1962: The Apocalypse

These are the list of events that lead to the East-West nuclear war of 1962.

Ubangui Chari
The OTL Oubangui-Chari (or Ubangi-Shari), was a French colonial territory in the southern half of today's Central African Republic. Anti-colonial rebels took to the streets as an ATL Cholera outbreak in the River Chari killed 400 in the summer of 1959. France intervenes and averts any further suffering. The Soviets offer their support and several crates of medicinal, pistols and bullets to the anti-colonial rebels.

Indo-China
The OTL Vietnam War began in 1959 with an uprising by Viet Cong forces supplied by North Vietnam.

The Vietnam War hastened the modernisation and westernisation of Thai society. The population began to grow explosively as the standard of living rose and North Vietnam became both fight and jealous of the Thais.

Upon his father's death in 1960, Prince Norodom Sihanouk again became head of state, taking the title of prince. As the Vietnam War progressed, Cambodia official policy of neutrality in the Cold War, although is was generally sympathetic to the communist cause.

Laos would be unwillingly dragged into the Vietnam War by 1960 as in reality, due to a Laotian coup in the end of the year and the location of the newly opened Ho Chi Minh Trail. The eastern parts of the country followed North Vietnam felt more akin to it. Laos also allowed North Vietnam to use its land as a supply route for its war against the South. In OTL response, the United States initiated a bombing campaign against the North Vietnamese, supported regular and irregular anti-Communist forces in Laos and supported a South Vietnamese invasion of Laos. The result of these actions were a series of coups d'état and, ultimately, the aggravation of the OTL Laotian Civil War between the Royal Laotian government and the Pathet Lao. The anti-communists and hawks in the Thai and American goverments called for decisive action in Vietnam!

On January 1st, 1961 a new OTL coalition of Kong Le's Neutralists, Pathet Lao, and PAVN drove 9,000 Royal Lao Army troops from the Plaine des Jarres. On 3 January, the Royal Laotian Air Force received its first counter-insurgency aircraft, American-built T-6 Texans, via the Royal Thai Air Force.



China also started massing ATL forces in eastern Inner Mongolia (Mongolian: Öbür Monggol and c Өвөр Монгол, Övör Mongol; Chinese: 内蒙古; pinyin: Nèi Měnggǔ) in the January of that year, ready for a planned massive ATL thrust on to the Korean Peninsular.

The massive ATL Thai/S. Vietnamese/American/Australian joint aerial bombardment of North Vietnam and eastern Laos was led by the United States. Parts of Laos were hit by an ATL average of one B-52 bomb load every eight minutes, 24 hours a day, between May 1961 and June 1962.

By February 1962, the Royal Lao Government's hold on Nam Tha seemed tenuous enough that it was reinforced by the paratroopers of the GM 15 and American Special Forces advisors. As the situation in Laos turned in to a rout the U. S. forced the RLG into a coalition with the Pathet Lao and Kong Le's Forces Armee Neutrale. This technically fulfilled the OTL Geneva Agreements on Laos and triggered the treaty requirement that foreign military technicians be withdrawn from Laos by October, by which time The United States disbanded its Military Assistance Advisory Group. North Vietnam stepped up its attacks and pushed on in to Laos. America would still try and hold on to South Vietnam.

Thailand
While the OTL war in Indochina was being fought out between the Vietnamese and the French, Thailand stay neutral, but once it became a war between the U.S. and the Vietnamese Communists, Thailand committed itself strongly to the U.S. side, concluding a secret agreement with the U.S. in 1961, sending troops to Vietnam and Laos, and allowing the U.S. to open airbases in the east of the country to conduct its bombing war against North Vietnam.

The North Vietnamese retaliated by supporting the Communist Party of Thailand's insurgency in the north, northeast and sometime in the south, where guerrillas co-operated with local discontented Muslims, but never posed a serious military or political threat to the state as in our world.

Panamá
The early 1960s also saw the beginning of sustained pressure in Panamá for the renegotiation of the canal treaty so they would eventually get control of the Panamá Canal if the USA no longer thought it was strategically important to directly own it.

Albania
On 7 November 1961, Albania’s president, Enver Hoxha made his OTL speech that accused the Soviet President Nikita Khrushchev a "revisionist, an anti-Marxist and a defeatist." Hoxha portrayed Stalin as the last Communist leader of the Soviet Union and began to stress Albania's independence. The USSR and every other Warsaw Pact nation broke relations with Albania by 11 November, 1961.

Guatemala
The OTL Guatemalan president General Miguel Ydígoras Fuentes assumed power and authorized the training of 5,000 anti-Castro Cubans in Guatemala. He also provided airstrips in the region of Petén for what later became the failed Bay of Pigs Invasion in 1961 as in our time line.

Korea
South Korea's president Yun Bo-seon (Korea:윤보선, Hanja:尹潽善,) was taken ill for 8 days after a ATL heart attack in his home on January 5th, 1962. President Kim Il-sung's hope of invading the south were dashed as president Yun Bo-seon made a full recovery on the 13th and was discharged from hospital that day.

Egypt
Mossad's OTL Operation Damocles was a covert campaign of the Israeli in the August of 1962 targeting German scientists and technicians, who had been formerly employed in Nazi Germany's rocket program and were now developing rockets for Egypt at a military site known as Factory 333.

When Egypt's President Gamal Abdel Nasser herd of this after a ATL security leak, he demanded a fomal ATL apolgy from Israel's President Yitzhak Ben Zvi, but he refusded to do so.

Cuba
As early as August 1962, the United States suspected the Soviets of building missile facilities in Cuba. During that month, its intelligence services gathered information about sightings by ground observers of Russian-built MiG-21fighters and Il-28 light bombers. U-2 spy planes found S-75 Dvina (NATO designation SA-2) surface-to-air missile sites at eight different locations. CIA director John A. McCone was suspicious and many in the American government feared a Soviet attack from Cuba.

On August 10, he wrote a memo to President Kennedy in which he guessed that the Soviets were preparing to introduce ballistic missiles into Cuba. The ‘hawks’ in the military became angry and planed for the worse. On August 13, an USAF Air Force Strategic Air Command U-2 was shot down as it overflew Sakhalin Island in the Far East by mistake. The Soviets lodged a protest and the US apologized. 2 days later a Taiwanese-operated U-2 was shot down over Shanghai China, probably to a SAM missile.

Air Force General Curtis LeMay presented a pre-invasion bombing plan to Kennedy on September 1st-3rd, while spy flights and minor military harassment from US forces at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base were the subject of continual Cuban diplomatic complaints to the US government.



On September 7, Cuban President Osvaldo Dorticós spoke at the UN General Assembly and said Cuba would not back down to an American invasion. After American diplomat Adlai Stevenson showed aerial photos of Cuban missiles to the United Nations to the Security Council that day.

US officials were worried that one of the Cuban or Soviet SAMs in Cuba might shoot down a CIA U-2, initiating another international incident. On September 17th, Navy reconnaissance aircraft photographed the Soviet ship Kasimov with large crates on its deck the size and shape of Il-28 light bombers.

At 13:13 UTC, on October 1st, the US informed its NATO allies that "the situation is growing shorter... the United States may find it necessary within a very short time in its interest and that of its fellow nations in the Western Hemisphere to take whatever military action may be necessary." To add to the concern, at 8 am the CIA reported that all missiles in Cuba were ready for action. The presidents of Guatemala and Turkey pledged their sport for the American cause.



The US Navy dropped a series of minor "signaling depth charges" on a Soviet submarine (B-59) at the blockade line around Cuba, unaware that it was armed with a nuclear-tipped torpedo and under orders that allowed it to be used if the submarine was "hulled" On the same day, a US U-2 spy plane made an accidental, unauthorized ninety-minute over flight of the Soviet Union's far eastern coast. The Soviets scrambled MiG fighters from Wrangel Island and in response the Americans sent aloft F-102 fighters armed with nuclear air-to-air missiles over the Bering Sea on October 5th.

The next morning, October 6, Kennedy informed the Executive Committee of the National Security Council (commonly referred to as simply the Executive Committee, EXCOMM or ExComm) that he believed only an invasion would remove the missiles from Cuba.

On October 7th, after much deliberation between the Soviet Union and Kennedy's cabinet, Kennedy secretly agreed to remove all missiles set in southern Italy and in Turkey, the latter on the border of the Soviet Union, in exchange for Khrushchev removing all missiles in Cuba. Unfortunately East German's Walter Ulbricht saw a opportunity to annex West Berlin on October 7th and would thus ruin the peace talks and ordered it's invaion that night.

Germany


As news reached the Soviets in the morning of the 8th, of the unauthorised war between both the Germanys, which Walter Ulbricht had openly and baselessness blamed West Germany for starting, East-West relations imploded!

The East German's Ministry for State Security (German: Ministerium für Staatssicherheit, MfS), commonly known as the Stasi struck out on the evening of the 8th, with a series of sniper attacks in Hamburg. ATL Oberfeldwebel Konrad Dorf, ATL Brigadegeneral Henrich Dieter Ober and ATL Obergefreiter Hans Ritter were all liquidated in the attacks. ATL Feldwebel Hans Otto Wenger was lucky and survived the attacks, the inter-German war, and ultimately Doomsday as well, which meant he was very lucky indeed!

A Stasi bomb exploded at the British embrace in Brussels, killing ATL Colour Sergeant Steve Price (inter-force liaison duties), ATL W. German Oberstabsfeldwebel Kurt Hime and the British ambassador to Belgium on the morning 9th of September. ATL Oberfeldwebel Konrad Dorf and ATL Brigadegeneral Henrich Dieter Ober and 2 secitateries.

Chancellor Konrad Adenauer and his sectary were almost assassinated by a booby-trap bomb in their Westphalia bunker on the evening of the 9th later that day.

As the literal and metaphoric smoke settled, more hawkish and right wing elements staged a coup in the parts of West Germany the government controlled. America and Soviet forces were put on a war-footing in both halves of Germany, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Turkey, Belgium and the UK.

Diplomacy was urged by The British PM Harold MacMillan, Turkish president Cemal Gürsel, Românian president Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, Bolivian president Ángel Víctor Paz Estenssoro, French president Charles de Gaulle and the Australian PM Sir Robert Gordon Menzies at the UN on the late evening of the 9th, since all feared that the conflict would soon go nuclear,chemical and/or biological.

The Australian PM, Sir Robert Gordon Menzies KT, AK, CH, FAA, FRS, QC; made a ATL TV broadcast warming Aussies that a nuclear war was near and the Thai king Bhumibol Adulyadej (Thai: ภูมิพลอดุลยเดช) Rama IX, went on national radio to urge his nation to prepare for an imminent all-out war with North Vietnam and China.

The King of Nepal Mahendra Bir Bikram Shah Dev, phoned the American and Soviet embassy on the morning of the 10th, requesting a new summit at the UN, but by now it was too late.

From Crisis to Doomsday.
The American and Soviet leader felt betrayed by the German governments and thought it was all part of a covert super-power plot. As the day pass the situation degenerated and a reluctant nuclear war would occur from the launch of missile (a American Regulus missile that hit Vladivostok airport at 00.01 U.T.C. on October the 11th and the launch of the last missile (a Soviet R-12 missile that hit Miami sea-front at 14.55 U.T.C.) on October the 11th, 1962.

Well; Kim Il-sung, Walter Ulbricht, Ho-Chie-Min, Che Guevara and Fidel Castro were only too eager for war, but in this time line would get more than they expected!

Also see:

 * Editorial Guidelines- (1962: Doomsday)
 * Add-hock weapons at hand (1962: Doomsday)
 * List of known Warsaw Pact targets in the UK (1962: Doomsday)
 * Armed forces weapons in 1962/1963 (1962: Doomsday)
 * List of surviving nations (1962: Doomsday)