Authors: James Barrington
‘The other problem is that right now we don’t have any surface assets that close.
The
Enterprise
Carrier Battle Group is currently in the North Pacific, and they’ve been ordered to head towards Korea, but
we’re still talking days before they get within striking distance.
‘The only options we’d then have would be to hit the attacking forces with bombs
from our aircraft at Andersen on Guam, or use ICBMs from here in the States, or our boomers – missile-carrying nuclear submarines – but they wouldn’t be able to stop a
ground assault.’
‘Why not?’
‘Numbers, Mr President, numbers. As I’ve said, the North Koreans can field over a
million front-line troops and almost five million reservists. Unless we carpet-bombed or nuked the entire front, we’d have no hope of stopping them, and anyway tactics like that are
considered politically unacceptable in the current international climate. If we did get involved, we’d be expected to use smart munitions and carry out precision attacks. Using those
tactics against the sort of forces the North Koreans can field would be like a mosquito biting an elephant.’
‘So what’s your own recommendation?’
‘From what I witnessed at the United Nations, diplomacy isn’t going to work here. I
think we should carry on with what we’re doing already. We prep Andersen and get the bombers moving, fly them towards the Korean Peninsula but hold them clear of territorial waters,
just to let
Pyongyang know we’ve got the capability to strike if they do launch an invasion. That’s one threat. Against the possibility of North
Korea escalating this to a nuclear conflict, keep the ICBMs and the boomers at a high alert state, so that we can respond real fast if we have to.’
‘The missiles are holding at Alert Sixty now.’
‘It’s your decision, Mr President, but I suggest bringing them to Alert Thirty
fairly soon, and I’ll make sure Pyongyang knows that we’ve done so. It may not stop them, but it’ll sure as hell make them stop and think.’
They stopped the countdown at launch minus eight minutes, awaiting the executive order from
Pyongyang that would either see the missile launched or force them to begin the complex process of reversing the actions they’d taken so far. Just under fifteen minutes later, the
secure teleprinter spat out half a dozen lines of text, and almost immediately afterwards the direct line from Pyongyang rang. Two minutes after that, once the commanding officer was
satisfied with the authenticity of the orders he’d been given, the countdown resumed.
A little after four-fifteen that afternoon, local time, those missile control staff who
weren’t manning consoles watched through six-inch-thick armoured glass as an explosion of flames and smoke enveloped the pad. The first stage of the Taep’o-dong ignited with a
roar that could be heard miles away, and the bunker shook and vibrated. Slowly, so slowly that it seemed it must fall back to earth, the pointed nose of the missile rose above the
conflagration and accelerated steadily into the clear blue sky.
There was a smattering of applause once it became clear that the first stage was performing
faultlessly, but the most critical part of the flight was still to come.
‘Flash, flash, flash. Homer, Whisky Charlie with flash traffic. Missile launch detected
from the east coast of North Korea in the vicinity of Ok’pyong at sixteen seventeen local time, zero one seventeen Zulu. Stand by for initial trajectory estimate.’
‘Whisky Charlie, roger.’
The lieutenant manning the Homer position immediately selected the group line.
‘All positions, Homer. Flash traffic from AEW Sea King Whisky Charlie. Missile launch
reported from the vicinity of Ok’pyong, waiting for initial trajectory data.’
There was a moment of dead silence while everyone who had access to a radar screen stared at it,
watching the combined ship’s radar and data-linked picture.
‘Flash. Homer, Whisky Charlie. Missile trajectory looks like southeast. No immediate
threat.’
On the Operations Room displays, the return was now beginning to open to the south-east. Then
it seemed as if everyone started talking at once, before the Group Warfare Officer silenced them and made a broadcast on all group lines and the ship’s main broadcast system.
‘Action stations. Action stations. Air raid warning red. I say again. Action stations. Air
raid warning red.’
Then he switched off the broadcast and opened the line to Flyco. ‘Flyco, GWO. What’s
the circuit and deck state?’
‘One Merlin on deck, turning and burning. Two Harriers in the range. One Merlin on
recovery about half a mile astern. No scheduled movements apart from the Merlin turn-round.’
‘Roger, expedite the recovery and call the moment he’s secured. Shut down the other
Merlin and clear all personnel off the deck as soon as possible.’
The GWO went back to the group line and ship’s broadcast. ‘All positions, GWO.
Secure all external hatches and openings. Assume Damage Control and NBCD State One. Break. Homer, GWO. What’s the endurance of our airborne assets?’ In the background could be
heard the muffled slamming of watertight doors being closed. Although the opening trajectory of the missile was away from the ship’s position, it could always be turned around or,
worse, it might just be the first launch of a salvo.
‘Already checked. The two Harriers are twenty-eight minutes to start of recovery, the
AEW Sea King and the two Merlins can stay up for a couple of hours.’
‘Good. Keep them out there.’
‘GWO, Flyco, the Merlin’s on deck and secured.’
‘Good. All positions, GWO. Release Goalkeeper to unrestricted operation. Engage full ECM.
Advise the ships in company.’
Goalkeeper is a fully autonomous close-in weapon system manufactured by Thales Nederland,
specifically designed to intercept incoming shells, and both ballistic and sea-skimming missiles. Its heart is a 30mm seven-barrel Gatling gun – the same weapon that’s used as a
‘tank-buster’ on the American A-10 Thunderbolt II – firing four thousand two hundred rounds a minute, guided by an X-band search radar and a combined X-band and Ka-band
monopulse Cassegrain engagement radar, backed up by an optical system.
Against a high-speed target like the Russian SS-N-22 Sunburn Mach 2 sea-skimming missile,
it’s designed to detect it at 1,500 metres and complete the kill at 300 metres, in just over five seconds. By any standards, it’s a formidable weapon, and the
Illustrious
, like her sister ship
Invincible
, was equipped with three of them –
one on the bow, the second amidships on the starboard side, and the third on the port side aft, just below the Flight Deck on a custom-designed platform.
In less than three minutes,
Illustrious
was fully secured, the gas-tight citadel in place, and positive air pressure established – a basic but very effective defence
against chemical or biological attack – and the captain had just okayed the Military Flash signal that would be sent by satellite to advise CINCFLEET of the missile launch.
The Barents Sea is not the deepest water in the world by a long way. Much of the sea floor,
especially to the west and south-west of Novaya Zemlya and to the north-east of Murmanskiy Bereg, is under six hundred feet deep. The captains of ballistic missile-carrying nuclear submarines
prefer to lurk in areas where they have more freedom to manoeuvre than such shallows allow, but the latest orders hadn’t allowed Commander Richard Clare such latitude.
His redefined patrol area committed him to maintaining position
about three hundred nautical miles to the north of the tip of Poluostrov Kanin, right on the edge of the deeper water of the central Barents Sea.
Clare hadn’t left the control room of
Victorious
in almost fifteen hours, apart from visits to the Officers’ Heads and a couple of trips to the Wardroom for sandwiches and
coffee. No hot food had been prepared, or would be available, in the boat until it was secured from silent running, because cooking inevitably causes rattles and clangs as pots and pans are
used. All off-watch crew members were confined to their bunk spaces, and all video and audio equipment had been switched off, apart from personal players using earphones only. The atmosphere
in the boat was tense with anticipation, but very quiet.
Richard Clare was worried about on-board noise. He was also worried about seabed passive sonar
arrays, ASW helicopters and hunter-killer submarines, like the small but silent and deadly Alphas.
But what worried him most was steaming around in the Russians’ back garden. The problem
was, he couldn’t see any alternative to this.
The operational range of each Trident II D-5 SLBM carried by the
Victorious
was around five thousand miles. This meant that, from the boat’s current location, each of the eight MIRVs contained within the
Trident’s warhead could easily strike a target anywhere inside the Confederation of Independent States – the territories of the old Soviet Union.
They could also, if the missiles’ navigation computers were reprogrammed, strike any
target in the United States located to the east of a line drawn from Miami straight up to Minneapolis. Or, looking south and east rather than west, any target in China, Japan, the countries
of the western Pacific Rim or Africa. In fact, about the only nations
Victo rious
’s missiles couldn’t hit were Australia,
New Zealand and South America.
He would have much preferred to be patrolling the wide, safe and, above all,
deep
waters of the North Atlantic, but in order to hit the targets he’d been given in North Korea, he had no option but to stay in the
Barents Sea. The signal from CINCFLEET had made it perfectly clear that time was of the essence: to reposition the boat in the North Atlantic would have taken too long and, for most of the
transit, North Korea
would have been beyond the range of the Tridents, and that was unacceptable.
It made good tactical sense, but that didn’t mean Clare had to like it.
For the last thirty years of the twentieth century, and well into the twenty-first,
America’s anti-missile defences have relied upon DSP (Defense Support Program) surveillance satellites located in geosynchronous orbit some twenty-two thousand two hundred and fifty
miles above the surface of the Earth.
The replacement system – SBIRS (Space Based Infrared System) – met substantial
delays, but the new SBIRS Mission Control Station at Buckley Air Force Base in Aurora, Colorado, was commissioned more or less on time at the end of 2001, and now controlled the orbiting DSP
satellites as well as operating the ALERT tactical warning centre.
The three front-line DSP birds were located over Central America, above the Indian Ocean and
more or less over the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Two other spacecraft were available as orbiting spares, ready to take over when one of the satellites reached the end of its useful
life.
Their sole purpose was to detect missile launches anywhere in the vast area under
surveillance, using a huge infrared telescope designed to identify the heat flare of the missile’s rocket engine almost immediately after launch. The only thing that could delay
detection was adverse weather, because thick cloud would prevent the infrared radiation reaching the telescope until the missile had cleared the cloud tops.
Over the Korean Peninsula, the weather was clear, and the Pacific Ocean DSP bird located the
launch six seconds after the first-stage motor of the Taep’o-dong fired. Eleven seconds after that, the on-board computers had identified Ok’pyong as the launch site and
calculated the missile’s initial trajectory.
Immediately, the DSP satellite transmitted the data to Buckley, where high-speed computers
assessed the calculated trajectory to determine if the missile was on a ‘threat fan’: meaning if the flight-path could conceivably
end in the
United States or any allied nation. The initial data showed that the North Korean missile was heading east-south-east, which meant it couldn’t hit mainland America – but the
Hawaiian Islands or even Mexico remained possible, though unlikely, targets.
Simultaneously, Buckley’s data links flashed details of the launch to NORAD. Moments
later, a klaxon sounded, a light flashed, and a computerized voice announced ‘Missile alert! Missile alert!’ One of the huge vision screens displayed the warning ‘MISSILE
EVENT’ in red in the top left-hand corner. In the top centre was the word ‘SECRET’ and below that, occupying most of the screen, was an outline map of the Pacific Rim, with
the Korean Peninsula on the left-hand side.
Dominating this display was a large red dot positioned over Ok’pyong, indicating the
launch point, and a line pointing east-south-east, showing the missile’s initial trajectory. At the end of the line was a quadrilateral shape, narrow where it joined the line but
widening out from that point. This showed the threat fan: the computer system’s assessment of the area within which the missile could land, which was updated every second or two as
additional data was processed.
Automated instructions were sent to the Pave Paws phased-array radar control room at Beale Air
Force Base in California, and the new X-band radar base on Kwajalein Atoll in the western Pacific, listing the launch and trajectory coordinates and instructing the radars to begin tracking
the missile.
The moment the launch data had been confirmed by an automated back-check to Buckley, officers
began broadcasting verbal confirmation to supplement the automatic threat warning systems.
‘All stations, this is Brass Hat. Ballistic missile launch detected from Ok’pyong in
North Korea. Initial trajectory one two seven degrees true, flight-time is – on my mark – two minutes and fifty-five seconds. Stand by for calculated impact point. This is
not
a drill.’
One hundred and eighteen seconds after lift-off, and well out over the Pacific Ocean, the
first stage of the Taep’o-dong dropped away, its fuel
expended, and the second stage immediately ignited. That was scheduled to burn for a further one
hundred and five seconds before the third, solid-fuel, stage would fire.
Two hundred and twenty-three seconds after launch, the second stage of the Taep’o-dong
disengaged from the missile and began a long uncontrolled tumble to the sea below, and the third-stage motor flared into life. The programmed burn time was one hundred and two seconds, but
the fuel was actually expended in ninety-eight seconds. Not that it made any difference.
Three seconds after the sensors had confirmed the engine was dead, six explosive bolts fired on
the third-stage/payload junction, and the now-empty tube fell away, taking with it the telemetry transmitter. Now that the third-stage burn was complete, there wasn’t anything the
scientists and technicians at Ok’pyong could do to direct the weapon, because the nose-cone hadn’t been designed to be steerable. All they wanted was extreme range, and
they’d know the result of the test-flight soon enough.
The warhead on this missile wasn’t a nuclear device or a chemical weapon or anything of
that sort. In fact, about all the aerodynamic tip of the Taep’o-dong contained was a dozen hollow metal objects designed as radar reflectors, and a small explosive charge to rupture the
nose-cone before re-entry. The cone itself was made from fibreglass with a heat-resistant ceramic coating to be as light as possible, and the weight and shape of the ‘warhead’ had
been carefully calculated to ensure reasonable directional stability whilst still achieving maximum range.
The final component was a small transmitter inside a protective heat-resistant canister, locked
onto a single frequency, and a radio altimeter that would send it an electronic signal when the canister reached a predetermined height above the ocean. The transmitter would then begin
sending out a repeated signal and that, the missile designers had calculated, would be sufficient to achieve the desired result.