Soviet Domination - A Red Dawn story

Nukes are the new carpet bombing.

Nuclear weapons will be used in this story, at the outset. Chemical weapons will get a big role too.

Both weapons sound bad, very bad.

While this is logical from the military pow it's extremely risky, even in the early 80's europe were pretty integrated and going that way mean that sooner or later (talking about days, not months or weeks) and the rest of the continent will be involved; the UK can be possible as it has always posed itself apart from the continent (but as Brexit demonstrated, was more perception than economic and military reality) but i doubt that will last too much and expanding the conflict to other european nation from the start mean that you plan to fight all other very soon (nobody likes to be surrounded and frankly the possibility of a Lusitania like accident are too high).
Not considering that expanding the conflict it's not a risk that the URSS can take lightly, supply the american front will mean making an herculean effort and the great bulk of the conventional force will be occupied in North America and China, making keep western europe a quiet place a priority worth to sell your firstborn

(84)

February 1983:

President Nixon had gone to China; his successor President Ford had done the same. President Kennedy was due to go to China later this year. Since Nixon had opened a new page in Sino-American relations in 1972, those relations had been strengthened. China was eager to expand them like the United States was though with each side still apprehensive of the other at the same time. Both Beijing and Washington worried over the other suddenly improving relations with the Soviets over them and in Beijing, Deng had been concerned that just that was happening with Kennedy’s recent dealings with Andropov. Still, while the Americans and the Soviets were talking about troop numbers and nuclear weapons in Europe, relations between the mutual adversaries of Moscow in the form of China and the United States remained strong. These were of the nature of intelligence-sharing and diplomacy in facing off against the Soviet Union though there was too a slow increase in trade links. This had started in the last years of Ford’s presidency and were unaffected by the ’79 war between China and Soviet-backed Vietnam which had forced Chinese-Soviet relations to a nadir. The trans-Pacific trade was small but growing; so too were the recently-established travel links where commercial air passenger services were slowly being opened up between the two countries. It had started with a bi-weekly service between Beijing and Washington with extensions made to Shanghai, San Francisco and New York afterwards. Two American and one Chinese airlines made these flights. They weren’t exactly always full and were thus rather expensive for passengers. Few Chinese had reason to go to the United States (they needed a state-sanctioned one too) and while there were more Americans going to China, the opportunities for business there weren’t that great. Chinese protectionism was only slowly easing up. One of the US-based airlines was soon to cut their service unless things picked up. Business decisions didn’t affect the Chinese government-owned airline which was to fly to America regardless of passenger numbers: that was a political decision.

CAAC Airlines flew a mix of aircraft purchased from Britain, the Soviet Union and the United States for long-range overseas journeys. February 6th 1983 saw one of those shot out of the sky: a Boeing-707 heading from Beijing to San Francisco by way of Alaska. A navigation error saw the aircraft veer too far northwest when over the Sea of Japan and that continued as the flight kept on heading for distant Anchorage. The Boeing-707 kept flying onwards but its course took it over the Sea of Okhotsk rather than direct over the Pacific. The Kuril Islands should have been off the port wing but instead they were off the starboard wing. Flying high and in the darkness, with the initial navigational error continuously getting worse, the Chinese aircraft flew through skies considered by the Soviet Union to be their own without knowing that. The Sea of Okhotsk was only Soviet territorial waters in part along with elements of the air space above. Only Moscow recognised this, not Beijing. The aircraft hadn’t intended to be there but even when it was, there was nothing illegal nor aggressive in this. The Soviets watched the Boeing-707 heading for the Kamchatka Peninsula. This was an area full of closed towns and many sensitive military bases. The civilian airliner didn’t respond to stern warnings to not approach and it was regarded by those on the ground as being a spy aircraft: there had been those before over the Sea of Okhotsk. A pilot sent up in his Sukhoi-15 interceptor made a visual identification of the aircraft as a civilian airliner. He told those on the ground he could see the lights coming from the passenger windows. The orders still came. This was a spy flight and it had ignored warnings to leave Soviet sovereign air space. It was to be shot down. The Su-15 put a pair of air-to-air missiles into the Boeing-707. They hit and down when the airliner: it made impact with the Sea of Okhotsk far below. One hundred and fourteen passengers and crew were aboard: twenty-eight of whom were American citizens.


It was winter in North East Asia. The Sea of Okhotsk wasn’t an area for much civilian shipping nor commercial flying. The only witness to the shoot down was the interceptor pilot. He was isolated from the rest of his comrades in his regiment when he returned to base and flown to the Far Eastern Military District headquarters – from where the shoot-down order came – at Khabarovsk for a debriefing. That wasn’t going to be a fun experience for him. Soviet radar operators and ground control officers who witnessed on radar screens and through radio channels of what happened were taken off duty as well for less-intensive debriefings. For the first two days following the shoot down, there was no comment from the Soviet Armed Forces nor the Foreign Ministry about the missing airliner. Elsewhere, there was plenty being said. The civilian jet missed a communications check soon after it crashed into the ocean with air traffic controllers in Japan and then with those in Alaska. No one responded to the many radio calls. An emergency was declared by both the Japanese and the Americans beginning with civilian authorities. The Chinese were informed that one of their aircraft might have had an accident. The Soviets were asked for help as well. The problem was that no one was sure where the missing aircraft went down. It was meant to be over the northeastern reaches of the Pacific and so that was where a search began to look for wreckage and hopefully survivors too.

The DIA and NSA – two American intelligence agencies – operated undeclared listening stations within China. They were focused on gathering intelligence from within the Soviet Union with their locations being priceless. Everything had to be shared with the Chinese (though not everything actually was) for them to continue to operate from Chinese soil. The radio transmissions concerning the Chinese airliner, from the warnings to leave Soviet air space to open fire on the aircraft to confirmation that it was down, were picked up and then work went on decoding them. Those who did so had no idea until afterwards what they had because their job was just to decode anything and everything. What they did end up having was proof that the Soviets had shot down an unarmed airliner and not said anything about it. There was actually a pretence made that there could be Soviet help given to search for the aircraft out in the Pacific when they knew that it had been purposely brought down over the Sea of Okhotsk. This information was passed to governments in Beijing and Washington. Deng called it ‘air piracy’ and ‘murder’; Kennedy made a statement deeming it an ‘outrage’ and called for an international investigation. The Soviets denied everything. The recordings of intercepted radio transmissions (sources unrevealed) were made available to the media. A forgery, said Gromyko, and an attempt to frame the Soviet Union for something it hadn’t done. There was a stream of allegations and counter-allegations between national capitals. All the while, the bodies of those aboard remained inside the broken Boeing-707 at the bottom of the sea with only the Soviets having an idea of where they were located… but having sent so-called rescue ships out into the Pacific instead.

Deng considered the whole thing a deliberate act. The Americans told him that shooting down the airliner was done on purpose but it appeared to be a decision made by local commanders and not authorised by Moscow. That was foolish, Deng believed. He was certain that the whole thing had been arranged in Moscow and stage-managed throughout. Somehow that airliner had been tricked into flying where it had and then carefully shot down. His conspiracy theory was a bit much for the Americans yet they weren’t looking at the whole thing like Deng was when considering the bigger picture. The Soviets had done this to tell China to back off. Back off with putting pressure on Vietnam to withdraw from Cambodia. Back off supplying Pakistan with weapons to be pointed at Soviet-friendly India & Soviet-dominated Afghanistan. Back off with the People’s Liberation Army sitting right on the border with the Soviet Union. Back off working with the Americans to not just spy on the Soviet Union but help to try to encircle the country too. Deng wouldn’t back off. He wasn’t one to give into intimidation. The Americans politely asked him to re-consider his conspiracy theory but he won’t. They didn’t see what he did. Everything the Soviets did was carefully planned out a long time ahead with desired end results.

Oh, boy, TTL's equivalent of KAL 007. Kennedy's handling of this will be bad, methinks...

Will we see a UN condemnation and a Soviet veto.