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disha wrote:^^^ Kargil was a win after a surprise. Same here in Vivekji's scenario., please read it through.
No need to conflate IKG, MaMainoSingh and your dhoti shivering. There is a specific dhoti shivering thread for China and if you want to soil your dhoti against the bakis, there are other threads too.
I have never dhoti shivered mate. I wonder where you are coming from?
Winning was a gritty given taking into account the bravehearts we have. Been associated with them for 60 years.
I question the unecessary loss of our lives at Kargil. Isn't a study of war history meant to ensure that mistakes are not repeated? And strategies improved?
9. Tiger Claw
10. Elephants over the himalaya //western readers will associate with hannibal taking hathi's over the alps into italy
11. Tiger Eye
12. The Jaguar vein
Will we take the Chinese offer for face saving exit for both sides?
Tawang itself is a first of it's kind.... even the Pakis didn't firebomb hundreds of citizens. Well, except that "stray" bombing in '65.... forgot the name of the village. Then the loss of our ships with most of the crew, the missile strikes on our bases.....
And what about the Tibetans who did their bit in Partisan actions? The Bhutan citizens who died simply because their country trusted India?
Well, if we won't be able to march into Amdo and Qomdo and water our horses in Dogai Coring we can't do much for Tibetans, eh? They know it too. Unless a breakup of PRC a-la USSR occurs, Tibet will be in the ChiCom iron grip. Dislodging them militarily will be near impossible IMO. Maybe we can be cynical about the Bhutanese too... what are they gonna do? And Indian citizens will probably shrug and move on....
>> even the Pakis didn't firebomb hundreds of citizens. Well, except that "stray" bombing in '65
in 1965 PN SAG evaded IN screens and arrived off Dwarka one night if you recall. around 350 heavy naval shells were fired which would have devasted the town if they exploded. fortunately the brit arms dealers had supplied mostly dud shells so majority of shells were inert duds.
make no mistake, if they see any benefit they will do it. and the PN/PAF of those days was probably far more 'professional' and less jihadi in character. imagine a flight of 4 F-16 dropping 4x1000lb incendiary devices over chandni chowk region....the area of several sq km houses rickety old buildings, stuffed with flammable materials for every type of business....the fire would burn for days..only stone built structures like juma masjid and gurudwara Sisganj and the adjoining big temple would stand scarred and blackened but unbowed.
Singha wrote:>> even the Pakis didn't firebomb hundreds of citizens. Well, except that "stray" bombing in '65
in 1965 PN SAG evaded IN screens and arrived off Dwarka one night if you recall. around 350 heavy naval shells were fired which would have devasted the town if they exploded. fortunately the brit arms dealers had supplied mostly dud shells so majority of shells were inert duds.
make no mistake, if they see any benefit they will do it. and the PN/PAF of those days was probably far more 'professional' and less jihadi in character. imagine a flight of 4 F-16 dropping 4x1000lb incendiary devices over chandni chowk region....the area of several sq km houses rickety old buildings, stuffed with flammable materials for every type of business....the fire would burn for days..only stone built structures like juma masjid and gurudwara Sisganj and the adjoining big temple would stand scarred and blackened but unbowed.
they don't have courage to do it knowing that Islamabad is 2minute away than Delhi with conventional weapon.
GURUCUN
NORTH OF THE CHUMBI VALLEY
DAY 11 + 1500 HRS
The Chomolhari peak stood majestically on the eastern end of the valley, its snowcapped slopes shining in the afternoon sunlight. Small puffs of white clouds broke over its ridges against the blue sky with perfect serenity. Colonel Thomas sat on the ground, his back resting on his heavy backpack laying on the gravel which he used as a backrest and stared at the beauty of the Himalayas to his east. The clouds were drifting over the Chomolhari as a speck in the blue sky glistened in the sunlight above it and darted to the north. It flew across Thomas’s vision silently and he recognized it for what it was: a jet fighter streaking over Bhutan as it headed north…
Sure enough, the distant and subdued rumble of its engines finally reached his ears. Then he saw more specks glistening in the sky over Bhutan, this time some heading south and others north as they merged into each other. It was all so utterly silent from where Thomas was watching. There were a couple of small puffs of spiral clouds dropped by some of the specks.
Flares!
Thomas realized he was now a mute witness to yet another desperate aerial battle being fought between the two sides of this war over Bhutan…
He sighed, and used his rifle laying on the mud nearby to lift him up and then got up, dusting off his uniform. The other paratroopers nearby got up as well, seeing the Colonel getting ready to move to another position again. Thomas squinted as he saw a small flash of light over the Chomolhari and witnessed a pencil-thin trail of smoke diving behind the peak. By now there were several such dirty brown-black lines of smoke in the sky as young pilots from both sides lost their lives over some unnamed peak east of the Chumbi valley.
Thomas looked down and checked his palm as he moved his fingers to retain circulation in the freezing cold and then looked to his left to the source of the radiated heat he had been feeling. The PLA truck was burning furiously and flames raged out from it while a constant rumble raged nearby. Thomas brought his hands to face the fire and get the heat in his palms as he saw his other paratroopers moving out in a line past the now dead Chinese convoy on the highway to Gyantse.
They were moving to a different position now that this one had been compromised by this attack an hour before. They had to do this movement every few hours to prevent the Chinese from isolating the two Indian Airborne Battalions in the region. They would hit each attempt by lead units of the Chinese 15TH Airborne Corps to open the route to the south to their two PLA Divisions cut off to the south in the hills of Chumbi. Thomas and his men were beating back each wave after another using extensive air support from IAF fighters. It was the only way they could hold off these increasingly desperate assaults to break through…
Thomas cursed as the winds changed and the soot from the blazing truck flew over him, entering his eyes. He rubbed it clean with his gloved finger, grabbed his backpack from the ground and then walked away from the smoke, following his men as they headed off in a long trail to the northeast, where they could now see flashes and explosions from their sister Battalion fighting to prevent the siege from being broken…
Singha wrote:>> even the Pakis didn't firebomb hundreds of citizens. Well, except that "stray" bombing in '65
in 1965 PN SAG evaded IN screens and arrived off Dwarka one night if you recall. around 350 heavy naval shells were fired which would have devasted the town if they exploded. fortunately the brit arms dealers had supplied mostly dud shells so majority of shells were inert duds.
make no mistake, if they see any benefit they will do it. and the PN/PAF of those days was probably far more 'professional' and less jihadi in character. imagine a flight of 4 F-16 dropping 4x1000lb incendiary devices over chandni chowk region....the area of several sq km houses rickety old buildings, stuffed with flammable materials for every type of business....the fire would burn for days..only stone built structures like juma masjid and gurudwara Sisganj and the adjoining big temple would stand scarred and blackened but unbowed.
That was the Porki "Admiral" on Arnab's show on Tuesday. Who wanted to interject all the time to say he "attacked" Dwarka! He sounded hilarious in trying to accentuate this point in all the cacophony. Like his @nal 0rifice was still hurting from one of the Styx mijjiles he recieved in Kachhari, kind hospitable courtesy of IN.
Colonel-General Wencang stepped out of the staff car at the airport and met Chen and Feng standing near the parked Tu-154 on the airport tarmac. Chen saw him approaching and handed Feng his papers and nodded to him to move out. Feng glanced at Wencang and moved out towards the base of the stairs leading into the aircraft.
“Come to see me off?” Chen said with a smile as he extended his hand.
“You are not that important yet in my book!” Wencang said with a smile and shook his old comrade’s hands. Chen felt that something was up.
Don’t say it…
“You take care of yourself out there,” Wencang said soberly, still grasping Chen’s hand. “We are far too old to go around pretending to be young. This whole mess will be over soon enough. Don’t let the ba$tard Indians get you so close to the end!”
“They won’t. Besides,” Chen said, “we are only going as far away as Chongqing. But what’s the word from the committee?”
Wencang sighed and looked at the sunlight breaking through the cloudy skies over Beijing.
“Yongju and Peng managed to push the case for negotiating peace despite Liu’s arguments. Liu of course is not happy about a thing. And his position carries a lot of support both within the committee and outside. Yongju and Peng are on thin ice right now and they know it. If the Indians can be persuaded to take the offer, we will be terminating this mess once and for all.”
“And if they don’t?” Chen asked with his forehead wrinkled now from the concern.
“Then we will find out exactly how thin the ice under Yongju and Peng really is,” Wencang said as he glanced around the airport, mostly deserted except for the Chinese airline aircraft parked on one corner of the tarmac and now being used for military transport of soldiers to Xinjiang…
“Anything we can do to sway or assist?” Chen said as he crossed his arms. Wencang shook his head in denial.
“Nothing much. We disgraced ourselves in front of the committee, remember? The only reason we are still alive is because they still need us for running the air-force. But that’s far and away from being looked to for advice or assistance. I am going back to doing what I do best: running the air headquarters. You take care of what’s left of our boys over Tibet. I will keep you informed on what’s going on out here in Beijing.”
Chen nodded and then walked away from Wencang towards the parked Tu-154 as the pilots started spooling up the engines. Wencang stood by his black staff car and watched Chen trot up the stairs of the aircraft past the salutes of the ground-crew and disappear inside. Wencang continued to lean on the door of the car as he watched the ground-crewmen quickly remove the stairs and the pilot began rolling the large aircraft under the guidance of the marshaling crew on the tarmac below.
This will get over soon enough.
One way or another…
Lieutenant-General Suman yawned for what seemed like the thousandth time as he realized how exhausted he was. Unlike all other wars that India had fought in nearly seventy years, this war truly waged on a near continuous level over the last two weeks. With little or no time for rest and always being on the move for fear of Chinese missile attacks, Suman was realizing the limits of his own body’s endurance.
But for all that, his corner of the war was going well.
The XXXIII Corps had broken the PLA 55TH Division in the southern part of the valley into several isolated segments as Chimera entered its final phases a few hours ago. The 11TH Division had been pushed away from its sister force and was now effectively separated by the full force of the Indian 2ND Mountain Division in between them. And north of the 11TH were the two Indian airborne battalions under Colonel Thomas. The 2ND Mountain Division brigades had moved west to east within the valley and one of its battalions had even reached the eastern slopes of the Chomolhari where they had been met by a small recon group from Lieutenant-General Potgam’s Joint-Force-Bhutan. That had effectively sealed the fate for the PLA 55TH Division. With each passing hour the Chinese soldiers in that unfortunate unit were being pummeled with Divisional artillery assets plus a whole plethora of artillery batteries that General Yadav had arranged to be moved from Rajasthan to Sikkim over the last few days. That proud Division that 55TH was had now been reduced to a couple thousand battered men surrounded from all sides within the hills of the Chumbi valley.
As once we were, sixty years ago…
Suman clenched his fists and broke the pencil in his hand in two as he thought about that. He and most other senior officers were old enough to remember growing up learning of the defeat at Naka Chu and the Chip-Chap river valley back in 1962. There was little in the way of sympathy that Suman could bring to bear for the Chinese soldiers now caught in a similar dreary affair in the Chumbi valley.
He leaned back in his chair, exhaled and tried to close his eyes for a brief moment of rest.
Five minutes. Just five minutes! He told himself as his eyelids became heavy.
The door to his office slammed open as his staff officers ran in. He immediately awakened and watched with bloodshot eyes as his Deputy-Commander walked in behind the other officers.
“What the hell is this? What happened?” he asked worriedly.
“The boys in the 71ST Mountain heard this over their comms,” the Major-General handed Suman a print-out with a smile. Suman took it and glanced over the usual comms security data down to the relevant part:
“To the Indian field commander, we hereby accept your offer to surrender honorably under the following conditions. Firstly, my officers and soldiers are to be treated in accordance with the Geneva Conventions. Secondly, my wounded are to be provided medical attention and the medical convoys are to be allowed passage through the lines, without threats or attacks. If these conditions are met, then given the incapacitated state of the division commander, I am authorized to surrender what remains of my force within the valley. This comms channel may be used to communicate with me and my staff directly. -deputy commander, 55TH Division, People’s Liberation Army”
Suman grunted and then looked up at the smiling officers in the room around him.
“Well then, I think we should tell the boys in the 71ST Mountain to accept the good Chinese General’s offer right away, don’t you think?”
THE CENTRAL MILITARY COMMISSION
MINISTRY OF NATIONAL DEFENSE BUILDING
BEIJING
DAY 11 + 2330 HRS
“They did what?” Liu thundered and stood up from his chair hard enough to trip it over behind him. As it fell with a thud, it froze everybody in the room while Colonel Dianrong moved to pick up the chair. General Yongju, who had just announced to the room what he had heard from his Chengdu region commander regarding the surrender of the remains of the 55TH Division, stood where he was with the paper in his hand. He was visibly shaken by Liu’s thunderous response.
“General Liu,” Peng started to say, but Liu cut him off:
“They surrendered? They surrendered to the Indians, of all people? How dare he?!”
“His force was down to a few hundred men,” Yongju replied, “and thoroughly cut off and by this point ineffective. He did what was in the interest of saving the lives of the men he still had left!”
“That was not his call to make!” Liu shouted loud enough so that the room echoed his voice a bit. “He has singlehandedly brought shame to this country through his actions!”
To that Liu received silence in the room and as he looked around, none of the army commanders met his gaze head on. He saw defeat in their eyes and in his own stomach he felt a pit of rage…
“We need to negotiate an end to this war right away!” the Foreign-Minister added urgently.
“No! We will do what we should have done a long time back!” Liu shouted and looked over to Dianrong, standing by the wall behind his seat.
“Colonel Dianrong! Get me the commanders for the 818, 819 and 820 Brigades right now!”
“General, what are you doing?” Peng shouted at Liu as Dianrong picked up the phone on a table nearby.
“Making sure that the Indians are not able to enjoy the glory that you all have handed them on a silver platter,” Liu shouted back. “And I will finish what you all could not!”
It would be extremly surprising if the chinese negotiated an end to the war without utilizing their major advantage in ballistic missiles. Even from a face saving pov it would make sense that they would want to do as much damage as possible using BM on conventional warhead , especially so on our military targets.
I always wondered why they didnt use the BM with conventional warheads against logistic nodes of the Mountain corps and the Eastern Command. Hitting the bridges in chickens neck area would have created a logistic nightmare for IA. But Vivek must have thought about it.
Waaaaahhhhhh
No coup-shoup pleej. I hate that escape hatch/Deus-Ex-Machina personally. Even in Laila (remember that? PM JEM and all? ) we weaseled out with something like this. Methinks the Chinese would rather risk a minor nuke slug fest with India than unknown calamities and shakeups that a coup will bring.
It makes sense for them to nuke/massive conv strike the rump "Chumbi Kessel" and then honor all the dead units and servicemen later on. After all, they are already pretty much obliterated and the Indian expeditionary forces are concentrated there in strength. Take them out and the Indian spearhead is blunted.
Great scenarios. Thanks for using Liu as a prop to extend the tabletop exercises into ballistic nuclear pow-wow. This is an important step, we need to see how the nuke ballistics work out. Will AAD/PAD play a scene here?
Time period for this scenario I think is around 2014-15, and by that time AAD/PAD would be available to couple of sities only, such as, Delhi,Mumbai and Kolkata.So if they go for these Cities then BMD might come into the picture.
But if they go for tactical strike on valley, we don't have any defence.
“What the hell?” the Group-Captain said as the live-SAR feed of a Chinese DF-21C medium-range ballistic-missile battery in northern Tibet on one of the wall screens was replaced with flickering static.
Air-Vice-Marshal Malhotra looked up from the papers he was reviewing inside the glass walled conference room behind the lines of operations consoles. He didn’t hear the Group-Captain as the glass was sound-proofed, but he did see the loss in video feed. He walked out of the room after opening the glass door and the cacophony of noises from the operations center suddenly filled his ears…
“What happened?” he asked the Group-Captain.
“Not sure, sir,” the officer replied. “We just lost the RISAT-2 feed over the 802ND Brigade A-O.”
“Checked with ground-control?” Malhotra asked as he watched the wall-screen replaced with a 3D model of the earth with the orbits of various satellites marked over it.
“Doing that now,” the Group-Captain said as he picked up the phone.
Malhotra knew what this was even as he waited for his men to confirm it.
When the war had started two weeks ago, one of the major questions in the minds of the operators in the Indian Aerospace Command was the threat posed to Indian satellites by Chinese Anti-Satellite or ASAT weapons. Modified from older model DF-21 ballistic missiles and named KT-xx series, the Chinese ASAT capabilities were as enigmatic as they were doubtful. A lot of the Chinese research and development in this genre of weapons was based around American and Soviet technologies. But they still did not have the true ASAT capabilities. The KT-xx systems required very careful planning of the target satellite orbit and flyover schedules. As such, if the enemy kept changing these during wartime, there was little that these weapons could do.
But on the Indian side, satellite coverage over mainland China and Tibet was essential for wartime operations and intelligence gathering on Chinese intentions. And so they had to be used regardless of whether the Chinese possessed a capability to knock them out or not. And so the few satellites that had remote-sensing capabilities had been loaned from ISRO to the Aerospace Command; the latter currently operated only the RISAT-2 radar-imaging-satellite and had partial control over RISAT-1 along with ISRO at the time the war had started. ISRO had loaned its CARTOSAT series satellites over to expand Indian military satellite capabilities.
But a stroke of luck had benefitted the Indian side which they had understood very early on. Because there were few satellites on hand and far larger areas to cover both in Tibet, China and the Himalayas but also over the Indian Ocean, satellite tasking varied day to day. Orbits were shifted daily to accommodate these missions. And that had denied the Chinese ASAT systems the stability they had needed to take a shot at the Indian low-earth-orbit satellites moving over their country every day.
Of course, that had changed as the momentum of conventional war changed hands from China to India and the threat of ballistic-missile usage, possibly with nuclear-warheads, increased. Now the focus of these satellites had reduced down to smaller and smaller regions where the 2ND Artillery Corps units were deployed in northern Tibet.
And that had made their RISAT orbits predictable and regular…
Malhotra crossed his arms and turned to see the Group-Captain as he put down the phone with the ISRO satellite-operations center.
“They took it out, didn’t they?” he asked.
“Sounds like it, sir. We just got the first live demonstration of Chinese ASAT capabilities!”
“Better tell the chaps at the SFC that we just lost our radar coverage over the Chinese DF-21s in northern Tibet until we can re-task RISAT-1 from the Lhasa front!” Malhotra ordered.
Of course, that means that we won’t have continuous coverage on the PLA 15TH Corps in that region…Malhotra realized. There just weren't enough remote-sensing satellites to go around. And it was no more apparent today than ever before. The loss of even one bird was enough to tear a big hole within the Indian coverage of the Chinese ballistic missile sites over northern Tibet…
The loss of the satellite did not cripple Indian coverage over the Chinese ballistic-missile sites as much as General Liu and his officers had anticipated. The loss of battlefield aerial control by the PLAAF had a lot of cascading effects, some of which were lost on the Chinese due to careful Indian planning. So while the ASAT attack had shocked the Indian Aerospace Command and crippled a section of their capability, it did not affect the Indian Strategic Forces Command as it might have done if the PLAAF still had control over the Tibetan skies.
For the past few days the long-range, long-endurance Herons of the IAF had been flying lonely, isolated missions over central Tibet in support of SFC operations. They were filling the gaps when the satellites were out of range and helping maintain visual on the enemy missile launch preparations, if any.
When the RISAT-2 satellite was smashed into smithereens in orbit above the 802ND Brigade batteries, the loss in video-feed had only been momentary. The nearest Heron had been diverted on orders from Air-Marshal Iyer and had arrived on station, south of the battery to maintain long oblique visual angles for its EO systems. That way, it stayed out of harm’s way while still able to monitor activities at the target. There was no Chinese knowledge of this bird and so when they began rolling the DF-21C launchers out of their camouflaged netting and start pre-launch preparations, they had no intelligence that Air-Marshal Iyer and his staff at SFC operations had a clear live-feed of the near-future Chinese intentions…
Very impressive Vivekji, for presenting each and every aspect of Indian assets from both strength and weakness perspective.
SAT launching is one area India has self-sufficiency (even if it is limited to PSLV) and yet India doesn't reach a point where this capability is available without interruption for its defense needs.
***
It would be awesome if a HALE launched missile puts rest to a couple of ready to fire BMs. Is it possible even?
OPERATIONS CENTER
STRATEGIC FORCES COMMAND
INDIA
DAY 12 + 0520 HRS
“Oh my god! Are you serious?” the Prime-Minister’s voice came over the conference view on the wall.
“I wish I wasn’t!” Iyer replied urgently. “We have direct eyes on them now from our high-altitude aerial drones. It’s clear as day, sir! We can see them preparing the launchers. The camouflage nettings are gone and the vehicles are preparing to move to their launch positions!”
“What targets are we expecting them to aim for?” Chakri said as he joined the conversation. “I mean, we are talking about their DF-21s, right?”
“Yes sir! We are.” Iyer agreed. “The ‘C’ models to be exact. From where they are, west of Golmud, they can hit any target within an arc of fifteen-hundred kilometers. To give you an idea, we are talking about all states from Ladakh, down to Delhi, Uttar-Pradesh, Bihar, Sikkim, Assam and all other eastern states. But we don’t see any activity at their DF-31 sites which is what they would need in order to hit our cities in the south such as Mumbai, Bangalore, Hyderabad and all.”
“So it’s possible they are going for a battlefield use at this time? Not our cities?” the PM asked, his voice cracking under the fear.
“It is possible,” Iyer said. “But they can hit Delhi, as I mentioned earlier!”
“Iyer, are we talking nuclear warheads here? I want to be clear on this!” Chakri replied just as the NSA and other military officials joined the video feed and the screen split into smaller sections to accommodate them all.
“Yes sir,” Iyer continued as Vice-Admiral Valhotra stood by the side and coordinated with the other officers at the SFC. “We are almost certain that their DF-21s are nuclear-tipped. All of their shorter range missiles are not. Many of those units were hit and destroyed on the ground by air-force strikes once we established control of the skies over southern Tibet and Beijing pulled the surviving launchers to the north where we can’t touch them. But it also means that unless we start driving deep into Tibet, those missiles are not our primary concern at this point. The DF-21s, however, are very much the weapon of choice for Beijing right now.”
“Oh my god!” the PM added as he rubbed his eyes.
“Why are they doing this?” Ravoof asked, completely lost with regard to Chinese intentions. “We just initiated conversations with Beijing to negotiate an end to the war! Where did this threat suddenly come from?”
“I will tell you where it came from,” Chakri replied as he sighed. “One of their Divisions in the Chumbi valley just surrendered! The other one isn’t far behind once General Suman clears out the valley with his army. General Potgam and his Joint-Force-Bhutan just killed the Highland Division in northern Bhutan.”
“Good god! So this whole thing is a ‘loss-of-face’ issue for them?” the PM asked.
“It would very much be in their character if you ask me,” Chakri replied.
“So what the hell do we do now?” Ravoof asked next as he absorbed the severity of the situation.
“Air-Marshal Iyer? Our options?” Chakri asked the SFC commander.
“Come on…hurry!” the operators watching the feed from the Heron’s electro-optical pod could hear their hearts beating in their chests as they watched the infra-red view of a DF-21C launcher elevating its deadly cargo. The view showed the white-out regions near the engine and hydraulic pumps of the launcher as they glowed in IR spectrum. The other sections of the vehicle were lighter shades of gray and the freezing grounds nearby were dark gray.
The top cover of the large-diameter tube opened up and revealed the conical shape of the ballistic-missile inside. The UAV operators also saw the ground crew-clearing out from the vehicle and taking their time about it: they had been told that the Indian satellites overhead had been destroyed an hour previously and that the Indians could not know what was going on at their location at the moment.
They assumed they had time, when in reality they didn’t…
The Heron’s EO screen showed a small black conical dart flying across the screen and slam into the ground a few dozen meters away from the vehicle. The screen flared white and the post-processing software adjusted coloration in near real-time to show a silent white ball expanding over that batteries location which quickly lifted off the ground and disappeared, leaving a mushroom small mushroom cloud expanding over that location while the destroyed launcher rolled on the smoke filled terrain as it shed bits and pieces of its body and burst into flames.
“Kaboom! That’s a direct hit from the warhead!” the EO operator shouted.
“More flare-outs to the east!” the Pilot shouted as his own flight-control screen flickered. “God damn it! Bring your eyeball over to the east!”
“Yeah, roger!” the EO operator shouted as his hands trembled under what he was seeing.
As the EO pod rotated about two axes under the Heron and the view changed, they could see more small mushroom clouds rising into the sky all over the region as the Indian Agni-I and some Agni-II ballistic-missiles slammed in quick sequences into the Chinese DF-21C launch sites. All of it was so silent and serene on the screens of the Heron as they zoomed back the view to show the entire region from forty-thousand feet AGL…
The same view was being shared at the SFC operations center as well. There also, the view was being watched in silence by all those present. Iyer crossed his arms and let out a deep breath as they overheard the operators of the Heron talking to each other in fear-induced excitement as more and more Agni warheads dived into the three DF-21C missile brigades that General Liu had inducted into Tibet for this war.
Even now, missiles were launching from Assam and Uttar Pradesh as more Agni-IIs were taking to the air. The warheads were all conventional unitary. The PM had not allowed Iyer to break India’s stance on the No-first-use policy with regard to nuclear weapons. Had the warheads been nuclear, Iyer could have eliminated those three missile Brigades in northern Tibet with far few missiles and far greater certainty of annihilation. As it was now, he was being forced to match the Chinese roughly missile for missile and seventy-five DF-21Cs required him to expend roughly sixty Agni-Is and –IIs.
Of course the Chinese hadn’t seen anything coming. The missile launches and the inbound warheads were not detected because the IAF had pushed the only surviving KJ-2000 all the way back to Korla and from there, all it did see were the dozens of conventional warheads ripping through the upper atmosphere on their way down.
The use of conventional warheads brought a host of other problems for Iyer and Valhotra. The biggest was that they could not be certain whether all of the targets had been eliminated or not. Up till now, all warheads were exploding as predicted, but that did not mean that their targets had been destroyed…
“Oh shit! What the hell is that?” The Heron pilot shouted
“Where?” The EO operator asked.
“Eleven position, relative!” The pilot exclaimed. “Bring your damn eyeball to my eleven, damn it!”
“Hold on! The pod has a fixed omega-rate! It doesn’t go any faster!” the EO operator shouted, forgetting that they were over open comms with the SFC operations center. Iyer looked at Valhotra and shook his head. He knew what this was.
The wall screen rotated in the center and showed two long pillars of smoke rising from near one of the mushroom dust clouds, the white-hot region at the tip of the smoke cloud…
Iyer opened his arms and walked over to the nearest comms officer:
“Send out the warning order! We have two DF-21s in the air in northern Tibet and arcing south.
IN THE UPPER ATMOSPHERE OVER SOUTHERN TIBET
DAY 12 + 0730 HRS
There was no ordered process to any of this.
When the Indian ballistic missiles had taken the three DF-21C brigades by total surprise, it had also eliminated any semblance of an organized strike that had been planned against Indian military targets. All three brigades had lost their commanders and all command and control. And there had been no time to re-task surviving launchers as others were being taken out. As a result, there was no chance and no time to re-task to a higher priority target. It was time to use them or lose them. The two launchers than had survived intact had thus launched their missiles on their original tasking. The two warheads arced south and then began the dive portion of their trajectory. The warheads heated and began glowing orange while a detached pressure waves expanded around their small blunted-ogive noses. They parted the white clouds with impunity and flashed them away in seconds as they tore into the lower atmosphere. Several seconds later the two warheads dived into their targets in Bhutan without any hope of intercept…
As the sudden brilliant flash of light overhead paled the sun, Squadron-Leader Saxena jerked his head upwards and saw the expanding ball of white light a thousand feet above the town to his west. North of the town, Lieutenant-Colonel Fernandez also brought his arm in front of his face as ball expanded and then smashed into the town to his south. It was the last thing both men ever saw. The one-hundred-fifty kiloton nuclear warhead exploded over the town and the ball of flash and flame expanded radially over the town, instantly enveloping thousands of citizens there and did not stop. It flashed over Paru airport like a brick wall of flame and debris that swept aside the two parked An-32s on the ground and smashed past the bombed-out remains of the terminal buildings as well as the dozens of army trucks and other vehicles. North of the tow, it wiped out the trees and the forests and ate up the convoy of resupply trucks that were moving to Fernandez’s Pinaka unit. A second later it swept past the launchers, rolling them in a wall of debris and flame along with all of the Paratroopers from the 12TH Para Battalion…
BARSHONG
NORTHERN BHUTAN
DAY 12 + 0732 HRS
Pathanya, Vikram and the other members of Spear team dived for cover. Six kilometers west of the village occupied by the 11TH Para Battalion, the saw the flash of light over the ridges near Barshong and had to wince away from it. The snow on all peaks around Barshong instantly flashed away under the intense heat and revealed the brown rocky layers underneath. Vikram saw the pressure wave rapidly approaching them as it engulfed the valley and the village and covered his head with his hands behind the boulders a few seconds before the shockwave swept past them…
There was one unique aspect to the sudden exchange of the past hour.
When Defense-Minister Chakri had recognized that the Heron UAVs over central Tibet had provided them with the most crucial piece of real-time intelligence of this war. He had also recognized that it had given them an advantage not shared by Beijing. They knew that China intended to use nuclear weapons before they actually used them. By all indications they intended to restrict them to military targets or battlefield ones.
But all bets were off on conventional armed missiles now. Chakri had given Iyer the one special order aside from the preemptive counter-missile strike against the DF-21C launchers. That order now went into play just as the explosions ripped the Bhutanese mountains apart.
The citizens of Baghdogra were once again witnesses to yet another Indian ballistic missile launch as a massive Agni-III ICBM lifted off the tubed launcher and climbed into the early morning sky with a loud constant rumble from its first stage exhaust. It climbed slowly and then gathering speed as it accelerated through the gray clouds, its hot exhaust parting them like god’s own hand…
First of all, in public domain there is not much debate about escalatory ladder when the satellites are taken out. Particularly with non-weaponisation of space treaty between US/Soviet (russia)., there is not much danger between the erstwhile cold war foes to go nuclear. However China (with its proxies NK and Pakistan) are new entrants to the game.
A question does arise, taking out a satellite itself can be construed as an escalatory step towards nuclear warfare. In that case an ASAT use not just forms a pre-cursor to nuclear strike - but can be construed as one. After that in the defense of a nation, one has to use nukes.
edit: Just noticed Agni III launch. Wonder what flowers it carries for the chicoms.
The surprise element was complete.
But then again, it was meant to. The RISAT-1 satellite had confirmed that the politburo and the members of the CMC were only beginning to arrive at the helipads near the underground complex used as the national command center for the CMC in China. The satellite had shown Mi-17s parked on the ground as well as other Z-8s and Z-9s arriving from Beijing.
The window was short, but usable…
The massive two-thousand kilogram unitary warhead of the Agni-III dived past the stunned ground radar crews around Beijing and exploded above the helipads. It caught several of the helicopters on the ground and others in the air as the pressure wave smashed the helicopters aside as well as the parked military vehicles waiting to take the members into the underground center. A massive shockwave expanded in a circle and flattened all of the trees in the forests near the helipads while a smoke filled mushroom cloud rose into the air…
I think that Beijing A3 attack should be nuclear, even if it meant escalation. China, for all it's antiques need to see the light at the end of the asuric tunnel they dug themselves into
Khalsa wrote:I love it ... the fact its conventional shows our true grit
I love it
oh well hopefully it is ...
How so? This is the thinking we should get away with; fighting an enemy with Ahimsa nonsense.
So the PM of India, Mr Chakri, defeated the Indian Nuclear Doctrine by his ahimsa? Doesn't the IND say that any WMD attack on Indian military will result in nuclear retaliation?
Then the loss of our ships with most of the crew, the missile strikes on our bases..... 
) we weaseled out with something like this. Methinks the Chinese would rather risk a minor nuke slug fest with India than unknown calamities and shakeups that a coup will bring.
