The Second Battle of Britain - a Soviet Sealion

Pretty much the only way to stop this is for somebody to propose a "phased mutual stand-down of nuclear and conventional forces beginning immediately," but would either side accept the offer from the other?

If not, "Thus passes the glory of the world"

207 – New York, New York


‘New York, New York (So good they named it twice)’.

The war raging overseas had had quite the negative affect upon New York City. The Big Apple descended into chaos soon after the news came that World War Three was underway. In the time between the outbreak of fighting between the superpowers and the destruction of the city, eleven days, events in New York were quite something. It wasn’t a place anyone would want to be in.

Criminality and violence had rocked New York. It started a few hours after the war began and would continue without pause until the city came to an end. Robbery, looting and arson took place. Impoverished and upscale neighbourhoods were similarly affected. A lot of what happened was organised violence with some major thefts taking place yet the majority was entirely random. The NYPD and the FDNY had no ability to bring under control what happened. Each of those would have failed to stop what happened even without the loss of manpower when national mobilisation occurred: many of their personnel were within the Organised Reserves, the National Guard and the State Guard. A large number of personnel also fled the city regardless of their duties. Those who remained were pulled from non-essential tasks and drafted in to try and stop the destruction of so many areas of the city and avert the deaths. They were given the run around through the Five Boroughs. The whole city had seemingly gone crazy! Amongst all of this, attention was paid to certain areas with others ignored. Brighton Beach fell into the latter category where so-called patriots went on a rampage against ‘Russians’ there in what could be called a modern-day pogrom due to the high number of Jewish deaths. Parts of the Bronx and Brooklyn as well as much of Harlem was left alone by the authorities too. In contrast, police officers and firefighters paid most attention to trying to avert the chaos unfolding in large areas of Manhattan, Queens and certain (wealthier) areas of Brooklyn & the Bronx as well as the relatively quiet Staten Island. There was the saving of Guggenheim and Metropolitan Art museums too: these parts of New York’s cultural heritage were protected from arson attempts where possible but other cultural sites were burnt out.

New York’s National Guard – army and air components – had been federally mobilised. This took them out of state control despite the wishes of the governor to keep some of them for civil defence tasks. What remained under the orders of Governor Cuomo was the New York Guard (NYG): New York was one of several states nationwide which had a State Guard. This was a paramilitary force in many ways, not a true combat command. The NYG had three brigades and only one of them, the 88th Brigade, was deployed into the city. Mayor Koch, not someone who usually had a good relationship with the governor, welcomed them though wished that another one would have been sent. Cuomo was keeping the others for state-wide missions though as the Big Apple wasn’t the only place which had seen chaos erupt when war came: the state had other cities too. The NYG wasn’t used to fight the violence nor the fires but instead tasked for security duties. They were much needed. Bridges and tunnels as well as transportation hubs needed guarding. There was a security incident at JFK International Airport where the NYG intervened successfully yet they failed to stop a bomb from causing immense destruction at the Con-Ed facility at Ravenswood in Queens that had negative effects city-wide straight away. A request for the NYG to go to Rikers Island to put a stop to the massive prison riot there (dozens were dead already; guards had been taken hostage) was refused though because they were needed elsewhere. The NYG were also involved in providing security for the gold removal operation which took place from underneath the Federal Reserve Bank building in Lower Manhattan. Little of that belonged to the United States – most of it was owned by Western European governments – but it was a valuable resource which was pulled out of the city and being taken far away.

What the NYG, neither the NYPD either, could do anything to help with was the flight of people from New York. Millions wanted to get out of the city. They found this hindered by the authorities who closed so many of the routes out. They weren’t trying to trap people in the city but instead secure the transport infrastructure against an effort by Soviet saboteurs to destroy them. Most of the big road bridges were shut along with the tunnels. The airports and seaports were closed too. Huge crowds of people on foot as well as clusters of vehicles were around the access points to these places, trying to push their way past. Efforts were made to inform them that there were other ways out of the city – through Harlem into the Bronx and out of Queens into Long Island – but few wanted to listen. Violence took place soon enough and this was met with gunfire in return. The reason why this was done was to allow for New York to be used for military purposes. The city was to be a transit point for American military forces overseas with its ports and airports. Those planned operations were at once under severe strain by the mass of people.

All of this came to an end when a Soviet missile submarine up in the Kara Sea fired on the Big Apple. Three R-29R ballistic missiles (known to NATO as the SS-N-18 Stingray) were launched over the North Pole. They carried a trio of warheads each with a projected explosive force of each being five hundred kilotons. A second submarine, firing two more of the same missiles, was due to launch them as well. This targeting schedule was done for redundancy in case one submarine failed to achieve its mission. Such was the case here. That other boat had a major launch malfunction and wouldn’t get any of its many shots off: like the first, it was due to attack many targets. Those missiles which were flying reached New York late on the morning of Wednesday September 2nd, 1987.


Warhead #1 detonated two and a half thousand feet above Lower Manhattan. The immense thermonuclear explosion occurred in the sky to effectively destroy the Financial District below. It was just off-target when it blew up above the northern end of Battery Park: the projected ground zero was the NY Stock Exchange, a few blocks away over on Wall Street. That didn’t matter much because the explosion had enough force to wipe out everything in the target area that it was meant to. Wall Street was atomised like so much more in the Financial District. The Federal Reserve (there was no gold left there; any future treasure hunters would be disappointed), the iconic Twin Towers of the World Trade Centre, dozens upon dozens of other skyscrapers & office blocks, the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel entrance, City Hall & One Police Plaza, the Brooklyn & Manhattan Bridges, up to the Bowery in Chinatown, most of Tribeca, across the lower reaches of the East River onto the Brooklyn shore… all of this was gone forever.

Warhead #2 failed to explode. It was meant to blow up in the sky over Brooklyn with Crown Heights, near Prospect Park, being below the hypocentre of the thermonuclear detonation. The warhead instead crashed into the water of Upper New York Bay and would sink to the bottom while leaking radioactive poison. The very heart of Brooklyn would have been destroyed if it had worked as it was meant to.

Warhead #3 was bang on-target. It exploded above JFK Airport in Queens. National guardsmen with New York’s 42nd Infantry Division were gathered there with large parts of that formation due to fly out to Western Europe starting this evening with the equipment supposed to follow them by sea soon enough if a miracle resolved the issue of available sea-lift. Close to half of the Rainbow Division, those part-time soldiers going off to war, were among the many casualties caused when the airport was hit like it was. A huge fireball eliminated large parts of Queens beyond the airport grounds taking many more lives too.

Warhead #4 was also aimed perfectly. It went off in the sky over Manhattan, striking Mid-Town East. The Pan-am Building was right below the immense explosion with Grand Central Terminal underneath that particular targeted structure. As a result, a huge part of the centre of Manhattan was wiped off the map. Times Square and the Port Authority Bus Station along 42nd Street – the historic Deuce – to the west. The Empire State Building and Penn Station to the south. The United Nations complex to the east at Turtle Bay and the Queensboro Bridge over the East River too. To the north, the Rockefeller Centre and Trump Tower. These were all gone just like the Chrysler Building close-in to the hypocentre of the nuclear blast. Such famous landmarks of New York were no more.

Warhead #5 was meant to eliminate La Guardia Airport at the northern end of Queens. It was way off-course though and blew up in the sky over Mineola out in Nassau County: beyond the boundaries of New York City. This was a suburban area and into one which many New Yorkers – those from Brooklyn and Queens – had managed to flee fearing nuclear blasts near to their homes. Instead, they were underneath the nuclear fireball here. The force of that explosion was less than a quarter of the intended outcome though with a partial detonation occurring. Damage was still significant across Nassau County though because the blast would be rated one hundred and twenty kilotons: it being smaller than intended didn’t count for much in the end.

Warhead #6 didn’t make it into the skies over New York. It broke up on the edge of space just after being fired from the warhead bus due to a catastrophic malfunction. Its target had been the extensive rail facilities at Sunnyside Yard in Queens, near to Long Island City and also Manhattan’s just destroyed Mid-Town East. The planned blast would have wiped out significant parts of the western reaches of Queens and northern parts of Brooklyn: urban and industrial areas alike. Sunnyside Yard provided strategic rail links across the Northeastern United States too. While this failure mattered, New York was still being struck elsewhere though.

Warhead #7 was aimed at the Military Ocean Terminal (MOTBY) just over in New Jersey. The MOTBY was still pretty close to New York though and the detonation in the sky when it exploded did knock the Statue of Liberty down due to the blast being above Upper New York Bay. The immense port facility targeted by this warhead was utterly destroyed. There were military equipment and supplies arriving by rail and road to go aboard ships that would transport them to the fighting raging across the ocean. All that came to an end. Also wiped out was the neighbouring Port Jersey artificial pier (also the scene of the mass movement of military equipment), much of the town of Bayonne and the famous ferry terminal at the north-eastern tip of Staten Island as blast effects tore into the edges of that island too.

Warhead #8 failed to reach its target. That was in New Jersey as well though still close enough to New York City to matter due to the projected blast yield. The Port Newark / Elizabeth Marine Terminal container port behind the MOTBY, with Newark Airport nearby too, was supposed to be wiped from the face of the earth to deny its wartime value. Without exploding, that warhead landed in distant Pennsylvania though with its mangled, dangerous remains buried in woodland.

Warhead #9, the last one, was slightly off course. It was targeted to explode above the Grand Concourse in the South Bronx, near to Yankee Stadium. The explosion was instead over Spanish Harlem across in Manhattan, above one of those violence-affected housing projects off First Avenue. It was far lower in the sky than planned too, going off at just over a hundred feet in the sky: almost a ground burst. Areas of Spanish Harlem underneath it were obliterated but there wasn’t much of the desired destruction caused over in the Bronx. In addition, other parts of Harlem weren’t as hard hit as they would have been had the warhead detonation been higher than it was. A crater was dug into the island of Manhattan – and the whole island shook too – with an immense amount of fallout due to be caused.


There were supposed to be six more planned nuclear blasts from those further two missiles which failed to leave their launching submarine. Three of the warheads were targeted at Manhattan with Washington Heights in the upper reaches of Harlem near the George Washington Bridge, the Hell’s Kitchen area of Mid-Town West and Lower Manhattan (a second warhead from a second missile from a second submarine) projected to be destroyed by these. The Co-op City & Pelham Bay area of the Bronx, JFK Airport in Queens again and the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge on the Staten Island side were the final three targets. These all escaped the fate which befell other areas of the city yet there would have been the question as to whether all of the warheads would have stayed on-course or even worked as supposed to.

Those from the missiles which did made it had done enough though. New York City had been directly hit four times with those other blasts in the harbour area of Upper New York Bay and out on Long Island occurring near enough to matter. At each of these sites, there was nothing left. It wasn’t a case of there being ruins like had been seen forty-two years previously in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The ground zeroes were New York were empty… of everything. They were black holes where once there had been so much. Life was snuffed out there along with all traces of what humans had laboured so long to create.

Large areas might have escaped the physical destruction which came with the nuclear explosions in terms of the fireballs and the immediate blast-waves. However, the aftereffects were fast into action. The radiation unleashed came in instant form and then there was the fallout too, much of that going to come from the near ground blast over the eastern side of Harlem. The flash of the explosions had blinded countless victims. There had been vehicle crashes, showers of glass and then steam explosions worse than had come after the terror attack against Queens’ Con-Ed plant. Fires were ignited everywhere with several soon to converge into firestorms. Power and telecommunications were out at once due to EMP effects. That bomb over the MOTBY saw the waters of Upper New York Bay displaced with surges into the Subway network below Manhattan and Brooklyn. Officially, the Subway was closed but there were many people underground regardless. Buildings away from the multiple ground zeros were fatally weakened and many would soon come down. Heart attacks and strokes had taken place city-wide. New York had suffered a rash of suicides before the nuclear attacks and many more would occur afterwards. Many hospitals were either destroyed or badly damaged; at the latter and into ones not at once affected by the multiple nuclear blasts, tens of thousands of people converged upon them making each one rapidly a scene of absolute horror. The blasts put a temporary halt on the violence across New York – and also killed many participants too – but it quickly re-started. This time it was about people doing what they thought they needed to so to survive, not caring about anyone else in that. There was also the issue of the people left alive across the city and nearby.

Anyone who hadn’t wanted to leave before did now. They sought to get out of New York in fear of another attack and also the radiation that had been unleashed. It was the latter which would kill millions more New Yorkers after the first couple of million had their lives taken with the Soviet strike. People were out in the open yet even those in their homes across the Five Boroughs were soon to succumb to an horrific death. Many New Yorkers headed towards civilian fallout shelters. These were scattered across the city like they were many areas of the nation. Food and medicine were inside them and there was supposed to be safety. Yet in the preceding days, there had been trouble around many of these sites. As New Yorkers again rushed to those ones not atomised, they found many closed or others compromised by fire, flooding (Major Koch, a New Yorker through and through, drowned in one of these shelters) or fallout. Nowhere near enough space had been available to shelter the entire city’s population but now there was even less.

The city had been home to seven million people before the war. Almost a million were already dead. The majority of those New Yorkers who’d survived the attack – another three million plus; a roughly equal number had fled over the last eleven days – were now about to lose their lives too, just as their city was. New York, New York or the Big Apple or the Greatest City on Earth or even Gotham, whichever name had suited it best, was lost in a morning which saw hellfire rain down upon it.

Damm, do not think i need to go on vacation to New York for the time being.

Also another good update, sorry to say it is not the case for anybody living in NY.

You would glow in the dark afterwards.
Thanks. We are coming to the end of the story now. I wrote the bulk of this update - changed a few things today - back in August last year. I have been waiting to do it since then.



In my view - and I had it in Soviet Domination - in a Cold War exchange of nukes, DC = Leningrad and NYC = Moscow. I agree that New York needs to be answered with Moscow.
However, this isn't just the one strike done by itself. New York is hit in the midst of a mass, multi-nation exchange. That will be in tomorrow's update, the penultimate one for the story. I'm thinking I will have a couple of F-117s fly with B61s but they will only be part of a bigger series of attacks.

208-A – The missiles of September


It was Israel which struck the opening blow to begin the second round of nuclear exchanges. Of course, there was no foresight of what was to come. This was supposed to a limited action, one due to what the country’s leaders believed was an imminent threat not just to their nation’s security, but very survival. It would begin a chain of events that would see the deaths of an unimaginable number of people though, including immense numbers of Israelis too.

The day before, Israel warships in the Med. had been targeted by Soviet nuclear attacks at sea when they were engaging the US Navy. That was deliberate, the Israelis believed, when in fact it was just collateral damage during a Soviet attack on the Americans. Earlier today, following the Soviet nuclear attacks on land – including an unsuccessful strike against a military airbase in Egypt – the United States had responded by making a counterstrike into Syria. Prime Minister Shamir was informed about this when the Tomahawks were already in the air. There had been a communications delay in getting in contact with him. It was Vice President Bush who told him of what the Americans were doing, not Reagan who was at that time engaged in a three-way teleconference with Hurd and Mitterrand. Israeli monitored the multiple nuclear explosions which occurred northeast of Lebanon. They were quickly aware too of the Soviet reaction elsewhere in Syria. There were nuclear forces of theirs deployed in that country, located over on the far side near to Iraq as well as across the border into that second nation. The Israeli leadership believed that those were soon to come into action with Israel as a target for them.

Getting back into contact with Bush brought another delay. He was leaving Mount Weather and getting aboard another E-4 aircraft – one of those ‘doomsday planes’ – so there was a wait for the Israelis before they could talk to him; Reagan was completely unavailable as well. Infuriated by this, Shamir and his top team were. More information came in while they waited impatiently. It really did look like the Soviets were getting ready to attack them. There was no time to waste and so, ahead of finally talking to the Americans, Shamir authorised the launching of IDF/AF aircraft to go east. Defence Minister Rabin did push him into giving the go ahead but Shamir didn’t need much of a push: he’d already decided that unless Bush said something extraordinary when they spoke, a strike was going ahead. In theory, it could be one that was aborted if that was the case too. F-16s – with Israeli-specific electronic systems and weapons – were on strip-alert with aircrew in the cockpits at several airbases. Off they went carrying Israeli nukes just ahead of Shamir eventually making contact with Bush.

Bush was told what Israel was doing. While only a couple of hours before, he had joined with Weinberger in urging Reagan to make a massive retaliation to the Soviet nuclear attack on European & Middle Eastern targets rather than the like-for-like one his president chose to do, with the Israelis he called for the opposite. Shamir was told that this was a mistake. The Soviets weren’t going to open fire on Israel but instead the signs of activity around their deployed forces were being done just in case there was an attack made. To Shamir, this was just pure speculation on Bush’s part. He had intelligence in front of him along with analysis that pointed to a Soviet strike on Israel. Israel’s PM informed the Americans that the strike was going ahead. His last words to Bush were that there would be no Second Holocaust. How wrong he was.

Single- & twin-seat F-16s flew out of Israel into Syria. Air defences over that country, Soviet and Syrian, had already been battered for two weeks now (starting before the NATO-vs.-Soviet conflict erupted) but one of the IDF/AF aircraft was brought down by a SAM. That F-16 was carrying a nuclear bomb which, if things hadn’t gone the way that they would, this would have given Israel nightmares for many long years to come. Fighter opposition wasn’t there and other SAMs were avoided. Into the attack the F-16s went… at the same time as there came a launch from back inside Israel of Jericho ballistic missiles. This was a time-on-target strike. All attacks were meant to occur simultaneously. There were issues with this. No plan survives contact with the enemy intact. Another F-16 was downed, this one during the attack and after the bomb carried had been dropped. Two of the Jerichos missed their targets like a couple of the bombs too. However, nearly twenty nuclear detonations took place through eastern Syria and the a-joining western Iraq.

The Israeli strike hit four airbases and the suspected locations of seven mobile missile-launchers. The latter were where they believed the Soviets had both SS-12 Scaleboard and SS-20 Sabre launchers. Those were nuclear-armed missiles with easily enough capability to wipe out Israel many times over. Israel hit them first, blowing massive nuclear holes in the desert. The airbases had aircraft at them capable of attacking Israel with nuclear bombs too. There were other ways in which the Soviets could hit Israel, but Shamir and Rabin believed that this was the closest and most imminent threat. They struck first with the intention of preventing an attack by showing Moscow their capability and, most importantly, will. Alas, the Soviets would come to a different opinion on this.


Ligachev and his cabal – away from Moscow now due to the danger which they felt in being there – believed that the Americans were behind this. Shamir didn’t tell them that Israel had made this attack on its own and there was only partial information coming in as to what had occurred to their forward nuclear forces down in that particular area of the Middle East. Just as Bush had told the Israelis, something which had been dismissed by Shamir, Soviet nuclear forces there were only preparing to be used in a counter-strike against any possible American attack: they had no plan to make a pre-emptive attack on Israel. There would be a retaliation for this. It would be one made against Israel itself and American interests in the region. Other Soviet nuclear forces, ones in Syria missed by Israeli reconnaissance, as well as assets spread further afield, made a counterstrike. It was a disproportionate attack: stronger than the blow inflicted upon them to both discourage and stop any further attacks. Aircraft and missiles were each used to strike a rage of targets across the Middle East. The focus was on military ones yet there were certain to be civilian losses because nuclear weapons unfortunately caused a lot of collateral damage.

American military sites through the Coalition countries (those first assembled to fight Iraq months ago) were hit. In Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Oman and the United Arab Emirates, those targets were airbases. Attacks on both Egypt and Qatar failed to be effective in hitting what was targeted but would result in large numbers of fatalities from the near misses. On Cyprus, the British airbase of RAF Akrotiri was blown up. There was only one of those US Air Force F-117 stealth aircraft on the ground at time: the rest were already airborne. An attack on Cyprus had been mooted earlier in the day when the Soviets first made use of nuclear weapons but due to the issue with Turkey requesting a ceasefire the day before, the target had been changed to the airbase at Cairo West which the Americans were using there. That change had been made because while Akrotiri was on the southern side of Cyprus, it was thought that Turkey would still not look kindly upon that and threaten an end to that conflict from happening. What a mistake that had been, a fatal one in the long run for the Soviets because almost all of those F-117s from there were now gone whereas many would have been caught on the ground a few hours before. Akrotiri, sovereign British soil here in the Med., was obliterated. So too were a pair of Turkish airbases up within their country. Each were home to more American aircraft, ones located dangerously close to the Soviet Union. Turkey had requested an end to the fighting but nothing yet had been agreed. There were American nuclear-capable aircraft on their soil at the Incirlik and Konya Airbases. Once the decision had been made to hit Akrotiri, there was no hesitation over striking Incirlik and Konya. Both of them were blasted to atoms with some American aircraft caught on the ground but not all of them.

And then there was the direct retaliation upon Israel. The Second Holocaust came.

From the airbases at Ramat David and Ramon, the IDF/AF F-16s which hit Soviet nuclear forces in the opening strike had flown. They were close to returning home when up ahead of them in came ballistic missiles from one site in Syria which they had no idea existed and also from far off in the distant Caucasus. The latter facility was far from populated areas; the former wasn’t. A third military facility was Palmachim Airbase and it was from where those Jerichos had been launched. This target for the Soviet attack on Israel was near to the shores of the Med., just south of Tel Aviv. Many Israelis lived nearby. Then there came the direct attack upon Tel Aviv itself. Incoming missiles targeted the military HQ in the middle of the city at The Kirya. The attacks on Palmachim and The Kirya were ground bursts. Protected storage areas for more Jerichos and belowground command centres were the targets. Above ground in the immediate areas lived hundreds of thousands of civilians who if not killed outright, were soon going to die with the resulting fallout from these ground bursts.

Separate American and Israeli counter-counterstrikes were made, several of them beginning before the last detonations from the Soviet attack had occurred. Nuclear-capable forces of both were already at the highest state of alert due to the exchanges underway. There was still opposition to them in places – aircraft faced the risk of being shot down – but most of the attacks got through. CENTCOM had authorisation to make these attacks which it did. In a flash message from Weinberger (Reagan had given his assent because he had no other choice here), General Crist send out a ‘Tango Twilight’ order to his assets. There was a standing firing plot to be followed by the Americans here. The Israelis were doing their own thing and there was no co-ordination which saw overlap but no instances of friendly fire between them. Neither CENTCOM nor Crist’s political masters knew what the Israelis were about to do.

Further nuclear strikes hit Iraq and Syria, this time with the Americans making them. There were a lot of blasts. Libya was likewise targeted though neither Iran nor even South Yemen were hit when there might have been an expectation that the partial and full allies of Moscow here were seemingly in the firing line. No targets worthy of a nuclear attack were spotted though. Tango Twilight was a military-focused attack; a different one would have the Americans hitting urban targets and that would have included both those countries should it have been ordered. The Americans didn’t launch any attacks direct in Soviet territory. The closest they came was the sending of missiles towards Bagram Airbase up in Afghanistan. Israel didn’t impose such restrictions upon itself, not with their own country having just been hit.

Using F-15s fitted with extra fuel tanks, with aircrew informed that this was going to be a one-way flight for them, IDF/AF aircraft went northwards. They would be soon flying above Turkey with the impact zones for their carried bombs going to be in the Crimea, the Ukraine, the Caucasus and the very southernmost reaches of the Russian part of the Soviet Union too. No recall orders were going to be sent to them: Shamir, Rabin and the others at the top of the Israeli leadership had been caught at The Kirya mid-evacuation at atomised.


Global nuclear warfare was underway. It was spreading outwards rapidly. The leaders of the Soviet Union and the United States were still in command of their military forces with decisions being taken to respond: those who kicked it off, Israel’s leaders, were dead already. It appeared that this could all be brought to a halt yet those IDF/AF aircraft on their way to bomb the USSR would make that difficult though. However, now it was underway, each side saw the other as being completely unreasonable with there being no way that they could trust the other not to go completely crazy. If there was to be a cessation of the nuclear exchanges, then one side needed to blink first. Neither was about to.

Reagan authorised the Tango Twilight strikes at the same time as – in agreement with Hurd and Mitterrand – the long-planned Operation Rainbow went into effect elsewhere. NATO was going to up the ante with the intention of stopping what had just happened to Israel being seen in their own countries. A pre-emptive strike was being made with the aim being that they wouldn’t suffer the same fate as the Israelis. It was a gamble, a fool-hardly move. It was going to result in a death toll on a scale beyond comprehension.


To be continued…