Chapter VI: Day Three: Daytime Nuclear Warfare, November 12th 1983.
And the beginning of the end continues:
At 08:00 AM the Soviet offensive resumed and began with the release of tactical nuclear weapons on a much larger scale than NATO’s initial strike. The 3rd Shock Army deployed OTR-21 Tochka tactical ballistic missiles (NATO reporting name: SS-21 Scarab), much smaller and much more accurate than the preceding 9K52 Luna-M system. An entire brigade of OTR-21 units was deployed with eighteen launchers that had two or three missiles each, which could carry fragmentation warheads but also nuclear, chemical or biological ones. These vehicles were completely amphibious, with a maximum road speed of 60 km/h (37 mph) and 8 km/h (5 mph) in water. The vehicle was NBC-protected (Nuclear, Biological, Chemical) and therefore suited to a war like this.
Two launchers fired a total of five missiles which carried a single 100 kiloton warhead each, obliterating West German, British and Belgian defenders belonging to the Northern Army Group (NORTHAG) and much of the city of Göttingen along with them. Out of a population of almost 114.000, half was killed and the rest was injured and fell prey to radiation sickness in varying degrees. The Soviet Army made no provisions for the refugees fleeing the ruined town where smoke from burning historical buildings blackened the sky and made it seem like night time. A culturally important city with a prestigious university had been ruined by Soviet commanders without an afterthought.
Now dressed in full NBC-gear to protect themselves from nuclear fallout, Soviet soldiers of the 3rd Shock Army arrived at the Weser River and built pontoon bridges as the regular bridges had been blown up by NATO sappers in the hopes of slowing down the Warsaw Pact’s advance. After crossing, they continued their advance to Kassel, conquered it and then rapidly moved on to the Rhine as too little remained of the NATO forces facing them (further to the north, Dutch I Corps withdrew west from the front on the Elbe to the Weser, crossing the river at Bremen). The 3rd Shock Army advanced so fast that later in the afternoon they were close to the Ruhr Area, the highly urbanized industrial heart of Germany.
On the 3rd Shock Army’s right flank the surviving elements of the 2nd Guards Army used a 100 kiloton missile fired from an OTR-21 unit to drive West German and Danish forces in Schleswig-Holstein into Denmark. They detonated the weapon 20 kilometres west of Lübeck, causing light damage to the city such as shattered windows. The small town of Bad Oldesloe, which was at the epicentre of the blast, was a lot less lucky: it was levelled and almost all of the town’s inhabitants were reduced to ashes in an instant. The few stragglers that made it out of town suffered from second and third degree burns and could literally pull the skin off their flesh. For many of them this agony would only end with a miserable death due to radiation sickness.
At the central front near Frankfurt, the 1st Guards Tank Army and the 6th Guards Army had regrouped after their vanguard had been decimated by two 80 kiloton American tactical nuclear weapons. After Rhein-Main Air Base had been destroyed and Frankfurt along with it, the Soviets wreaked further havoc in the region by deploying more of their OTR-21 Tochka systems. Four 100 kiloton explosions inflicted further extreme losses on NATO’s Central Army Group (CENTAG) and by nightfall they’d reached the right bank of the Rhine. CENTAG forces had withdrawn across the river, having destroyed all the bridges across it as they intended to use the natural defensive line the river provided to stop Warsaw Pact forces, deploying fresh reinforcements. The Soviets on their part prepared an amphibious and airborne operation to cross the Rhine and unleashed a heavy conventional artillery bombardment on NATO positions on the left bank.
In Mediterranean Europe the first nuclear strike took place that targeted a NATO member other than West Germany: Italy. A Soviet Tupolev Tu-95 strategic heavy bomber belonging to the 79th Heavy Bomber Aviation Division, resorting under the 37th Air Army, departed from Dolon Air Base (located at Semipalatinsk in the Kazakh SSR of the Soviet Union). It unleashed two Kh-22 missiles with the warheads set at a yield of 500 kilotons, annihilating the base as well as the nearby town of Aviano and the small city Pordenone. Again thousands of innocent civilians suffered.
All these nuclear strikes in the night and morning led to a West German exodus, starting at dawn. Half a million people had been killed almost instantaneously in these strikes across West Germany and Austria. Things were clearly heating up and German civilians no longer felt safe staying in cities that at any moment could be targeted by the Soviets with a nuclear weapon. Chaos erupted in major West German cities like Bremen, Dortmund, Essen, Düsseldorf, Cologne and Bonn as countless people didn’t heed the advice to seek shelter and protection underground in cellars, subway stations and fallout shelters as they feared they wouldn’t be safe here. The inhabitants of these cities knew these places would be hit in the event of a full scale nuclear exchange.
Law and order disappeared. Those intending to flee packed the essentials and prepared to leave, which in many cases also meant participating in the looting of grocery stores. As tens of thousands of people were involved, the police was no longer able to enforce order and the Bundeswehr had different priorities right now. In fact, many policemen didn’t show up for work and were busy looting themselves. The looters took anything edible and things like bottled water, but also things like clothing, toilet paper, shampoo, dog food, cat food and medication like painkillers and antiemetics for people who suffered from motion sickness. Stores catering to outdoors recreation saw looters steal things like tents, sleeping bags and gas cartridge portable stoves (a handful of people that followed the bushcraft lifestyle took what they needed to be able to live off the land). After putting their luggage and loot in every conceivable nook and cranny of their cars, people drove off. What also occurred was that people pooled their resources and took a bus, truck or even something as unconventional as a bulldozer or an excavator.
A refugee crisis emerged in just one day, turning the westbound roads in the Ruhr Area into one giant traffic congestion. Cars, vans, busses and trucks moved at a snail’s pace bumper to bumper, taking the entire morning and afternoon to cover a distance of just 50 kilometres or less. This prompted more and more people to take only what they could carry and abandon their vehicles. Quickly people were driving in the wrong direction on the eastbound side of the highways too.
The refugees continued on foot or on different vehicles. For those who had bicycles, mopeds and motorcycles, enabling them to navigate through the mass of cars much faster, the situation was a mixed bag. These two-wheeled modes of transportation certainly covered a lot more ground than any regular passenger car, but that also meant people wanted them. Plenty of motorcyclists, moped drivers and cyclists proved to be willing to take somebody with them. In other cases desperate people traded food or water in exchange for a ride. Many women engaged in survival sex as a method of payment for hitchhiking, which meant scenarios otherwise reserved for pornographic films suddenly took place in the real world: women having sex in the back of cars at roadside stations or gratifying men orally behind a bush in exchange for a ride. It was all part of the surrealism of those days in mid-November 1983, and tragically in many cases it was for nothing as many would die in the nuclear fire that would come.
Other people resorted to use of force to steal a motorcycle, moped or bike. They beat up or even killed the original owners with melee weapons like claw hammers and crowbars or sometimes firearms like air guns and hunting rifles. A different type of force was used by those who had commandeered a bus, truck, bulldozer or excavator: they used the sheer size and power of their vehicles to crush or cast aside abandoned cars.
A teleconference was held, attended by the leaders of all NATO powers, at 10:00 AM Western European time (09:00 AM in Britain, 02:00 AM at the Cheyenne Mountain Complex). Reagan de facto chaired the meeting despite his fatigue, having slept only four to five hours in the two preceding nights and taking a handful of 20-25 minute naps during the day when the situation allowed it. During this meeting Reagan, Thatcher, Kohl and Mitterrand discussed how to react to the escalating situation in West Germany. Italian Prime Minister Amintore Fanfani, Dutch Prime Minister Ruud Lubbers and Belgian Prime Minister Wilfried Martens featured prominently too. A Soviet crossing of the Rhine seemed imminent and Kohl, Lubbers and Martens argued in favour of larger scale use of tactical nuclear strikes to stop that. Some kind of retaliation was also discussed against Babruysk Air Base, where the bombers that had destroyed Hamburg, Frankfurt and Vienna had taken off from. The option of taking out Dolon Air Base as a tit for tat for the Soviets taking out Aviano was raised by Fanfani. They all agreed that a show of force was needed to show Moscow that the West wouldn’t be bullied into submission through their nuclear terror.
NATO released a statement that it would not yield to Soviet “nuclear terrorism” targeting Western cities and their civilian populations. If these kind of operations continued then NATO would see itself forces to retaliate “in kind” according to the same statement. They demanded a commitment from the Soviet Union that civilian targets would be spared as much as possible, because they couldn’t guarantee they would to the same if Moscow declined. Pope John Paul II, Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme and UN Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar offered to mediate such a deal as a precursor to a ceasefire agreement.
Like they hadn’t taken the earlier ultimatum seriously, the Soviet leadership didn’t take these threats seriously either. They should have done so, but instead they chose to see it as a sign of weakness and a desperate move to intimidate the Soviets into stopping their successful advance. They ignored the pleas of the Vatican, the Swedish embassy and Pérez de Cuéllar.
As the Warsaw Pact’s advance all across the front continued relentlessly, NATO prepared larger scale tactical nuclear strikes that afternoon to stop them as their leaders had agreed on in the morning. Under the NATO nuclear sharing arrangement, US nuclear weapons were stationed in the Netherlands, Belgium, West Germany, Italy and Turkey. The weapons were stored within a vault in hardened aircraft shelters, using the US Air Force WS3 Weapons Storage and Security System. They were controlled and guarded by USAF personnel who controlled the Permissive Action Link codes. To be specific, the USAF Munitions Support Squadrons co-located at these NATO bases, where they worked together with host nation forces, had custody and control over the weapons. After the Netherlands and Belgium had provided their keys for the dual-key systems, simultaneous authorization by the host nations and the United States was a fact.
At 03:00 PM that Saturday afternoon, three Dutch F-16s took off from Volkel Air Base near the village of the same name in the Netherlands. Volkel Air Base was one of several military airfields in the Netherlands, and one of the three major operational bases of the Royal Netherlands Air Force (RNLAF), the other two being Leeuwarden Air Base and Gilze-Rijen Air Base. A squadron of F-16s flying from Gilze-Rijen Air Base joined them as an escort to protect them. Besides that, a lone trio of F-16s would be odd and warn Warsaw Pact units that a tactical nuclear strike was headed their way, which they would try to stop at all costs. They dropped three B61 bombs, this time with the yield set at 300 kilotons, crippling the 3rd Shock Army a mere 50 kilometres east of Dortmund.
A strike twice as large was launched from Kleine Brogel Air Base, located near the town of Peer. It was the home of the 10th Tactical Wing of the Air Component, the air arm of the Belgian Defence Forces. A sextet of F-16s piloted by Belgian aviators took off at 03:00 PM and they dropped six B61 bombs that detonated over the 1st Guards Tank Army and the 6th Guards Army with an explosive yield of 300 kilotons each, decimating these two major Soviet formations and thereby preventing a crossing of the Rhine. Remaining CENTAG forces on the left bank were relieved that the artillery bombardment they’d been subjected to all day was finally over. It would be a short reprieve.
Chapter VI: Day Three: Daytime Nuclear Warfare, November 12th 1983.
At 08:00 AM the Soviet offensive resumed and began with the release of tactical nuclear weapons on a much larger scale than NATO’s initial strike. The 3rd Shock Army deployed OTR-21 Tochka tactical ballistic missiles (NATO reporting name: SS-21 Scarab), much smaller and much more accurate than the preceding 9K52 Luna-M system. An entire brigade of OTR-21 units was deployed with eighteen launchers that had two or three missiles each, which could carry fragmentation warheads but also nuclear, chemical or biological ones. These vehicles were completely amphibious, with a maximum road speed of 60 km/h (37 mph) and 8 km/h (5 mph) in water. The vehicle was NBC-protected (Nuclear, Biological, Chemical) and therefore suited to a war like this.
Two launchers fired a total of five missiles which carried a single 100 kiloton warhead each, obliterating West German, British and Belgian defenders belonging to the Northern Army Group (NORTHAG) and much of the city of Göttingen along with them. Out of a population of almost 114.000, half was killed and the rest was injured and fell prey to radiation sickness in varying degrees. The Soviet Army made no provisions for the refugees fleeing the ruined town where smoke from burning historical buildings blackened the sky and made it seem like night time. A culturally important city with a prestigious university had been ruined by Soviet commanders without an afterthought.
Now dressed in full NBC-gear to protect themselves from nuclear fallout, Soviet soldiers of the 3rd Shock Army arrived at the Weser River and built pontoon bridges as the regular bridges had been blown up by NATO sappers in the hopes of slowing down the Warsaw Pact’s advance. After crossing, they continued their advance to Kassel, conquered it and then rapidly moved on to the Rhine as too little remained of the NATO forces facing them (further to the north, Dutch I Corps withdrew west from the front on the Elbe to the Weser, crossing the river at Bremen). The 3rd Shock Army advanced so fast that later in the afternoon they were close to the Ruhr Area, the highly urbanized industrial heart of Germany.
On the 3rd Shock Army’s right flank the surviving elements of the 2nd Guards Army used a 100 kiloton missile fired from an OTR-21 unit to drive West German and Danish forces in Schleswig-Holstein into Denmark. They detonated the weapon 20 kilometres west of Lübeck, causing light damage to the city such as shattered windows. The small town of Bad Oldesloe, which was at the epicentre of the blast, was a lot less lucky: it was levelled and almost all of the town’s inhabitants were reduced to ashes in an instant. The few stragglers that made it out of town suffered from second and third degree burns and could literally pull the skin off their flesh. For many of them this agony would only end with a miserable death due to radiation sickness.
At the central front near Frankfurt, the 1st Guards Tank Army and the 6th Guards Army had regrouped after their vanguard had been decimated by two 80 kiloton American tactical nuclear weapons. After Rhein-Main Air Base had been destroyed and Frankfurt along with it, the Soviets wreaked further havoc in the region by deploying more of their OTR-21 Tochka systems. Four 100 kiloton explosions inflicted further extreme losses on NATO’s Central Army Group (CENTAG) and by nightfall they’d reached the right bank of the Rhine. CENTAG forces had withdrawn across the river, having destroyed all the bridges across it as they intended to use the natural defensive line the river provided to stop Warsaw Pact forces, deploying fresh reinforcements. The Soviets on their part prepared an amphibious and airborne operation to cross the Rhine and unleashed a heavy conventional artillery bombardment on NATO positions on the left bank.
In Mediterranean Europe the first nuclear strike took place that targeted a NATO member other than West Germany: Italy. A Soviet Tupolev Tu-95 strategic heavy bomber belonging to the 79th Heavy Bomber Aviation Division, resorting under the 37th Air Army, departed from Dolon Air Base (located at Semipalatinsk in the Kazakh SSR of the Soviet Union). It unleashed two Kh-22 missiles with the warheads set at a yield of 500 kilotons, annihilating the base as well as the nearby town of Aviano and the small city Pordenone. Again thousands of innocent civilians suffered.
All these nuclear strikes in the night and morning led to a West German exodus, starting at dawn. Half a million people had been killed almost instantaneously in these strikes across West Germany and Austria. Things were clearly heating up and German civilians no longer felt safe staying in cities that at any moment could be targeted by the Soviets with a nuclear weapon. Chaos erupted in major West German cities like Bremen, Dortmund, Essen, Düsseldorf, Cologne and Bonn as countless people didn’t heed the advice to seek shelter and protection underground in cellars, subway stations and fallout shelters as they feared they wouldn’t be safe here. The inhabitants of these cities knew these places would be hit in the event of a full scale nuclear exchange.
Law and order disappeared. Those intending to flee packed the essentials and prepared to leave, which in many cases also meant participating in the looting of grocery stores. As tens of thousands of people were involved, the police was no longer able to enforce order and the Bundeswehr had different priorities right now. In fact, many policemen didn’t show up for work and were busy looting themselves. The looters took anything edible and things like bottled water, but also things like clothing, toilet paper, shampoo, dog food, cat food and medication like painkillers and antiemetics for people who suffered from motion sickness. Stores catering to outdoors recreation saw looters steal things like tents, sleeping bags and gas cartridge portable stoves (a handful of people that followed the bushcraft lifestyle took what they needed to be able to live off the land). After putting their luggage and loot in every conceivable nook and cranny of their cars, people drove off. What also occurred was that people pooled their resources and took a bus, truck or even something as unconventional as a bulldozer or an excavator.
A refugee crisis emerged in just one day, turning the westbound roads in the Ruhr Area into one giant traffic congestion. Cars, vans, busses and trucks moved at a snail’s pace bumper to bumper, taking the entire morning and afternoon to cover a distance of just 50 kilometres or less. This prompted more and more people to take only what they could carry and abandon their vehicles. Quickly people were driving in the wrong direction on the eastbound side of the highways too.
The refugees continued on foot or on different vehicles. For those who had bicycles, mopeds and motorcycles, enabling them to navigate through the mass of cars much faster, the situation was a mixed bag. These two-wheeled modes of transportation certainly covered a lot more ground than any regular passenger car, but that also meant people wanted them. Plenty of motorcyclists, moped drivers and cyclists proved to be willing to take somebody with them. In other cases desperate people traded food or water in exchange for a ride. Many women engaged in survival sex as a method of payment for hitchhiking, which meant scenarios otherwise reserved for pornographic films suddenly took place in the real world: women having sex in the back of cars at roadside stations or gratifying men orally behind a bush in exchange for a ride. It was all part of the surrealism of those days in mid-November 1983, and tragically in many cases it was for nothing as many would die in the nuclear fire that would come.
Other people resorted to use of force to steal a motorcycle, moped or bike. They beat up or even killed the original owners with melee weapons like claw hammers and crowbars or sometimes firearms like air guns and hunting rifles. A different type of force was used by those who had commandeered a bus, truck, bulldozer or excavator: they used the sheer size and power of their vehicles to crush or cast aside abandoned cars.
A teleconference was held, attended by the leaders of all NATO powers, at 10:00 AM Western European time (09:00 AM in Britain, 02:00 AM at the Cheyenne Mountain Complex). Reagan de facto chaired the meeting despite his fatigue, having slept only four to five hours in the two preceding nights and taking a handful of 20-25 minute naps during the day when the situation allowed it. During this meeting Reagan, Thatcher, Kohl and Mitterrand discussed how to react to the escalating situation in West Germany. Italian Prime Minister Amintore Fanfani, Dutch Prime Minister Ruud Lubbers and Belgian Prime Minister Wilfried Martens featured prominently too. A Soviet crossing of the Rhine seemed imminent and Kohl, Lubbers and Martens argued in favour of larger scale use of tactical nuclear strikes to stop that. Some kind of retaliation was also discussed against Babruysk Air Base, where the bombers that had destroyed Hamburg, Frankfurt and Vienna had taken off from. The option of taking out Dolon Air Base as a tit for tat for the Soviets taking out Aviano was raised by Fanfani. They all agreed that a show of force was needed to show Moscow that the West wouldn’t be bullied into submission through their nuclear terror.
NATO released a statement that it would not yield to Soviet “nuclear terrorism” targeting Western cities and their civilian populations. If these kind of operations continued then NATO would see itself forces to retaliate “in kind” according to the same statement. They demanded a commitment from the Soviet Union that civilian targets would be spared as much as possible, because they couldn’t guarantee they would to the same if Moscow declined. Pope John Paul II, Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme and UN Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar offered to mediate such a deal as a precursor to a ceasefire agreement.
Like they hadn’t taken the earlier ultimatum seriously, the Soviet leadership didn’t take these threats seriously either. They should have done so, but instead they chose to see it as a sign of weakness and a desperate move to intimidate the Soviets into stopping their successful advance. They ignored the pleas of the Vatican, the Swedish embassy and Pérez de Cuéllar.
As the Warsaw Pact’s advance all across the front continued relentlessly, NATO prepared larger scale tactical nuclear strikes that afternoon to stop them as their leaders had agreed on in the morning. Under the NATO nuclear sharing arrangement, US nuclear weapons were stationed in the Netherlands, Belgium, West Germany, Italy and Turkey. The weapons were stored within a vault in hardened aircraft shelters, using the US Air Force WS3 Weapons Storage and Security System. They were controlled and guarded by USAF personnel who controlled the Permissive Action Link codes. To be specific, the USAF Munitions Support Squadrons co-located at these NATO bases, where they worked together with host nation forces, had custody and control over the weapons. After the Netherlands and Belgium had provided their keys for the dual-key systems, simultaneous authorization by the host nations and the United States was a fact.
At 03:00 PM that Saturday afternoon, three Dutch F-16s took off from Volkel Air Base near the village of the same name in the Netherlands. Volkel Air Base was one of several military airfields in the Netherlands, and one of the three major operational bases of the Royal Netherlands Air Force (RNLAF), the other two being Leeuwarden Air Base and Gilze-Rijen Air Base. A squadron of F-16s flying from Gilze-Rijen Air Base joined them as an escort to protect them. Besides that, a lone trio of F-16s would be odd and warn Warsaw Pact units that a tactical nuclear strike was headed their way, which they would try to stop at all costs. They dropped three B61 bombs, this time with the yield set at 300 kilotons, crippling the 3rd Shock Army a mere 50 kilometres east of Dortmund.
A strike twice as large was launched from Kleine Brogel Air Base, located near the town of Peer. It was the home of the 10th Tactical Wing of the Air Component, the air arm of the Belgian Defence Forces. A sextet of F-16s piloted by Belgian aviators took off at 03:00 PM and they dropped six B61 bombs that detonated over the 1st Guards Tank Army and the 6th Guards Army with an explosive yield of 300 kilotons each, decimating these two major Soviet formations and thereby preventing a crossing of the Rhine. Remaining CENTAG forces on the left bank were relieved that the artillery bombardment they’d been subjected to all day was finally over. It would be a short reprieve.
Last edited:
