Chapter 92: Concerto for Nuclear Explosions

If the prelude to the opening of the First World War was a series of general mobilizations between the participating countries; The prelude to the opening of World War II was a series of sneak attacks between the participating countries; Then the prelude to the opening of the Third World War was a series of nuclear explosions between the participating countries. Pen, fun, pavilion www. biquge。 info

On the whole, each time it is more cruel, each time is more despicable, and each time it is more terrifying.

However, this is the only way for the art of war to be sublimated, and it is also the inevitable course of the development of human civilization.

-- The so-called civilization eternally demonstrates the barbaric war, and the barbaric war eternally carries the so-called civilization.

Don't forget, war is the catalyst and promoter of human civilization, the collision and wrestling of the highest wisdom of mankind, the most splendid and magnificent group activities of mankind, heroes and epics, blood and honor, civilization and progress, all of which are immortalized in the collision of blood and fire!

Strictly speaking, the history of mankind itself is almost a history of war, from the barbaric era hundreds of thousands of years ago, when Ru Mao drank blood, the gene of a penchant for violence has been buried in our blood - in order to survive, early primitive humans fought with wild beasts and fought with nature. Then, for the survival of the race and civilization, the war between humans and humans for resources began. From primitive society to slave society, from slave society to feudal society and capitalist society, human desires are endless, and they are infinitely greedy to snatch everything valuable. From ignorant chieftains attacking other tribes, capturing slaves, building palaces for their own pleasure, to ancient kings waging large-scale wars, slaughtering cities and plundering populations and wealth, to imperialist powers fighting each other to divide the earth's territory, human civilization has staggered forward under the baptism of blood and fire.

In the long history of mankind, war has been a fierce collision between different civilizations and a violent exchange between various peoples. It is the terminator of civilization and at the same time the creator of civilization. Countless great kingdoms have risen in blood and fire, and then perished in the flames of war and fighting.

After all, we live in a world where the strong are respected, and the most intuitive way for the strong to show their strength to the weak is always war!

-- The fundamental basis for Westerners' conquest and domination of the world has never been a slogan of democracy and freedom, but a violence that no one can match!

Therefore, war, as a social phenomenon, has accompanied the occurrence and development of human society to this day, and will continue to exist in the foreseeable future. Although war can cause destruction and even destruction of civilization, war is also the most effective way to advance civilization.

No matter how much modern people hate war and love peace, war is still an inseparable part of human history, and it will still come to this world one after another, and as long as the history of human civilization continues, the blood and fire of war will never end.

A civilization that is excessively war-fearful is a cowardly civilization, and a civilization that is too bloodthirsty and belligerent is a self-destructive civilization. Only by skillfully balancing the proportions of war and peace, and successfully reconciling the rhythm of construction and destruction, can we become the final victor in the competition of civilizations.

In short, the smoke of World War II has not yet been blown away by the breeze of peace, and the mushroom cloud of World War III has plunged all mankind into a deeper nightmare......

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Iberian Peninsula, Gibraltar Fortress

Since defeating Spain and capturing Gibraltar, the British have spent a lot of money on the construction of this huge reef jutting out of the sea, making it the strongest fortress in Europe.

By the time of World War II, the whole of Gibraltar had been fortified, and the British had filled this coastal boulder with various coastal batteries, pillboxes and machine gun positions, and more than 150 coastal guns were installed on just two square kilometers of land, and at the same time, the entire middle of the rock was hollowed out like an ant's nest, and the top cover was reinforced with reinforced concrete, which could easily resist the frontal attack of a ton of aerial bombs, and its defensive strength was even higher than that of the Maginot Line.

Moreover, Gibraltar is surrounded by rugged terrain, with few gentle beaches to land on, and the coastline is full of cliffs and layers of artillery and mine nets, making it difficult for even a 21st-century Navy SEAL to force a landing in such terrain. In addition, the British army also stored enough food for ten years and ammunition for three years in the tunnel fortifications in Gibraltar for a long and protracted war.

With this fortress of Gibraltar, which has been painstakingly managed for more than 200 years, even after the successive defeats of the French and Spanish battlefields, the remnants of the 35,000 British expeditionary force still gritted their teeth and regrouped, united with the remnants of General Franco, who had withdrawn from Madrid, and backed the fortress of Gibraltar, and once again set up a battle formation in the Andalusian region of southern Spain, vowing to preserve the last sense of the British Empire's presence on the European continent - according to the optimistic plan of the British Chiefs of Staff, the fortress of Gibraltar will become a meat grinder, Let the European Bolsheviks shed their blood here.

However, even Gibraltar, the largest fortress in Europe, was as fragile as a papier-mâché model in the face of the atomic bomb.

-- The Soviet Red Army's approach to Gibraltar was still as simple and crude as ever: there is no fortress in the world that cannot be solved by one nuclear bomb, and if one is not enough, then two...... On October 10, 1946, the day the Soviet Union officially declared war on the United States and Britain, the Soviet Strategic Air Force organized a large-scale bomber group to raid Gibraltar and dropped a 60,000-ton atomic bomb over the fortress......

As a result, in the rising mushroom cloud, the famous white cliffs of Gibraltar were blown into a large crater, and the British destroyer formation and submarine force stationed there were all wiped out in an instant. And the honeycomb fortifications on the rocks also melted into wax figures in the heat of the nuclear explosion.

Despite the fact that many years of construction and buried deep underground tunnels were relied upon, even if they were directly hit by an atomic bomb, many of the British defenders who were defending the fortress of Gibraltar managed to survive. But the problem is that the entire area of Gibraltar, after the nuclear explosion and radiation contamination, has become a nuclear radiation zone in a short time, and is no longer suitable for human life - if the British army still insisted on holding the fortress of Gibraltar, then there was no need for the Soviet Red Army to waste much ammunition, and the pervasive radiation sickness alone could quickly collapse the defenders......

And according to the public propaganda of the Soviets, another more powerful atomic bomb will be dropped on the fortress of Gibraltar next month!

All of a sudden, the morale of the British troops on the Iberian Peninsula plummeted to freezing point - after all, no matter how tough the steel and iron bones were, they could not withstand the destructive power of the atomic bombing...... General Franco, the leader of the reactionary Spanish regime, had just gathered some troops in the port of Cádiz, preparing to launch a counteroffensive by taking advantage of the bombing of Madrid. However, as the mushroom cloud rose in Gibraltar, the counterattack had to come to naught.

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Zurich, Switzerland

As time passed, the dazzling glare of the mushroom cloud faded, and the deadly heat wave cooled down.

As far as the eye can see through the billowing smoke, Zurich, Switzerland's largest city, the famous city of finance and watches, and one of the safest, affluent and highest standard of living in Europe, has been destroyed beyond recognition by the atomic bombing. Ancient bell towers and ornate buildings were razed to the ground in the bombing, and the remaining streets were littered with half-naked corpses in smoke. Part of the city was reduced to nothing, part was left with rubble, and the rest of the neighborhood was on fire. The surviving Swiss cried out in the flames and fled, and in order to alleviate the pain of the burns, they subconsciously spread their arms, and under their arms hung long rolls of burned skin, which was indescribably terrifying.

-- Since the beginning of the war between the Soviet Union and Switzerland, the brave Swiss mountain people have successfully held off the offensive of the Soviet Red Army and the "Red Europe" coalition forces, relying on the steep mountains, rugged terrain, and strong fortress fortifications, as well as the ammunition and ammunition they had stockpiled before the war.

Although the Soviet Air Force quickly swept away the old Swiss planes, it firmly grasped the air supremacy of the Swiss battlefield, and bombed all major towns in Switzerland every day. But thanks to the mountains and mountains scattered throughout the country, as well as the fortifications carefully camouflaged as hills and fortifications deep underground, the Swiss were able to fight tenaciously while sending partisans to constantly harass the Red Army's logistical supply lines.

At first glance, the Swiss battlefield of this year seems to be a quagmire similar to that of the later war in Afghanistan.

However, Stalin at this time was not the Brezhnev of later generations, and he was never afraid to throw away all the nuclear bombs at hand, let alone directly brush up on the international reputation overflow - anyway, in the eyes of the Western liberal camp, he was already a bloodthirsty tyrant on the same level as Hitler!

As a result, Zurich, with its hundreds of banks, became the first sacrifice of the Soviet atomic bomb: a bright mushroom cloud that pierced the sky did not gradually dissipate until two hours after the atomic explosion, and more than 80,000 citizens were tragically killed at the time of the atomic bombing. When the survivors who were lucky enough not to die directly from the nuclear bombing walked out of the underground air-raid shelter and looked at their homes razed to the ground in disbelief, a cloudy "black rain" rich in various radioactive dust fell in the sky, leaving gray traces on the surviving citizens of Zurich.

It is clear that after this rain, thousands more Swiss will die from radiation sickness in the next few days and months.

At the same time, the Soviet side publicly informed the Swiss government that this was only the first nuclear strike against Switzerland. If the Swiss government continues to stubbornly refuse to surrender unconditionally, more nuclear bombs will come to follow - forty-eight hours later, a second atomic bomb exploded over the Swiss capital, Bern, after a delay in receiving the Swiss government's unconditional surrender announcement, and then claimed the lives of some 70,000 Swiss people...... This is just the statistics on the ground, and there are bound to be more deaths due to the radiation contamination.

At this point, the Swiss have broken their backbones - Switzerland was a small country of five million people during World War II, and in just a few months of war, Switzerland has already killed a tenth of its population, most of whom are young men who are the main force of labor!

If the fight continues, I am afraid that there will be a devastating and desperate situation in which the whole society collapses, the old have nothing to support, and the young have nothing to rely on.

On October 13, the Swiss government, which had moved to Geneva, sent a telegram announcing a national cessation of resistance and an unconditional surrender to the Soviet Red Army.

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Scapa Bay, Scotland, United Kingdom

The most famous wartime anchorage of the British Navy in modern times is a semi-enclosed water area in the Orkney Islands, the northernmost part of the British Scottish region, surrounded by the main island of the archipelago, the island of Hoy, the island of South Ronasay and a small island, is a good natural bay, about 24 kilometers long, 13 kilometers wide, with an area of 130 square kilometers. There are 3 shipping lanes to the Atlantic Ocean and the North Sea. Scapa Bay has been a frequent area for warships since the days of Viking invasions in the Middle Ages, and the Royal Navy used it to guard the Northern Sea Routes during the First and Second World Wars.

During the heyday of the British Grand Fleet, Scapa Sound was once home to more than 30 battleships and hundreds of other ships. However, by this moment, the essence of the British Grand Fleet had gradually withered away in the flames of war, and the speed of replenishing ships was far from keeping up with the consumption, and there were few remaining capital ships.

Last summer, the Royal Navy's Grand Fleet in Scapa Bay made its last all-out sortie to meet the Soviet Red Navy that had burst out of the Baltic Sea, and although it successfully defeated the Soviet fleet off the coast of the Netherlands, it was bombarded by two Soviet atomic bombs in succession...... In the midst of this nuclear explosion, the total tonnage of ships directly sunk by the British Royal Navy in front and behind alone was as high as 100,000 tons. After the remnants of the ships struggled to reluctantly withdraw to Scapa Bay, after inspection by the relevant experts, they found even more desperately that except for a few destroyers that were far away from the explosion at that time, almost all the remaining surviving ships were very seriously contaminated with radioactivity, and it would take at least three months of decontamination operations before it was possible to return to active service. Some of these highly polluting vessels were simply discarded or even dismantled because the hull steel had become a source of radiation contamination......

To add insult to injury, the Royal Navy not only suffered a massive destruction of its ships, but also suffered heavy losses in personnel -- the crews of all the ships involved in the war showed symptoms of radiation sickness on a large scale, and with the medical capabilities of this era, the actual cure rate of even the mildest radiation sickness was still pitifully low.

The navy was a highly specialized army, and could only be replenished from the seafaring schools and merchant sailors, not like the army, where it was only necessary to catch a few strong men and go into battle after two weeks of emergency training - although Britain once had the largest merchant fleet and the largest number of skilled sailors in the world, but after several years of continuous world wars, all this capital had been almost consumed. As a result, after the nuclear explosion, the Royal Navy was made to lack both ships and men, and it was a miserable and miserable scene.

As a result, for a long time, Britain almost fell into a catastrophe with no sea defense.

However, despite the devastating devastation of the nuclear explosion off the coast of the Netherlands, after a year of retraction to Scarpa Bay to recuperate and operate dismally, the fleet gradually recovered with the launching of several new ships and the replenishment of new recruits. A series of capital ships, such as the battleship "Howe," the battleship "Anson," and the aircraft carrier "Dreadnought," which had been paralyzed by radiation contamination, were finally able to return to service after large-scale refurbishment and repeated decontamination operations.

With the gradual recovery of combat effectiveness, the Grand Fleet, which had been dormant for a year, no longer continued to hide in Scapa Bay and pretend to be ostriches, but resumed a series of small-scale military operations. Although the wartime cabinet in London did not dare to use this limited capital to penetrate deep into the Baltic Sea and attack Leningrad directly, nor did it have the courage to bypass the entire Scandinavian peninsula and make an expedition to Murmansk, it was still easy to organize a cruiser fleet to break the merchant shipping routes in the North Sea and the Norwegian Sea, or occasionally sneak up on the coastal ports of Norway and Denmark.

However, what no one expected was that the second destruction of the Royal Navy's Grand Fleet had entered the countdown at this time......

This autumn was unusually cold in the North Atlantic, as if the Gulf Stream, which brings warmth to all of Europe, had suddenly struck, and even though winter had not yet officially begun, it was already bitterly cold around Scarpa Bay, and light snow was even falling in the Norwegian Sea north of the Orkney Islands.

At this time, a British coast guard patrol ship with a displacement of more than 200 tons was cleaving the waves in the rough Norwegian Sea to carry out patrol tasks.

In fact, in the outer waters of the military port, a routine cruising mission like this should logically be entrusted to a destroyer. But now that the Royal Navy has suffered heavy losses, has to undertake heavy escort tasks, and has to allocate ships to the Far East to participate in colonial wars, the number of destroyers left on the mainland is really not enough, and can only serve as combat missions. As for these routine patrols, we can only try to collect some chaotic boats to make up the numbers.

Overall, it's a tiresome chore. Even on a sunny day, the air and sea are still icy and biting, and if the weather is bad, the snowflakes and the waves will mix into ice particles, making people and the ship feel like they are in the world of ice demons, and the entire hull of the ship except for the chimney is wrapped in ice shells and hung with icicles...... Although some of the cabins have stoves for heating, in order to prevent carbon monoxide (gas) poisoning caused by insufficient combustion of coal stoves, portholes or doors need to be ventilated, which greatly reduces the heating effect. What's even worse is that because the skilled sailors have been requisitioned on the warship, the guys who drive these patrol ships are basically rookies who are not familiar with the sea, and the result is that all kinds of unbelievable accidents have occurred in three days, from fires, shutdowns, power outages, lost ships to running on the reef are common things, so that the captains have to jump all day long. Because of nervous tension combined with cold and fatigue, some captains even need morphine to get a good night's sleep.

At present, the captain of this coast guard patrol ship, after exhausting himself to deal with a lot of mess, has just injected himself with a shot of morphine and is ready for a good night's sleep. Unexpectedly, before his head could be stained with the pillow, he was dragged up by the first mate with a panicked look, "...... Captain! There are planes! ”

-- What can make Mr. First Officer panic like this will naturally not be one or two reconnaissance planes or lost fighters, but a huge group of bombers. Although from the foggy sea, even with a telescope in hand, it is impossible to distinguish the aircraft type and badge above 10,000 meters in the air - that is, it is impossible to confirm the identity of the other party, but just looking at their course and posture is enough to make people feel that the comer is not good!

“…… This is most likely ...... Bomber swarm of the Soviets! Hell, how is it that it didn't find it on the radar at all? ”

The captain shook his head in the sea breeze, trying to dispel the drowsiness caused by the morphine injections, "...... Hurry up and report the police! ”

However, the answer to him was an embarrassed voice: "...... Captain, our radios and radars have long been damaged by the wind and waves."

So the poor old patrol boat had to turn around, burn its boilers to the limit, and rush to Scarpa Bay at a top speed of twenty knots - at this rate, by the time it reached Scapa Bay, the Soviet planes would have already blown it up. The only hope for an early warning message is to try your luck and see if you can meet another ship with a good radio on the way...... Unfortunately, it wasn't until about half an hour later that they didn't encounter another boat, but instead saw a mushroom cloud rising from the end of the distant horizon......

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-- Although the antiaircraft artillery units and air forces in Scapa Bay fought particularly tenaciously in defensive battles, and the British shore-based air forces in Scotland also rushed to the rescue, no country in this era could prevent horizontal bombing from an altitude of 10,000 meters.

According to the standards of World War II, in the face of a strategic bombing of this scale, the defending side was able to shoot down a quarter of the bombers, which was already a great success, and it was simply a dream to prevent a bomb from falling on its head -- if it was an ordinary bomb, it would be enough to take a few of them, and it was very likely that they would not be directly hit, but only missed. But if it's an atomic bomb...... Is there also a near-miss concept of a nuclear strike?

In short, although the Soviet Air Force paid a certain price, dozens of planes in front and behind them turned into flames and fell to the sea, but God did not favor the British, and the Soviets still broke through the encirclement and interception of British planes and successfully dropped an atomic bomb on Scarpa Bay.

-- Next, the Royal Navy Grand Fleet anchored in Scapa Bay ushered in its own end......

It's the same as the last battle in the Dutch Seas. This time, the Scapa Gulf nuclear explosion also occurred on the surface of the sea. At the moment of the detonation of the nuclear bomb, I saw a high-speed expanding fireball appear at the detonation point on the water surface, and produce a supersonic terrifying shock wave underwater, like the palm of the titan giant, instantly tearing the keel of the nearby moored ship into pieces! At the same time, the intense flash of the nuclear explosion ignited the cables and flags on the mast at the first time, scorched the radar antenna into a mass of molten metal garbage, and blinded the eyes of a large number of naval officers and men. The crushed glass slag and scrap metal struck the officers and men on the ship in the face like bullets, piercing their bodies like a sieve, and then the light, heat and radioactive radiation slaughtered them completely.

On the other hand, when the underwater shock wave created by the nuclear explosion in Scarpa Bay spreads outward, the color of the sea becomes darker, like the spread of oil pollution at sea. The sea level immediately following the shock wave instantly turned into a layer of white foam -- because the speed of sound transmission in water is as much as five times faster than that of air, when the shock wave spreads at high speed underwater, the sea surface behind it is quickly dyed white, like a thin layer of white extending outward at high speed at sea.

- Although this is indeed a strange view, it is a purgatory spectacle that brings death and destruction!

At the same time, the bubbles caused by the nuclear explosion pierced the seawater directly into the seabed and hit the seabed, exploding a shocking crater on the seabed. The high temperatures caused by the nuclear explosion atomized millions of tons of seawater in an instant, spraying it into the air in the shape of a dome. And form a terrifying water wall with a height of thousands of meters and a thickness of nearly 100 meters, like a man-made tsunami, with the nuclear bomb explosion point as the center, wrapped in an explosion-like loud sound, and swept across the semi-enclosed waters of Scapa Bay in an instant!

All of a sudden, the entire Scapa Bay anchorage seemed to be a boiling cauldron, and the warships became grains of rice and peas bouncing in boiling water...... The blast wave swept across the surrounding islands, sending cars, cargo boxes and houses into the sky like a Category 18 typhoon.

Then, before reaching the shore, the wall of water caused by the nuclear explosion begins to fall with gravity, creating a huge waterfall that has never been seen before. Millions of tons of seawater, which had been subjected to zero-distance nuclear pollution, fell from the sky, stirring up a tidal wave of ultra-high-radiation nuclear-contaminated wastewater, flooding most of the ships on the sea, and finally rushing to the shore, smashing the docks, trestles, cranes, warehouses, bridges, and lighthouses into pieces......

Although some of the strongest warships withstood such a rollercoaster ride, and were not hit by huge waves until they disintegrated in the air, or washed up on the shore and turned into scrap metal, they were drenched and washed by such high-radiation sewage, and even if the battleship did not sink, the crew would basically die.

When the dust settles and the time comes, it's over. British sailors and officers struggled to crawl out of their underground bunkers, looking at the devastated military port and the fleet that no longer existed, and one by one they couldn't help but cry or sit on the ground and smoke cigarettes. What these survivors didn't know, however, was that because they were too close to the blast and had spent too much time in the radiation-contaminated area, even if they barely escaped death that day, they would not be able to escape the torture of radiation sickness in the future, and more than half of them would eventually die in agony in their hospital beds after surviving for a while.

Of course, the Scapa Bay anchorage, which had been hit by a nuclear bomb, was also scrapped and would be unusable for at least a few years.

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On the day when the Soviet Union officially declared war on the United States and Britain, the Royal Navy's Grand Fleet and the Scapa Bay anchorage were subjected to a nuclear explosion and were basically wiped out......

This earth-shattering news, together with the debacle of the fortress of Gibraltar, appeared on the desks of the British Empire's ruling class almost simultaneously, and the already shaky morale and fighting spirit of these British gentlemen were also devastating like a nuclear explosion. Prime Minister Winston Churchill's second wartime cabinet finally suffered a fatal crisis of collapse......