The Salvation War: Pantheocide. Part Eighty One Up

[Simon_Jester]

For some reason when I was reading about the initiation, it popped into my head as one of those zooming-ultra-slow-motion sequences, with the focus zooming around at a thousandth the actual speed, detailing each piece of the warhead before zooming out to show the Legion of Light being consumed by nuclear fire. It was enough to make me have to stop myself from yelling out "HUMANITY! F**K YEAH!"

At a thousandth normal speed, the whole initiation happens between two frames of a video camera (call it... dunno, 25 milliseconds?)

Most of the stuff inside the bomb is happening on microsecond or nanosecond time scales.

That was a fantastic way to end the chapter, Stuart. It's one of the things I like about your books, both in the Armageddon-verse and the TBOverse: the excellent use of technical detail in the story to convey impact (even if some of it is deliberately wrong).

Deliberate wrong stuff is (or can be) artful; it's generally much better than accidental wrong stuff.

I have a couple of soft-SF concepts myself that I one day hope to get out and onto paper, or at least electrons; the really tricky bit is that I'm trying for deliberate-wrong rather than accidental-wrong in the physics.

[GrayAnderson]

Yet another amazing chapter. I agree...I've never seen a detailed description of a nuke going off, let alone one that was enjoyable to read. Also, nice play on the Shakespeare line there...excellent as always.

[CyrilsScribe]

All I can think of while reading this is the Carmina Burana suite for a very large orchestra. What is going to be interesting is how the human governments react to the massive release of radiation and the ensuing massive radiation cleanup.

[Stuart]

All I can think of while reading this is the Carmina Burana suite for a very large orchestra. What is going to be interesting is how the human governments react to the massive release of radiation and the ensuing massive radiation cleanup.

It's a high airburst; the long-term radioactive contamination is limited. The problems with massive contamination come from initiations where the fireball touches the ground. They give massive fall-out plumes. Also, only a single device was used. This greatly simplifies the situation; one of the bad problems with cleaning up after an initiation is the development of things called hot-spots. These are very mysterious but they appear to be related to interactions between multiple initiations.

[Bayonet]

Why did we target a field army as opposed to the heavenly city?

Rule of snakes - Kill the nearest one first.

In addition, decapitation strikes can be risky. It's nice to have someone available to order a surrender.

[JN1]

As Stuart says a high airburst should be relatively clean. HEA troops should be able to operate in the area pretty quickly and without NBC gear.
Never thought I'd see a Glickem in action, what's next an SS20? Evidently the INF Treaty has gone by the board. The 501st Tactical Missile Wing was based at RAF Greenham Common during the '80s, so it is appropriate that it has been reformed to operate the Gryphon in the campaign against Heaven.
The Incomparable Legion Of Light being destroyed by a nuclear weapon, now why is it that I find that appropriate?

Out of interest were new BGM-109Gs made, or were navy versions converted? I'm also interested to note that this version of the Glickem has a W83 warhead with a yield of 1.2MT rather than the historic W84 which had a yield of between 0.2 kiloton up to 150 kilotons. I guess the HEA was going for a bigger bang in this case.

And so it was that the prophecies were fulfilled. The Sun Of Man was indeed rising over Heaven.

Best line of the chapter, IMVHO.

Here comes the sun... yep, Jesus must be having a smokin´ afternoon right about now.

He may just stop smoking in a day or two.

[Stuart]

Out of interest were new BGM-109Gs made, or were navy versions converted? I'm also interested to note that this version of the Glickem has a W83 warhead with a yield of 1.2MT rather than the historic W84 which had a yield of between 0.2 kiloton up to 150 kilotons. I guess the HEA was going for a bigger bang in this case.

These were new ones built to handle the larger warhead. Tradeoff was range. The logic is that using ballistic missiles in Heaven and Hell is questionable since the strange geometry might make them come down somewhere completely unexpected. So, cruise missiles were a better choice.

[White Haven]

Alright, be honest, how long have you been saving that Sun of Man pun?

[Stuart]

Alright, be honest, how long have you been saving that Sun of Man pun?

Since before I posted the first part of this story. . . .

[Simon_Jester]

Why did we target a field army as opposed to the heavenly city?

Rule of snakes - Kill the nearest one first.

In addition, decapitation strikes can be risky. It's nice to have someone available to order a surrender.

On top of that:

In fiction, nuking a city is a great plot element, because there will be massive civilian casualties. In an actual war (and Stuart is definitely portraying a real war against an unreal enemy, rather than a war tuned to the demands of the plot), things are going to be a little different. Cities are only logical targets if there's something in the city that helps you win the war quicker.

And on the list of "things we need to blow up to win the war," cities tend to be pretty far down the list. Higher up on the list you see other stuff. Like enemy missile silos and airbases. Or nexuses of logistics routes like railroad marshalling yards, highway interchanges, and ports. Or, yes, enemy field armies (hence "tactical" nukes).

Some of those targets are close enough to a city that the city will take massive damage as a side-effect; it's not going to be practical to destroy the port of New York without levelling most of the city proper. Others are important because without them cities cannot survive- blow up all the highway interchanges in the country and even if nothing else is destroyed, the supermarket shelves will empty in fairly short order and people begin to starve.

But that doesn't make cities primary targets as such.

In this case, blowing up the Heavenly City (which, unless I am sorely mistaken, would require high-multiple strikes since it's quite large) doesn't win the war quicker. As Bayonet says, we want someone available to order a surrender. And it's not clear that the bulk of Heaven's fighting forces are even in the city, so destroying it doesn't necessarily take out the field armies, which as we've seen can still be a threat even to mechanized infantry units, provided they can get into contact with them.

Whereas an isolated field force (like the main body of the Incomparable Legion of Light, heh) can be destroyed completely by one airburst, removing one of the biggest forces in the vicinity from play and saving the need to fight a major battle to take them down. Which is especially valuable because unlike demons, angels are a threat to light armor and close air support. Avoiding direct combat with angelic forces that are large enough to charge through artillery and get into close combat with the ground troops is definitely worth the trouble.

EDIT: Did I get that right?

[Ace Pace]

Hm. While I know we wrote up plans for targetting armies with nuclear devices, it seems more prevalent in fiction to target cities. Why did we target a field army as opposed to the heavenly city? And is army targetting the trend to expect? See an enemy corps forming and burn them? Or was this more of a show of force?

I'm curious to see Jesus response. Did he lose his feint group, or his entire army?

Why do we target anything? Different goals. During the Cold war, both sides targeted strategic installations and not cities (regardless of what fiction might tell you). In this case, what strategic installations do Heaven hold? God? Not an urgent target.

The Heavenly army is a far more pressing matter then any other facing the HEA.

[Bayonet]

Why do we target anything? Different goals. During the Cold war, both sides targeted strategic installations and not cities (regardless of what fiction might tell you). In this case, what strategic installations do Heaven hold? God? Not an urgent target.

Unfortunately on Earth, there are many strategic targets located in or near major cities. That makes them pretty much toast. Just ask Germany and Japan <wry grin>.

As you point out, that's not necessarily the case in Heaven or any other non-industrial society. Their only strategic targets are probably their concentrations of forces. They don't have many strategic things to break, so we're left with killing people.

[JN1]

These were new ones built to handle the larger warhead. Tradeoff was range. The logic is that using ballistic missiles in Heaven and Hell is questionable since the strange geometry might make them come down somewhere completely unexpected. So, cruise missiles were a better choice.

Makes a lot of sense, it's always good to know where your nuclear warhead is going to come down. I've read that's a problem the Soviets had with some of their ICBMs - i.e they were never quite sure where they would decide to come down once fired.

I'd guess that ALCMs and gravity bombs are also options held by the HEA too.

Why do we target anything? Different goals. During the Cold war, both sides targeted strategic installations and not cities (regardless of what fiction might tell you). In this case, what strategic installations do Heaven hold? God? Not an urgent target.

That's certainly true of American targeting; I'm no expert on Soviet targeting; but as Stu will tell you we Brits concentrated on Moscow latterly with Polaris and when we had the V-bomber force the targets were Soviet cities; at least our national plan was, the version of the SIOP that included RAF Bomber Command may well have sent them after different targets, probably air defences to help clear the way for SAC. Certainly for SAC planing purposes RAF Bomber Command seems to have been treated as a semi-independent forward based element of the command.

[Xveers]

That would be extremely useful for historians to uncover time periods that were not very well documented. I think it will be interesting to find out Caesar's opinion about the late Roman Empire and the Byzantine Emperors.

I would imagine that a lot of people (universities) would be chomping at the bit to get various historical people to interview, especially pre-Gutenberg. Mind you there was some misunderstanding with Aeneas, but that's only to be expected after all. You'd want to find some administrator or someodd to start with first. But the ability to plug and

As for explaining things to Aeneas, I was in that curious place between awake and asleep when I had a good way of explaining to him how crippled our view of his time is.

"You see, you have to understand just how many people and languages your history has passed through. Your history was absorbed and studied by the Romans. Real cultural greekophiles there. So, they translated your history from ancient Greek into Latin. And then spread their copies through their libraries all through the roman empire. As they collapsed, the Ottoman/Islamic empire absorbed their knowledge, and translated it into Arabic. By what amounts to an obscene amount of luck, one of their libraries fell to reconquering Christians in Spain. Yes, Spain. It was then retranslated back into Latin. And eventually, after two or three more hundred years it was translated yet again into the local languages, or back into some flavour of Greek."

The academic paused for a moment before continuing.

"So the history you know and understand, to us, has passed through at least three different groups, translated each time. Even one careless translation can radically change the meaning of anything. Works of science are somewhat resistant to this, they demand terminology to be accurate otherwise they are useless. But history? Perceptions and relevance turn on a single phrase, a single descriptive word. Change one, and a benevolent act becomes a callous one. Change a phrase, and you can make the most competent of people become dishonourable bastards. And even with that, keep in mind that each change of hands, each translation, not only was meaning perhaps lost, but entire literary works have disappeared. The only reason we know they even existed is their mention in other works that we still have... We've lost so much, but we have a chance to recover it, now..."

[CyrilsScribe]

Hmmm...interesting so I imagine it would be the large gamma ray dose and the massive thermal and sonic shock that would kill the Legion of Inane Light than the actual vaporizing fireball. So this is a more Tsar Bomba style initiation than say...Trinity, Castle Bravo, or Hiroshima style ground burst.

[Ace Pace]

Hmmm...interesting so I imagine it would be the large gamma ray dose and the massive thermal and sonic shock that would kill the Legion of Inane Light than the actual vaporizing fireball. So this is a more Tsar Bomba style initiation than say...Trinity, Castle Bravo, or Hiroshima style ground burst.

Hiroshima was not a ground burst. Hiroshima was a low altitude air burst, roughly around 600m (Shep can give more exact figures). The high amount of radioactive residue from the blast is due to Little Boy being very inefficient (1.38% of the material fissioned compared to high 90s today).

Regarding the effects of nuclear devices themselves, you may read Stuarts essay The nuclear game, part three on the effects themselves or in the following website Link

Quoting the relevent parts from Stuarts essay, mostly because it's more readable.

So how does a nuclear device destroy things? The primary effects that result from the initiation of a device are (in no particular order) a light flash, a heat flash a blast concussion wave and a sleet of direct radiation. In fact, of these the last is of relatively little significance. The range of the radiation is very short and is further attenuated by the inverse square law. Its only significant within the areas where blast and heat are already lethal. If thermal blast and concussion have already reduced you to the size, shape and color of a McDonalds hamburger, irradiating you as well is incredibly superfluous. Thus the direct effects we are interested in are light, heat and blast and they do arrive in that order. The further an observer is from the point of initiation, the greater the gap between them. This is very important. The flash of light that will blind a victim close in serves to warn a potential victim further out. Once a few miles out from ground zero, the light flash tells the population that a device has gone off and its shadows show them sheltered areas from the next effects to arrive. If an area is shadowed from light, its shadowed from radiant heat as well. The heat flash is the first really destructive effect to hit. This is direct radiated thermal energy; like light it travels in straight lines. It will set anything inflammable on fire to a considerable distance from ground zero. Interestingly, it won't set non-flammable things on fire and, for example, must enter a house via windows etc before setting that house on fire. If the windows are masked (for example painted white), the heat flash is unlikely to set a brick-built house on fire (US-style frame houses are a different matter which is why it makes me uneasy living in one).

Last to arrive is blast. Unlike light and heat, both of which travel in straight lines, blast can be funneled by structures, deflected and masked. The windows we carefully painted white are history; smashed by the blast wave and its associated wave front of debris but they've done their job. The heat flash has gone. Houses are actually quite well designed to resist pressure from outside - its pressure from inside that gives them problems. Again, if you can keep the blast out you've got a good chance. Impossible close in to ground zero but progressively easier as we get further from that point. Closing the shutters on windows inside the house is good; even taping the glass in a lattice pattern is astonishingly helpful. Compared with military targets, civilian structures have relatively low damage resistance. In the language this is called protection factor (PF) - most civilians can, with a few minutes warning give themselves a PF of around 40 - meaning they are 40 times more likely to survive than an unprotected civilian. In other words, even though the structures surrounding them are soft and weak, there is a lot they can do that will greatly increase their chance of survival. Note that - even when the sirens are going off, there is still a lot you can do that greatly increases your chances of surviving - provided you have a chance of surviving in the first place.

For all intents and purposes, the effects of initation are generated in the center of the device initiation and travel outwards evenly in all dimensions to produce a perfectly symmetrical sphere or fireball. Now think of the geometry of this. If the device is initiated at ground level, a so-called ground burst, half of all that energy will go into the ground, scouring out a crater but effectively being wasted. More goes skywards. Some will be reflected down towards the earth but very little; effectively that energy too is wasted. The only energy that is actually useful is that produced in a narrow segment around the equator of the spherical ball produced by the initiation. Thus, for this type of attack ground bursts seem very inefficient. They are.

So what do we do about it? Again, think of the geometry. If we lift the detonation point into the air, the segment of the sphere that will spend its energy destroying valuable things is increased and the amount that scours out a crater gets smaller. Keep thinking along these lines and we reach a point where the sphere of the fireball doesn't quite touch the ground at all. In this case almost all the energy from the lower half of the fireball destroys valuable things and none goes to digging a crater. This is called a low airburst and it remains a low airburst as long as the altitude of the point of initiation of the device is less than the diameter of the fireball. If the point of initiation of the device is at an altitude greater than the diameter of the fireball it's a high airburst. If the intention is to knock down cities, low airbursts are the most effective way of doing it.

We haven't mentioned fall-out. The dreaded stuff that destroys humanity. Well, there's a reason for that; the device has only just been initiated, there isn't any fall-out yet. Fall out is caused (mostly) by debris from the ground being sucked into the fireball, irradiated and spewed out of the top. This radioactive plume coalesces in the atmosphere and falls back to earth. It's a mix of isotopes of varying half lives. The most vicious of these isotopes have short half lives and are gone in a few hours. The milder ones can hang around for millennia. Now the blast and heat throw debris outwards, where does the debris sucked into the fireball come from? Answer is the crater scoured in the ground by the energy from the device that went into said ground. But hang on, we've just discovered the best way to knock a city down is to use an airburst that doesn't crater the ground. Doesn't that mean no fallout? That's right, airbursts are relatively clean from a fallout point of view. They do generate some fallout from atmospheric dust and water vapor and a bit more (some very nasty) comes from the debris of the device but not as much as legend holds.

[pdf27]

Good job, Stuart, as usual! Can't wait to hear more about the first nuclear strike in heaven!

Having read his description of the state of Duren after The Big One, I can wait. It is likely to be extremely unpleasant.

[JN1]

Agreed, the effects of a nuke strike are not pretty.

[CaptainChewbacca]

It certainly was nice of heaven to leave half a million troops out in the middle of an open plain without cover. Rather efficient, that.

[westrim]

Someone mentioned f-111s and now all I can think about is Bush finally back in the cockpit of the f-102 as he so fervently desired.

"Sodom, for Gomorrah they die."
And so it was that the prophecies were fulfilled. The Sun Of Man was indeed rising over Heaven.

Those were horrible. I applaud your punmanship.

[KlavoHunter]

So, just to be sure here, we just nuked Jesus?

[CaptainChewbacca]

So, just to be sure here, we just nuked Jesus?

No. We hit a forward troop division. The main body of the Heavenly Host is elsewhere.

[phongn]

Good job, Stuart, as usual! Can't wait to hear more about the first nuclear strike in heaven!

Having read his description of the state of Duren after The Big One, I can wait. It is likely to be extremely unpleasant.

His description of chemical warfare in Armageddon? was supremely unpleasant as well.

[Stuart]

No. We hit a forward troop division. The main body of the Heavenly Host is elsewhere.

That was the main body of Yahweh's personal command. The forward division is the one that was tackling Caesar's Third Legion.

[Enforcer Talen]

Does Jesus have another army to play with? I remember one of the scary things of LotR was when you defeat one of Sauron's armies, he just rolls up with another one. We going to encounter the virtually unlimited armies of heaven, or is it a wrap for them?