The Second Battle of Britain - a Soviet Sealion

208-B – The missiles of September


Operation Rainbow had been drawn up to stop a nuclear attack on NATO countries. It was planned as an attack when the moment arose when a Soviet strike was seen as inevitable. Its military planners and political proponents couldn’t guarantee that it would work though. When first briefed upon it, Reagan was told that the likelihood was that it would blunt much of the worst of any attack but that should the Soviets go ahead, this was the best chance that the West had of surviving a full exchange where damage would be inflicted. Such honesty had seen him at first refuse to consider it. Then Israel was hit like it was with nuclear strikes blowing up population centres. The British and French agreed with Bush and Weinberger that Rainbow had to happen… and happen now. Reagan gave in after Tel Aviv.

NATO thus struck first.

From seven US Navy carriers – in the Norwegian Sea, the Mediterranean, the Arabian Gulf and the Pacific – aircraft on strike missions flew towards their Soviet targets. Some had conventional weapons carried, other had nuclear ones yet many more were unarmed and flying while carrying electronic warfare equipment. There were a lot of those aircraft in the sky, all from carriers which had survived wartime attacks which others hadn’t. France’s surviving carrier, FNS Clemenceau, was involved too with her own aircraft flying from the Aegean Sea northwards. Other ships as well as submarines lofted cruise missiles. Only the US Navy had weapons like the Tomahawk: their partners would have loved to operate a cruise missile such as this. Again, the payloads for those bearing in towards the Soviet Union itself and its closest (physically) allies were conventional and nuclear.

Land-based air power played a bigger role than those from carriers. American, Belgian, British, Canadian, Dutch, French, Greek, Italian and West German aircraft made flights from sites in the UK, France, Italy and Greece. The air forces of several of those nations were using nuclear weapons supplied to them by the United States under long-standing Nuclear Sharing agreements. Re-directed from the ‘usual’ mission of attacking Soviet targets behind the lines with conventional bombs, they were now flying nuclear attack missions which included a significant electronic warfare role. Missiles from land joined the aircraft coming out of airbases. There were more American GLCMs in addition to their own Pershing-2s joined by Luftwaffe-manned Pershing-1s. Cruise and ballistic missiles followed the aircraft in going east and north from scattered launch sites.

Rainbow missions sought to knock out warning sites and command-&-control facilities as well as spotted nuclear capable forces. Through Eastern Europe first yet also deeper into the Soviet Union all around its borders, those attacks began. Missile detection radars came under attack alongside air defence ones. Fixed and mobile headquarters were targeted. Nuclear forces poised to attack NATO countries were struck at. Waves and waves of nuclear blasts occurred. There were more than a hundred of them taking place in a very short period of time. Long before the authorisation was given for Rainbow to go into effect, certain strike elements were already out ahead. They had been given preliminary orders ahead of Rainbow being authorised. These valuable assets were in a position to be recalled if necessary yet there ready to go if needed. RAF Tornados and US Air Force FB-111s carrying nuclear bombs & short-range missiles were above the Baltic. There were American F-117s laden with bombs in holding patterns over Finland, Romania and the Black Sea. Armée de l'Air Mirage-IVs carrying nuclear missiles were in Austrian airspace. Given the go ahead to strike, they all did just that. Rainbow plans had them knocking out vital enemy targets. The Soviet leadership’s ability to know what was underway and also to strike back even without that knowledge by sending orders down the line was what was hit by these forward units with the variety of Pershing missiles coming behind them joining in too.

In the Ukraine, the infamous ‘Russian Woodpecker’ was destroyed in nuclear fire. The Over-the-Horizon radar whose distinctive sound long heard by amateur radar operators was silenced by the French. There were further strikes there in the Ukraine against others radars and this was seen too in Belarus, up through the Baltic Republics plus through the Western half of the Russian SSR. Closer to Moscow, stealth aircraft were dropping bombs on communications sites as well as command posts. Many of the latter were underground: the Americans aimed to destroy them with ground bursts to open them up followed by secondary strikes to make the final kill. NATO aircraft on electronic warfare missions assisted with hiding the attack. Active and passive jamming was used to blind air defences and also cut radio communications. The Soviets were being hit with everything NATO could throw at them to smash up their nuclear forces and stop others which weren’t being hit from making a retaliatory strike. When more aircraft joined in, the barrage continued as more bombs rained down upon the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact countries. Away from the strikes coming from the west and southwest, US Navy Tomahawks came in from other directions as well as aircraft from their carriers. The US Air Force had B-1s and B-52s launching their own missiles. These aircraft were firing from outside of the Soviet Union rather than making bomb runs over it. Airbases from where MiG interceptors flew were targeted alongside all of those radars, communication sites and headquarters complexes. A few missiles launched from the B-1s exploded extremely high in the sky over central and eastern portions of the Soviet Union: these were EMP blasts aiming to knock out more communications. From all sides, the Soviet Union was under attack.


A Hotline message from the Americans came. Split between two aircraft – prototypes of the Ilyushin-82 command-&-control aircraft were being used –, the Soviet leadership received an up-link coming from the Kremlin with the contents of that provided. Reagan addressed Ligachev directly. He condemned the Soviet strikes on Israel and elsewhere in the Middle East as a crime against humanity and called for a cessation of any more Soviet nuclear attacks. Furthermore, in response to the Soviet nuclear attacks already made, he said that the United States and her allies were currently taking pre-emptive action to stop further attacks being made. Reagan’s message spoke of no desire being had to destroy the Soviet Union nor disarm it. This was instead about stopping any further attacks being made. The Soviets were told that any response to this would be met with a full strike, one which they couldn’t stop from causing untold destruction upon their nation.

There was a complete rejection of this from the leadership. They weren’t about to accept the idea that they could do nothing. Panic set in among them at the thought of what the West was doing to their country and their military might. It was their nuclear forces which ultimately protected them and those were being taken under attack. Fragmented reports reached them despite the Rainbow strikes being made to curtail the free flow of information. There were back up links that NATO didn’t know about and a picture was emerging of the strike underway. The Americans were hitting semi-strategic nuclear forces while not hitting their true strategic force of ICBMs in silos and the SLBMs aboard submarines at sea. Chebrikov and Sokolov were certain that the Americans would turn to them next. The others weren’t so sure and believed that these were being left alone on purpose. Regardless of the specifics of American intentions, this was an attack. Reagan had broken all the rules. He was attacking the Soviet Union directly, using nuclear weapons to blast holes in their country and kill millions. They had to hit back to make this all stop. Chebrikov was the first one to suggest using those strategic missiles, the ones which several of his comrades were convinced the Americans were frightened of touching. Use them, he urged Ligachev, and that will put an end to these American attacks A reply was quickly drafted to be sent over the Hotline while orders went out to Soviet ICBM fields.

On a bigger scale, the Soviets did to the Americans what was being done to them. They attacked the mainland United States – Western Europe and everyone was to be left alone in this strike; hitting the Americans directly was the #1 priority – with a volley of ICBMs. Dozens of them lifted off from Siberian missile fields and began to fly over the North Pole inbound upon North America. Many problems emerged with malfunctions in-flight and even (non-nuclear) explosions in silos. The majority of the missiles were away though, with independently targetable warheads soon emerging from them up in space. They fell upon the American’s own command-&-control sites, radars and also submarine bases for their Poseidon- & Trident-armed boats. It was a massive strike though only a portion of the availability that could be put to use if need be. This was made clear in that Hotline message. Ligachev told Reagan that it was designed to inflict minimal civilian casualties, just as Reagan said American ones were on the Soviet Union meant to, and he called upon the president to not make a counterstrike of his own. When those warheads arrived, they would kill many despite Ligachev’s remarks that they would be ‘minimal’. Radar sites up in Alaska, Canada and Greenland were hit first and these were in isolated areas. However, once the impacts came at the submarine bases (in Connecticut, Georgia and Washington State) casualties mounted. Then there were the major blasts against command sites. NORAD underneath Cheyenne Mountain was hit and so too was the SAC bunker beneath Offutt AFB. Mount Weather and Raven Rock were hit as well. All of these targets needed huge blasts from several warheads to make ground bursts. The human cost in lives was going to be immense from all of this.

Rainbow strikes were still taking place. NATO aircraft over the western USSR were making attack runs while missile impacts were still occurring with the latter coming especially from GLCMs as those cruise missiles struck home long after the ballistic ones had. In the Soviet Far East, American-only attacks from the sea and the territory of regional allies (Japan and South Korea) continued too. More internal Soviet communications were knocked out along with nuclear forces away from their still untouched ICBMs and SLBMs. Regional military commanders had no contact with higher headquarters as well as often with their own forces. The latter wasn’t uniform though. Two separate senior commanders with the Strategic Rocket Forces took matters into their own hands, fearful that Ligachev and the Defence Council were either dead or completely neutralised in being able to command the nation’s defences. KGB political officers – effectively their deputies – with them agreed that counterstrikes needed to be made before all was lost. It could be argued that the Rainbow attacks limited the effectiveness of these yet, at the same time, it was because the West was attacking the Soviet Union directly that these strikes occurred.

Ballistic missiles struck military targets in mainland Japan, on Okinawa, the Philippines and Guam. The effects were devastating. It could have been far worse though. Orders to fire were refused as invalid – the coding signal was interrupted – for a South Korea strike and an inbound flight of US Navy A-6s from the carrier USS Nimitz hit the missile battery on Sakhalin Island about to give Japan a second strike with targets including the American naval base at Yokosuka beside Tokyo Bay. From out of the northwestern USSR, missile batteries in addition to air regiments were ordered to attack Northern Europe. Plenty of those aircraft ended up being shot down but others made it: the missiles were untouched by enemy action yet there were many targeting issues. Regardless of problems with the strike, it was immensely destructive as well as taking a huge toll on lives. Norway and Denmark were hit by nuclear strikes, the second time today for each. A couple of military sites in neutral Sweden were also hit. Those were on the target list for a nuclear exchange and were struck due to the belief that in a nuclear conflict, NATO would be assisted (refuelling and recovery sites for aircraft) by the Swedes. That wasn’t happening but the nuclear attack still came because that was what the existing standing orders said.

Britain got hit too. Nuclear explosions took place in Scotland and Ulster. The UK only received a small portion of the strike planned against it but it was still absolutely horrific. Five airbases were targeted alongside two submarine bases. The missile aimed at RAF Aldergrove in Northern Ireland was off target and blew up over the city of Belfast. The busy airbases of RAF Kinloss, RAF Machrihanish & RAF Stornoway were all destroyed yet the world famous golf course at Troon was the impact zone for a warhead which was meant to eliminate RAF Prestwick. Faslane and Holy Loch, used by the Royal Navy and the US Navy respectively for their strategic submarines, came under attack with the Faslane one failing to explode properly and also being a long way off course. The instant destruction of Belfast would come alongside the slow death of Glasgow. That bigger city was quickly going to be affected by the fallout coming from the Holy Loch, Machrihanish and Troon strikes. Scottish civilians in the hundreds of thousands were going to die in a terrible fashion rather than quickly as had been seen with similar numbers over in Ulster. The Second Battle of Britain ended with quite the finale.


With only little information on what had just happened in the East Asia followed quickly by the attack on Northern Europe & Britain, Reagan and his top people were more focused upon the hits on their own country. They had more information on these yet that didn’t mean there was complete ignorance over the fact that the homelands of many of their allies were suffering too. Immediate casualty estimates for the Soviet strike on the United States itself said that up to two million deaths could likely have just been suffered. Many of them were going to come from Washington State (Bangor and Bremerton were in the Seattle area) but there would still be a lot more with Colorado Springs and Omaha being urban centres near targets too. In his latest message, Ligachev was telling Reagan to not strike back against this. Retaliation had to come though. If nothing was done, a follow-up was felt certain to occur if the Soviets smelled American weakness. Weinberger was pushing for this, fearful that if there was a follow-up, it would be against the American’s bigger cities next. A Hotline message was composed and at the same time there came another nuclear attack made against the Soviet Union. It was bigger than anything done beforehand in this series of exchanges.

From across the Great Plains, missile fields came to life. Minuteman ICBMs lifted off from the middle of the North American continent. They went over the North Pole with the targets being their counterparts deep inside the Soviet Union. It was believed that Soviet ICBMs would be caught while in their silos with Ligachev and the Defence Council being blind to their progress due to the continuing other strikes ongoing to deny them information and control. That was not to be. The Soviets saw them coming ahead of the arriving Hotline message. Patchy, incomplete information came to Ligachev on the projected targets of them. Furthermore, there was intelligence arriving that attacks on Soviet cities were already underway. Baku, Odessa, Rostov and Sevastopol had all just been destroyed. No one knew that this was that last Israeli strike. It was believed that they were American attacks. From what could be seen, it looked like a full strike with targets being not just missile silos but also cities being eliminated too. He was convinced of this by Sokolov – making a mistake, not deliberately lying – at the same time as the communication from Reagan arrived. Ligachev read it, screwed the printed sheet up in a ball, called the US president a psychopathic & a liar and then ordered a missile strike in response. He had his nuclear forces do what he was told the Americans were doing: target ICBM silos plus also a selected range of cities.

Both the Americans and the Soviets had ICBMs in the air. So soon did Britain. The aptly named HMS Revenge launched Poseidon SLBMs from her hidden position in Norwegian Sea upon orders coming after parts of Britain had just been hit. Those were going to crash into Soviet targets: military and civilian ones. Hurd was unable to get in contact with Reagan to tell him what he told Mitterrand about British cities being targeted (Belfast was seen as deliberate, not an accident) and there being a need to return fire to stop and more of those. The missiles from the Revenge struck their targets ahead of the American Minuteman. A second volley was fired on Reagan’s orders when projections of Soviet ICBM impact zones pointed to hits being made on cities: there were US Navy submarines with Poseidons and Tridents who launched on Soviet cities. Reagan’s Hotline message had gone unanswered and towards American cities missiles were coming. And, of course, seeing what the United States was doing despite all of their efforts to blind them, the Soviets made yet another strike with their own missile submarines in reply. Everyone was firing on each other now with cities being targeted ultimately by mistake.

Royal Navy missiles were mistaken for American ones by the Soviets just as Israeli bombs on their southernmost cities were. This meant that there was no follow up strike to the partial one already made on Europe by Ligachev. He focused the Soviet Union’s nuclear attacks on the United States just as the Americans attacked them. An error saved so much of Western Europe. The missiles of September began delivering their payloads once more. There would be hellfire raining down in so many places.

In addition to the missile fields in the Great Plains being hit, eleven American cities were struck with New York City being part of the second wave. The other ten wiped from the map were Washington, Chicago, Houston, San Francisco, Miami, Boston, San Diego, Milwaukee, St. Louis and Denver. There were more targeted but which survived due to missile or warhead malfunction: examples would be Detroit, Los Angeles and Philadelphia. Soviet ICBM silos were targeted along with fourteen of their cities being hit by American and British nuclear attacks. Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev, Minsk, Novosibirsk, Sverdlovsk, Gorky, Ufa, Perm, Volgograd, Kharkov, Vladivostok, Irkutsk and Alma-Ata all suffered the same nuclear fate as those on the other side of the globe. Millions on both sides were killed. The scale of destruction which came with these city-killer strikes alongside the wide-ranging hits on missile fields where buried silos were located was something that neither superpower could just get up and walk away from.


More nuclear destruction looked likely including cities within allies of both sides. For those already hit the apocalypse had already come but there was more it was just waiting to be visited upon. However, there had been an aircraft crash within the Soviet Union. The Il-82 carrying Ligachev, Chebrikov and Sokolov had gone down in the aftermath of one of those SLBM attacks by the British. It was caught in the shockwave and the experimental jet – not up to the same standard as one of the E-4s that American president and vice president were aboard (separate ones) – hit the ground with the three of them aboard. The Soviet Union had just lost its general secretary, KGB chairman and defence minister in an accident. Those three men were preparing to order another attack on American cities which would also include strikes on Britain, France and other countries in the West as well. Aboard the second airborne command post were Gromyko and Ryzhkov: the foreign minister and secretary of ideology. They blinked. They decided to save the world. The two of them couldn’t abide to see any more of this. Their hearts told them to keep striking out, to kill and kill again. Their heads told them that enough of that had come. The nation was in ruins but there was still some of it left.

The Kremlin terminal for the Hotline was gone but there were back-up links not hit by Operation Rainbow attacks. Gromyko and Ryzhkov drafted an urgent message to go to Reagan, not sure if the Pentagon (where the primary US terminal was located) was still standing but sure there were back-up links on the United States side too. They proposed a ceasefire. An honest ceasefire, one where each side would have to trust the other through sure to be upcoming accidents in the next few hours, but one which would stop all of this. The ceasefire would be both nuclear and conventional. The war would end though there would be no surrender. Both sides were hurting and the Soviet’s surviving leadership were prepared to give up a lot, knowing the Americans would too, so as to end this now pointless conflict.

They waited on a response.


End of Part Six