The Third World War III: After Action Analysis
What happened and why.
This is a out-of-universe explanation of why I made the choices I did in this piece, explaining how it is, as best as I could, historically grounded, in a 1989 we thankfully did not see. Needless to say, spoilers abound so read this only after the preceding two posts.
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The Iranian plot: The Soviets have coveted Iran since before the Soviet Union existed – the Russian Empire yearned for "washing their boots in the warm waters of the Indian Ocean", to paraphrase Vladimir Zhirinovsky. Khomeini's incipient death and Iranian instability was well known in the late 1980s, so of course the KGB would have a plan for it. In our tale, that plan went wildly out of control – ambitious junior officers (I had initially intended on one Major V. V. Putin to take the lead, but that would have been too cute by half and he was busy in Germany at the time) grasping for the One Weird Trick that would hand the Soviets the Middle East. So, killing Khomeini's designated successor, framing one of the two contestants for the throne, and then causing a general governmental collapse preceding an invasion is pretty much what the KGB does (and how they took over Afghanistan a decade earlier). The problem is that this is 1989 and Mikhail Gorbachev would not have countenanced it. Thus what triggers the failure cascade that follows – the KGB just did it anyway.
The Russian coup: obviously, extremely plausible – after all, it happened in our timeline only two years later. However, in this timeline the KGB was forced to act by Gorbachev discovering the Iran shenanigans, and Kryuchkov responding to his firing by instead removing Gorbachev from power. No drunken Yanayev appearing on state TV, and poor Boris Yeltsin is shot trying to take his place in history. Everything else happens as it did during the actual coup – only with more brutality, and more effectiveness. The initial press conference, which in reality led to the coup's collapse, instead resulted in the doubtful reporters being arrested. The demonstrations in Moscow and Lithuania, in this timeline put down with excessive force. The problem is that the coup leadership is still incredibly unstable – and committed to war in Iran.
The Iran war: the KGB plan at first goes off without a hitch, but there was no planning for US intervention. And the US would never let the Strait of Hormuz be held by a hostile power, would it? (Pause for me to laugh maniacally.) Thus the RDF/Central Command seizes most of the southern Iranian coast, with zero resistance from a very bemused Iran which is watching all sorts of superpower invaders run around with a very Persian detachment. The inevitable escalations happen as the Soviet and American forces meet; neither has the strength to meet each other with full force but both skirmish and real losses occur.
The first escalation: The Soviets attempt to hit the US supply lines in Diego Garcia, but fail; in response, the Americans hit the base that the attack was launched from. The problem is that this base is in Russia – an extreme act of escalation which somehow does not occur to American planners (this constant escalation heedless of consequence happens throughout this tale; anyone who believes it stretches credulity is invited to study the first year of the Korean war). Meanwhile protests in eastern Europe, instead of triggering the peaceful changes of government in our timeline, meet a Russian armored fist and escalate into open revolt. The Soviet junta feels that events are out of control, and the only response they can see is to escalate further. Thus: the invasion of Germany.
The German war: I'll put it plainly – in my opinion, the West has always wildly overestimated the Soviet threat to Europe. What NATO planners saw as an advantage - the Warsaw Pact allied armies – in reality were a third column behind the Soviet lines, at best sitting out the conflict and at worst in open revolt. Soviet hardware never measured up to NATO standards and by 1989 were outclassed in virtually every way. Thus, the Soviet Air Force wipeout, and the Soviet invasion, thanks to a few days warning due to heightened tensions, meets a ready NATO line that turns them back at the border. Losses are severe the first day, but the rest resembles what, in our timeline, those same units would do in Iraq a year later, against much the same hardware. The war was folly for the Soviets to launch; an act of desperate escalation to try to seize advantage and was lost on the first day.
The second escalation: Americans gonna America. As it becomes clear that the Soviet Army has collapsed, US military leadership sees an opportunity to run the table and clear Europe of its longtime enemy. The problem is that in a nuclear world, a superpower cannot lose a war if it is a threat to its existence, and NATO driving towards the Soviet border definitely qualifies. Every single desperate message the Soviets send to back off is completely ignored and on the final day NATO is bombing targets within Russia (well, the Kaliningrad exclave, which counts and wasn't an exclave in 1989).
The nuclear war: having exhausted all other messages, the Soviets fire what they consider a warning shot. It being Russia, their version is hitting virtually every NATO capitol. (Why Munich? Maybe Kryuchkov was a technodisco fan.) The result is predictable; the Soviet military removes Kryuchkov immediately, Gorbachev is restored, and Bush responds. I had mapped out three possible options for Bush - the savagely proportional counterstrike that killed millions more innocents, declining to respond in kind which would have dire consequences for the Allied governments (the UK or France may have retaliated on their own at that point) or a "counterforce" strike seeking to destroy the Soviet nuclear force, which would have quickly escalated to the end of the world. The proportional response seems very Bush to me.
The results: even a very limited nuclear exchange like I describe eventually results in the deaths of a billion people. (Famine is a killer.) The world, ironically, is somewhat of a better place in many respects; fusion power, no climate crisis, a united Europe, a global community that is mostly peaceful, and in general, especially compared to today, a more thoughtful, contemplative public. Near death experiences do that. Donald Trump died in 1989, and his brand of populism did not survive the blast. There was no al-Qaeda, no Iraq or Afghan war. Still, it is a world that collectively has the worst case of PTSD ever recorded, the millenial generation is forced to basically remake the planet, and nuclear weapons, though greatly reduced, still exist.
The center: in my story, the moral center of the tale is Pope John Paul II, a role he would assume with relish, I think. The absolutely medieval reaction of his prostrating himself in a Geneva cathedral (the Vatican moved him the day before as Rome could have been targeted) and never coming out as the cathedral bells toll the death of nations is something he would very much have done. The world of 2049 is far more religious than our own – again, near death experiences do that.
Side points/trivia: I started with the image of Saddam Hussein meeting the ambassador of Kuwait and going "what the actual fuck" as the world collapses around him. His being, somehow, a pillar of stability in the Middle East is frankly absurd, but sometimes the world is absurdist. And hey, why not have Schwarzkopf help out with his strategic planning, since he's not that great at it.
If you think Lech Walesa's declaration of war on Russia is outside the bounds of possibility, you haven't spoken to many Poles. They remember. That's kind of their thing.
The news being obsessed with two US POWs the first week of the war and then promptly forgetting them as everything devolves into hell is very US media. (It's OK, Rodionov let them go at the border. No hard feelings.)
The way East Germany collapses is, as per the prime directive of counterfactuals, reality reasserting itself. The Alexanderplatz massacre shocked the Soviets almost as much as the Germans, and they were ordered not to repeat this under any circumstance (instructions which, obviously, did not apply to Poland). The NVA opening the Berlin Wall is pretty much what happened in our timeline, only with much less risk on their part. The Czech velvet revolution happens almost identically to our history.
Ukraine always gets screwed. At this point it's a law of physics. And yes, I used Kyiv over Kiev and similar namings intentionally, although it's anachronistic. (Dnepropetrovsk instead of Dnipro, though - that didn't happen until 2016)
I really don't have anything against John Galvin; he just happened to have the job at the time.
Viktor Anpilov's "of what use is a world without the Soviet Union" quote is taken directly from Dmitry Kiselyov's “Why do we need a world if Russia is not in it?” quote on Russian state TV in the aftermath of the invasion of Ukraine. Today's Russian media is very fond of threatening nuclear annihilation.
We're going to assume that nearly dying in a nuclear blast made Dan Quayle grow up. George W. Bush presumably remains governor of Texas, or possibly a baseball team owner.
The Pugwash Declaration disavowing Herman Kahn's nuclear war theory is real. Just another callout from someone who reads about this stuff too much.
South Africa's fate was my way of saying the new world isn't uniformly better - in the absence of our world's 1990s, South Africa got the Nazi Eugene Terre Blanche of the AWB instead of Nelson Mandela. It's safe to say it did not go well. The South African nuclear program actually existed, but in our timeline was closed much earlier. On the other hand, North Korea presumably is no longer a nuclear power; we'll give China credit for that one. And yes, the Chinese century is still on schedule, and probably will be the next major global conflict in that timeline. Thankfully, not a nuclear one.
I hope you enjoyed reading all this. Writing it was certainly cathartic in many ways. My generation, "GenX", has always been convinced we would die in a nuclear explosion; as we careen towards forgetting what that means reminders are good.