The Type R-16 was the Union of Soviet Socialist Republic’s first truly operational ICBM, having been first deployed in the field a little over a year ago. Manufactured by Plant 586 — the Makarov Southern Machine-Building Plant at Dnepropetrovsk in the Ukraine — missile 8K64/017 had been delivered to the 33rd Guards Rocket Army in early May 1962. In the next three years the Soviets planned to deploy approximately two hundred R-16s, including a variant designed to be silo launched. However, the missile aimed at Buffalo was one of only a handful of operationally certified R-16s armed and available to launch when the ‘strike’ command had been transmitted from the command bunker of the Soviet Strategic Rocket Forces Headquarters outside Moscow, minutes before it was bracketed by and completely destroyed by two Minutemen.
Soviet ICBMs tended to be much more massive than their American counterparts because Soviet H-bomb technology was less sophisticated than that of its enemies. On average Soviet warheads were two to three times heavier than weapons of comparative yields in the US arsenal, hence, Soviet rockets were monsters, and ironically, initially much better suited to shooting satellites into low Earth orbits. Yuri Gagarin had ridden into space in 1961 on the back of an R-7 variant of the Soviet Union’s first ICBM.
The R-16 was a brute of a rocket; one hundred feet long and weighing over one hundred and forty tons at blast off. Basically, it was a two-stage, liquid fuelled death trap universally viewed by its rocket crews as an accident waiting to happen. In a launch pad ‘incident’ at the Baikonur test range a prototype R-16 had blown up on the launch pad after the second stage unexpectedly initiated, killing over a hundred people, including most of the original project team and the then commander of the Soviet Strategic Rocket Forces, Marshal Mitrofan Ivanovich Nedelin.
The R-16 which had travelled over the Arctic before deploying its single warhead on a sub-orbital terminal trajectory over Hudson Bay had been rolled out onto its unshielded pad two hours and forty-eight minutes prior to its scheduled launch. It had been fuelled at breakneck, reckless speed with unsymmetrical dimethylhydrazine — a hydrazine derivative often referred to as UDMH — a stable compound resistant to ignition by shock which only becomes viable as a rocket propellant when combined with an oxidizer, in this case dinitrogen tetroxide. Although missiles loaded with UDMH could theoretically be kept at readiness for several days, because of the corrosive properties of dinitrogen tetroxide an R-16 could only stand at launch readiness for a maximum of seventy-two hours. Afterwards, the fuel would have to be removed — a very dangerous procedure — and the missile returned to Plant 586 in the Ukraine to be completely rebuilt.
To say that the R-16 was extremely vulnerable to an enemy counter strike in the hours before it was fired would have been an understatement of truly monumental proportions. Even when it was fully fuelled it still took over thirty minutes to spin up the rocket’s navigational gyroscopes, and to check and configure its inertial guidance and targeting co-ordinates. This was no mere formality; the rocket was launched vertically and had to be programmed to alter course to conform to a low Earth orbit where it would in effect, free fall the greater part of the journey to its target where its warhead would be set to detonate at either a specific height above the ground, or after impact with the ground. Although the mathematics involved in formulating this ballistic trajectory was straightforward, in practice the actual calculations were fiendishly convoluted. The main complication being the fact that while the missile was in the air the tangential speed of the Earth’s rotation differed from one latitudinal point; its launch pad to that at which it was intended to impact. At the equator — zero degrees of latitude — the speed of rotation of the Earth is of the order of 1,040.4 miles per hour; whereas to establish the correct tangential speed of the Earth’s rotation for Buffalo, latitude 42° 54′ 17″ N, the calculation which needed to be achieved was 1,674.4 kilometres per hour (1,040.4 mph) × cosine (42.904722) to ensure that the R-16 ‘led’ Buffalo’s actual ground position at the time of launch by approximately two hundred nautical miles when it arrived at its designated air burst height fourteen minutes and seven seconds later. For the unfortunate and extraordinarily courageous Soviet missile technician responsible for checking this final calculation with a slide rule on the top of a hundred foot gantry — standing next to over a hundred tons of rocket fuel which had an evilly proven propensity to blow up without warning — while his, or her concentration was being constantly interrupted by the flash of distant thermonuclear air bursts, it was anything but a routine business. Only a man — or a woman, for many of the engineers, mathematicians, chemists and physicists who worked on the Soviet Strategic Missile Program were women unlike in the ‘free’ West where such work was judged ‘inappropriate’ for members of the fairer sex — possessed of superhuman powers of concentration, not to mention nerves of steel, would check and re-check until they were absolutely confident that everything was in order before reporting that the rocket was ready in all respects for launch.
And then presumably, absent himself or herself, as quickly as possible from the scene.
The men ‘in the hole’ at NORAD would have been deeply alarmed, possibly panicked, had they known that launch crew of Missile 8K64/017 had actually received orders to prepare for launch over an hour before the first American missiles popped up over the horizons of the USSR’s northern radar shield. Had it not been for the disruption of the 33rd Guards Rocket Army’s radio communications by the initial US strikes on the Moscow Military District, and a series of minor technical issues with 8K64/017’s inertial guidance system caused by errors in its original coding, the missile would probably have been one of the first to hit the North American continent.
As it was, Missile 8K64/017 was the last inter-continental ballistic missile fired by the 33rd Guards Rocket Army before its command centre outside Semipalatinsk was destroyed by a near miss by a 3.8 megaton W39 free fall bomb dropped by a B-52.
At 00:13 hours on the morning of Sunday 28th October a hydrogen bomb with an explosive yield equivalent to over five megatons of TNT detonated above the city, and the surrounding countryside, of Buffalo.
Five megatons of TNT represents nearly twice the total explosive power released by all the combatants in the whole six years of World War II. The entire metropolitan area of Buffalo ceased to exist in a millisecond.
Within seconds Port Erie, Welland and St Catherine’s on the Canadian side of the Niagara had also ceased to exist. North of the air burst on the American shore in Tonawanda, Getzville, and Lockport; twenty-seven miles west as far as Akron, and twenty to thirty miles south to Lake View, Derby, Eden and Hamburg ninety percent of the population was dead or dying within minutes.
And then the firestorms began to engulf the ruins.
Chapter 10
The road signs in New England informed the most casual observer exactly who had colonised this particular part of the New World. The coast road west of New Haven went through Milford, Bridgeport and Fairfield on the way down towards Stamford and Greenwich, heading east the Connecticut Turnpike went through Branford, Old Saybrook and Old Lyme on the way to New London. Heading north to Meriden one passed signs for Cheshire and Durham, and drove through Wallingford; while at Meriden roads forked toward Waterbury, Bristol, Cromwell, Glastonbury and New Britain.