.
This was an age of systems. Only an interlocking system of weapons systems, backed up by hundred-billion-dollar economic concerns, vast research institutions spanning nations, and wielded by legions of personnel forged by the training and doctrine of a modern military force, could unlock such an awesome display of firepower.
And he commanded the mightiest system of them all: the exemplary nuclear warfighting arm of the Joint Government of the Pacific: Strategic Air Command.
He looked up at the glowing sky as angry red-orange streams of light danced across it from horizon to horizon.
"General, we're coming up on a SAM search radar. Two hundred kilometers." His pilot warned.
"Magnum. Missile away." Drago pressed a button, and a 200-kiloton short-range attack missile rocketed away from his aircraft, plunging into the gloom below.
The SAM radar blinked out.
Drago roared across the radio as his squadron formed up. "Radars on. Search the valleys! Find those missiles!"
"Sir, we've lost Gator 6, 7, 9, and… 2. Communications issue. Nuclear environment is really screwing up communications… and some of our gear."
Drago shrugged. "They know what to do. I trained you all well."
The pilot smiled. "Yessir."
The Valkyries charged on, ready to perform a clean sweep of the Indian missile forces. Erect missiles were, after all, easier to spot on radar.
=O=