The Third World War

Far more than either the First World War or the Second World War, the Third World War was a conflict that was global in its effects despite the brief seven months of warfare. No part of the world was left unscathed, not even neutral countries or continents; the conflict bears the unique distinction of having caused, both directly and indirectly, deaths and injuries in every country in the world, though casualties vary enormously from the 109 dead of Kerguelen to the almost one billion dead in China. A conflict that literally destroyed entire countries, it left its survivors to rebuild the world as best they could.

By 1980, tensions between the Sino-Siberian alliance and the United States-supported Manila Pact reached dangerous levels. Taken individually, the local causes for discord -- the border disputes on land and on sea, and the ideological and ethnic differences between China and post-colonial Southeast Asia -- would likely not have contributed to a complete breakdown in relations. Unfortunately, both the Chinese and the Southeast Asians were encouraged to escalate the dispute by their respective Siberian and United States patrons, which in turn invested too much political capital in these foreign alliances to allow their partners to compromise. The United States under President Elizabeth Chang was actually governed by a clique that actively sought out armed conflict in order to retain unchallenged its control over the country. In March of 1981, after what might well have been an attempted Indochinese invasion of the Chinese island of Hainan, the League of Nations met in emergency session and proposed the establishment of negotiations between China and Indochina over their respective borders. Grudgingly, the two countries dispatched low-level representatives to the Berne Conference, but from April of 1981 the Philippines and Indonesia began to dispute Chinese sovereignty over the islands of the South China Sea. Relations between the two blocs deteriorated alarmingly, as the United States Pacific Fleet was dispatched to take up station in the Vietnamese port of Danang while the Siberian Advanced Group Army was sent south from its base in Irkutsk to temporary bases in the central Chinese province of Hunan.

In December of 1981, the Indochinese government announced, in the Berne Conference, that it claimed for itself the Chinese island-province of Hainan and the mainland Chinese province of Guangxi. These two territories -- administered by the French as part of Indochina from the end of the Sino-French War in 1885, but retroceded to China in 1969  along with Macau -- had long been in dispute between the Chinese and Indochinese, but the Indochinese demand that these provinces be immediately ceded to Hanoi's control destroyed the Berne Conference. By late January, the League of Nations had managed to establish another conference, this one in Mexico City, but by this time the positions of both parties had hardened, as Indochina was secretly assured of Manila Pact and United States support, and China drew upon promises of Siberian support. The United States public, weary of escalating terrorist campaigns and increasingly hostile to the Chang Administration, looked upon this turn of events with nothing short of alarm, while the Congressional opposition quietly began to prepare to impeach Chang.

On the 18th of February, 1982, though, at 1900 Greenwich Mean Time, the Indochinese Union launched a full-fledged invasion of southwestern China. The well-trained Indochinese air force caught the Chinese air force, located at bases close to the Indochinese border, by surprise, and established air superiority over much of the field of battle. Anti-Communist members of the Chinese Nationalist Party in Saigon were organized into an army that made landings in Hainan island and on the adjacent Zhanjiang peninsula. Despite the initial success of the Indochinese invasion, the superior numbers of the Chinese soon came into play, as undamaged fighter-bombers and military units were moved to the field of battle..

On the 24th of February, the European Defense Secretary briefed the European Treaty Organization and the European Confederation Parliament. In part, the briefing went as follows:

"... It is an incontrovertible fact that the Sino-Vietnamese fighting was provoked by the Vietnamese military government, by a direct invasion of the southwestern flank of the People's Republic. This act of overt aggression -- occurring just four years after the fall of the Lin Biao regime and the restoration of political normality to China -- has been met, as expected, by overwhelming Chinese offensives. Perhaps by the end of March, the Vietnamese will have been expelled from the territory of the People's Republic ..."

"... The Security Council of the European Confederation recommends to the executive of the European Communities that the Confederation, Associated States, and League of Nations members that strict neutrality be followed, else we jeopardize the possibility of Siberian separation from the liberalizing western Soviet Union, liberalization within the People's Republic, and risk general war. Any Chinese invasion of Vietnam will be met with strong Vietnamese resistance, particularly if attempts are made to establish a Vietnamese satellite. This is unlikely; at best, the Vietnamese will be crushed and thus prevented from launching another attack against China, at worst, the Red River valley will be occupied, and there will be Chinese-supervised independence for the Montagnard and Laotian populations of north Vietnam. Such an outcome will greatly aid stability in Southeastern Asia, by removing Indochina as a disruptive element."

On the 28th of February, the United States declared war upon the People's Republic of China. The vast superiority in technology and in numbers of the United States Pacific Fleet allowed that force to pick off the Chinese navy almost at will, while the Chinese air force was shattered. The United States quickly established superiority in the South China Sea area, and allowed the transport of Indonesian and Filipino soldiers to the front. Hainan fell to the Manila Pact by the end of March, and the Vietnamese with the Burmese mounted counteroffensives into mainland China. The stunning series of Chinese defeats led the Siberian Republic to commit its armed forces to battle alongside their Chinese counterparts, thus bringing the entire Soviet Union into the war against the opposition of the Russian and Ukrainian governments.

In the month of April, the United States and its Manila Pact allies continued on the offensive. US Marines and Indonesian troops landed, with heavy air and naval support, on the island of Kowloon in the former British colony of Hong Kong on the 9th of April. In three bloody weeks of urban warfare and at an incredible cost in human lives -- perhaps fifty thousand United States and Indonesian casualties, a quarter-million Chinese military casualties, and as many as two hundred thousand Chinese civilian casualties. Once the last major Chinese regular unit had been chased over the former Anglo-Chinese border, the Chinese Nationalist Party -- operating from its new headquarters in Zhanjiang -- announced on the 27th the restoration of the pre-Communist Republic of China. More than anything else, this declaration made the Chinese government commit fully to the war; any cession of territory to an Amero-Indonesian puppet regime could only signal the eventual subordination of China to foreign imperialists and such was ideologically unacceptable. The peace offer of the 5th of May, relayed directly by President Chang to Chinese Foreign Minister Li Peng in Mexico City, which offered to end the war in exchange for Chinese recognition of Indochinese sovereignty over Guangxi and Hainan, and the independence of a Republic of China in Hong Kong, was rejected as a matter of course.

As the Third World War continued, with the Burmese and Vietnamese bogging down in trench warfare along their borders with China and with continued bloody attempts by United States, Indonesian, and Filipino military units to break down Chinese coastal defenses in Guangdong and Fujian, outside observers in the League of Nations became aware of the tremendous damage caused by the war to date, using only conventional weapons. Although reliable reports reached Genève of chemical weapons being used in Yunnan, the rest of the world considered itself lucky that nuclear weapons had not been used. On the 14th of June, though, a Siberian nuclear-armed missile destroyed a United States armoured unit that had broken through the Chinese defenses and threatened Guangzhou.

The first nuclear weapon ever to be detonated in wartime killed only five thousand United States soldiers, but it inaugurated a whole period of tit-for-tat exchanges of tactical nuclear weapons. The following day, the United States retaliated with a nuclear strike against the Siberian missile base in Hunan that launched the missile. In following weeks, the exchanges broadened -- military bases and units unrelated to the initial strikes were targeted, nuclear weapons came to be used not only in southern China but in parts of Burma and Indochina. A horrid stalemate had emerged in Guangdong province, as Sino-Siberian and United States nuclear weapons destroyed any sizable military unit of either side that entered the province.

The rapid escalation of the exchanges on the 28th of July, following the accidental United States bombing of Guangzhou city itself with a forty-kiloton nuclear shell, was in retrospect entirely predictable. Chinese and Siberian doctrines dictated that following the use of a nuclear weapon against a Chinese urban or industrial centre, retaliation in kind would follow, and in the early morning just one hour after the attack the Indochinese capital of Hanoi was bombed, with an immediate loss of a quarter-million dead. A vicious cycle ensued, as land bases in China and nuclear-capable aircraft carriers first bombed each other, and as intermediate-range nuclear-armed missiles were used against targets as disparate as the Southeast Asian port cities of Manila and Danang, the (vacant) Indonesian missile farm in Borneo, and most notoriously, the crowded Chinese city of Shanghai. In all, by the time that the exchanges came to an end for a want of targets perhaps forty million people had been killed and another fifty million injured, the vast majority civilians. Appalled by the terrible bloodshed, the combatants agreed to a temporary ceasefire and to negotiations mediated by the League of Nations.

The month of August saw little military action, by either side, although surviving Indochinese and United States military units remained stationed in their meagre territorial gains. Had the combatants chosen to negotiate in good faith, the Third World War might have ended. Few of the combatants, though, were willing to do just that -- the Philippines under President Benigno Aquino was the only country willing to drop out of the deadly alliance systems, but the Aquino Government was overthrown by the FBI. Ominously, even as the negotiations continued the United States and Siberia continued to mobilize their vast armaments as yet uncommitted -- the United States Atlantic Fleet sailed into the Mediterranean as a precursor to entering the Black Sea and raiding Ukrainian ports, while the vast space-based arsenals of the United States and Siberia were prepared for combat.

Towards the end of August, opinion in Indonesia, Siberia, and the United States had turned, almost violently, against a further escalation of the Third World War. Uniquely among the combatants, these three countries had survived the exchanges with comparatively few casualties, and were fundamentally unwilling to fight a nuclear war to the death. In the United States, in fact, members of the United States Congress had overcome their fear of FBI reprisals and began to impeach President Chang on the grounds of neglecting her duties to the United States. The attack upon the Congress by the FBI on the 26th of August, 1982 signalled that the United States was not about to drop out of the war. Even though the Congressionals desperately tried to continue the impeachment process, by this stage President Chang and the Joint Chiefs of Staff were willing to risk global thermonuclear war if that was the price to be paid for their continued power.

The terminal phase of the Third World War began in space, at roughly 300 Greenwich Mean Time, on the 2nd of September. The half-dozen Lunar Orbit Vehicles maintained by the United States in orbit around the moon, armed with megaton-range nuclear warheads, were launched towards the Siberian lunar base of Lunagrad. The comparable Siberian spacecraft in lunar orbit managed to intercept the United States weapons and to destroy the United States' Moonbase Washington with nuclear warheads of their own. The fighting quickly spread into low Earth orbit, as the manned stations, surveillance satellites, orbiting conventional ASAT weapons, and nuclear-armed missiles stationed in orbit at enormous expense destroyed each other in only hours. For a brief eight hours after the practical depletion of the victorious United States' orbiting weapons, the League of Nations tried to mediate a second ceasefire while the Congressional opposition to President Chang in the United States tried to overthrow the President.

At 200 GMT, on the 3rd of September, 1982, the global nuclear exchanges began with the preemptive destruction, by President Chang, of the Congressional stronghold of Richmond, in the United States' state of Virginia. Responding to the bombardment of Richmond as if it was a Siberian missile attack, United States submarines positioned off of the Japanese and Indian coasts launched an attack, with thermonuclear warheads, upon major military bases in the Siberian republic. Heedless of Russian demands to stand down, Siberia responded with an attack in kind upon United States military bases in North America, and against surviving Indonesian missile bases in Borneo. Before its surviving missiles were destroyed, Indonesia launched a purely countervalue strike against surviving Chinese cities while the Chinese government retaliated with a similar strike against the major cities of Manila Pact member-states. At roughly 330 GMT, the United States responded by launching nuclear-armed missiles targeted upon major surviving Chinese and Siberian military bases and Moscow and Beijing, while targeting missiles armed with the latest generation of chemical depopulants upon the major cities of the Sino-Siberian alliance. Siberian submarines launched similar attacks upon the United States homeland.

By 400 GMT, death tolls had reached horrifying levels worldwide. Of the 150 million residents of the mainland United States, half were either dead or dying. The destruction of Moscow at 3:55 GMT by multiple nuclear warheads killed immediately two-thirds of greater Moscow's population of 17 million, while almost all 200 million urban Chinese and 45 million urban Siberians had perished. Southeast Asian populations were decimated, with virtually every major city and industrial centre in Southeast Asia outside neutral Thailand -- Jakarta, Manila, Saigon, Rangoon, Yogyakarta -- razed to the ground. The grimmest scene was in the densely-populated island of Java, as the very high density of cities, industrial centres, and military bases ignited an island-wide firestorm. In neutral Canada, the cities of mainland British Columbia and the civilian population of Nova Scotia were decimated as part of Siberian plans to deny the United States access to ports outside its borders. The desperate governments of the non-Siberian republics of the Soviet Union declared their republics' independence within a half-hour of Moscow's destruction and Siberia's decimation.

Already, the neutral Great Powers -- the European Confederation, Japan, Brazil, Argentina, and India -- along with the League of Nations were faced with the intimidating task of rebuilding half a continent. By 500 GMT, though, the terminal nuclear exchanges broadened to include most of the non-combatants in the Northern Hemisphere as well as Brazil. President Chang contacted individually the heads of states of the intact Great Powers in the hour before 500 GMT, as part of an attempt to marshal their untouched resources alongside the United States. When the Presidential entreaties failed utterly, in a bout of sheer genocidal spite the President and the Joint Chiefs of Staff authorized the launch of most of the United States' remaining weapons of mass destruction against cities and industrial centres in the European Confederation, Russia, Japan, north India and Bengal, and Brazil.

The Razoir ABM systems managed to blunt what otherwise would have been a devastating attack. Brazil was targeted with comparatively few weapons, and so its ABM systems were able to intercept the missiles targeted against the major cities of the coast with ease. Despite the relatively larger number of missiles targeted upon the European Confederation, the dense concentration of ABMs in western and central Europe saved cities across Europe from bombardment -- the only European city destroyed, Venice in North Italy, was destroyed by the tidal wave created by the explosion of a nuclear warhead in the Adriatic opposite the Lido. The Romanian and Polish Razoirs left over from the defenses of Warsaw and Bucharest were used to intercept the nuclear warheads targeted against Kyiv and the cities of southern Ukraine, while the East Baltic ABM network was able to similarly shield Leningrad and the states of south and west India were miraculously not targeted at all. However, all of Bengal and north India were decimated by the final Presidentialist launches, as was the vast territory of the Russian republic outside Leningrad. Most ominously, the fertile grain fields of central Ukraine were destroyed.

By the middle of the month of September, almost 1 300 million people had died as a direct result of the War. The medium- and long-term effects of the conflict would produce still greater catastrophes.

Table 1: Immediate Fatalities of Third World War