And Death Fell From the Skies...

"...4. The "Foreign Minister" of Radovan Karadzic's "Serb Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovnia", Aleksa Buha, has told reporters that the Bosnian Serbs have "volunteers from friendly countries" standing by, as well as "kamikaze pilots" , ready to strike targets in Western countries -- including nuclear power stations -- if there is Western military intervention in Bosnia. End summary."

--Excerpt from a CIA document written in 1992

"....There is some debate about whether the U.S. was implicated in the Bosnian War. There were reports that NATO planes were used to disable Serb command and control centers in the Krajina regions, which made the Serbs an easier target for Croatia. These allegations, whether or not they were true, most certainly caused Serbian nationalists to begin one of the most extensive and infamous terrorist campaigns of all time..."

--Excerpt from article written in 2005 about NATO intervention in the Bosnian War, and the subsequent Days of Fear

"America Stay Out Of Serbia"

--Graffiti at New York's Grand Central Station

--last part cut--
. . .

Well, hi there. I've been thinking about the Bosnian war lately, and I was wondering what would have happened if the B-H foreign minister actually had put his terrorists where his mouth was, as it were. So, I started this thread.

I'm not sure a suicidal airliner could actually destroy a nuclear reactor. Here's a pair of articles that may be of interest.

While it can't destroy a nuclear reactor, it can easily destroy the control station, which would make watering the reactor (and thus keeping it from critical meltdown) impossible. I realize I didn't explain that very well in the OP.

Are you aware that US nuke plants are (and were long before 9/11) designed to resist aircraft impacts up to an including 767's without a breach of the core?

There is also no way that a US nuclear power plant will become a nuclear bomb. Zero. Zip. A 'dirty bomb'? Barely possible, with considerable effort from the inside or a miracle from the outside. Most of the technical staff of any plant are fully aware of this. Some of them get even more annoyed than I do about this misconception. Please avoid it? Pretty please?

The one positive side effect of the anti-nuclear lobby in the US is that the safeguards of US nuke plants border on the paranoid.

Of course, ITTL, they weren't paranoid after all, were they? :-}

Ah. Good point.
Incidentally, the Serbs also claimed to have four nuclear warheads.

Hrmmm. Didn't know that. And anyway, just in case something like this happened, I had another option, one which is much less hard to believe...

Oh, and about the warheads....that was probably just blustering, so I'm not going to address it in this TL, mmkay?

"I hadn't gone to the port that day, not yet. My car broke down outside the house. Typical, eh? Those (censored) things that just happen save your (censored) life."

"Please watch your language, Mr. Johnston."

"Sure, sure. Anyway, so there I was, taking the bus to the city: I was still at least three miles away, when I saw that....flame shoot up into the air. A flame bigger'n any I had ever seen. I realized as I saw it that it had to be one of those LNG tankers: a dockman's worst nightmare. And then the sound came. This huge sound boom, just slamming through the air. People started screaming on the bus, but I could barely hear them. My hearing's going bad anyway. So I just kept staring at the flame. The flame was....devouring the city. Devouring it, you get that? It just ate up everything. I was shocked, horrified. But I knew I had to get back home, reassure my family. So I got off the bus--it had stopped by now--and walked home, ignoring the heat on my back the whole time. And then....and then I got home, and it really sank in as me and the family watched the news. The (censored) Serbs had destroyed Boston."

--Excerpt from 2003 interview with Alex Johnston, a former dockworker at the Port of Boston

OMG! You blew up the USS Constitution!

...oh, and Boston too. Eh, win some, lose some...

BTW, why is Serbia trying to get nuked into a series of glowing craters?

Damn.
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The Cold War itself may have ended, but US-Russian tensions will be rather stronger than in the OTL '90s.
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Is this in '92 or in '93 - or maybe a bit later? And does the WTC bombing happen as well? Definitely going to be a political issue - how could we let this happen?
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Maybe some radical Serbs actually believed that they had nukes (like they claimed for a bit in OTL), and thus could act with some impunity? I definitely think they were just blustering, but not everyone would've realized that.

Not to mention USS Cassin Young (DD-793), a Fletcher-class destroyer from WWII.

Wolfman said:

Not to mention USS Cassin Young (DD-793), a Fletcher-class destroyer from WWII.

Click to expand...

Wow, how did I miss that growing up? Was she at the Charleston Navy Yard?

Gridley said:

Wow, how did I miss that growing up? Was she at the Charleston Navy Yard?

Click to expand...

She's been there at the Charlestown Navy Yard since 1978... albeit in her modified form with a tripod foremast, hedgehog projectors on each side of the bridge, where the fore 40mm twins were in WWII and quad 40mm guns between the funnels, in place of the forward quintuple 21in torpedo tubes. She's berthed on the other side of the pier from the Constitution...

Wolfman said:

She's been there at the Charlestown Navy Yard since 1978... albeit in her modified form with a tripod foremast, hedgehog projectors on each side of the bridge, where the fore 40mm twins were in WWII and quad 40mm guns between the funnels, in place of the forward quintuple 21in torpedo tubes. She's berthed on the other side of the pier from the Constitution...

Click to expand...

I guess I never had eyes for anything but USS Constitution herself. In my defense, she is quite the eye-magnet.

Anyway, sorry for the thread hijack DirtyCommie.

It's fine. Anyway, Gridley, much of the Serbian government actually threatened to carry out terrorist campaigns in Western Europe and the US if NATO intervened in the Bosnian War and....well, and they did. The POD is the Serbians putting their money where their mouth is. More later.

anon: It's '93, the year NATO started using missiles against Serbia.

So probably April or May, 1993, soon after Operation Deny Flight begins.
Heads are definitely going to roll over this. It doesn't help that the WTC bombings happened back in February.

Looks like some Serbs actually claimed credit; how else would it be clear the same day that this was their work?

Al-Qaeda may take inspiration from this attack, particularly given that their attack on the WTC failed. This may butterfly away the Bojinka plot, with an attempt to replicate the Boston LNG explosion happening in the mid-'90s instead.

War on Terror comes early. I don't know if there'd be a Department of Homeland Security; there might just be attempts to promote stronger links between the FBI and the CIA (and the NSA).

Remember that Slick Willy is POTUS. Thus, judging by OTL, military action will be erratic and micro-managed, with ludicrous ROE and frequent order changes.

Gridley said:

Remember that Slick Willy is POTUS. Thus, judging by OTL, military action will be erratic and micro-managed, with ludicrous ROE and frequent order changes.

Click to expand...

And lots of reliance on the Tomahawk.

I don't know that we can judge by OTL. This is probably before Mogadishu went sour, which historically soured Clinton on the military's effectiveness and led to his reliance on missiles and aircraft, rather than troops on the ground.

Boston, and the US response, likely define the Clinton presidency - and certainly define the first term.

How would Republicans react? Would they favor it or oppose it? (This could turn the modern Republican party towards interventionism earlier than 9/11.)
This could also get NATO into Yugoslavia earlier- but what would this do for Clinton's NATO expansion plans? How would Yeltsin react? How would Eastern Europe?

Far scarier indeed was the Serbian terrorist attack on the US power grid. Equipped with improvised explosives and hunting rifles, a group of no more than 20-30 Serbian terrorists caused massive disruption in the US and very nearly caused the complete collapse of the power grid and the US infrastructure. Had they succeeded in several more of their synchronized attacks against the critical high voltage transformers, even the heroic efforts of the local, regional, and national power authorities would not have been able to stem the collapse and restart the grid. Ironically, what may have put their attack below the critical threshold where triage, a few spares that many had forgotten about, and ad hoc engineering was able to save the day was the fact that Arizona does not use daylight savings time. Because the Serbians were using commercial, off the shelf tools, including cell phones, to coordinate their attacks and did not take the local custom in AZ into account, their attack on the AZ area transformers did not start until an hour after the rest of their carefully planned attack. The collapse of the national cellular networks and the mobilization of special forces, local law enforcement, and even ordinary citizens derailed several key attacks.

Ya know, this actually fits in nicely with a piece of science fiction I read a few weeks ago by Weber. It was entirely incidental to the plot but he had (in an eventually obliterated or possibly parallel timeline, woohoo time travel) the breakup of Yugoslavia spilling out into a general European war and then a very limited nuclear exchange between at least Russia and a few others. I was only three, but I actually talked with my parents after reading this just to get a feel for it and they said people were worried, given the noises Russia was making at the time. Adding in a terrorist campaign by the Serbs could make for some interesting butterflies.