Countries, Regions and Locations

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Countries, Regions and Locations

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Countries, Regions and Locations

The purpose of this thread is to shed a light on the current state of locations, regions and countries of particular interest, specifically (though not exclusively) those whose status in CSW is significantly different from OTL.
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Re: Countries and Regions

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Afghanistan

Afghanistan is a culturally mixed nation, a crossroads between the East and the West, and has been an ancient focal point of trade and migration. It has an important geostrategical location, connecting South, Central and Southwest Asia. During its history, the land has seen various invaders and conquerors, while on the other hand, local entities invaded the surrounding vast regions to form their own empires.

The longest period of stability in Afghanistan in recent history was between 1933 and 1973, when the country was under the rule of King Zahir Shah. However, in 1973 Zahir Shah's brother-in-law, Mohammed Daoud Khan, launched a bloodless coup and became the first President of Afghanistan. However by that time Marxist influence in Afghanistan was already increasing, which soon became seen as a threat to the Daoud regime.

In 1978 a prominent member of the pro-Soviet People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA), Mir Akbar Khyber, was killed by the government. The leaders of the Marxist PDPA feared that the President was planning to root them out, especially since many party officials were arrested by the government shortly after Khyber’s death.

In response, those military wing officers of the PDPA still at large organised an uprising. The PDPA overthrew the regime of Mohammad Daoud, who was killed along with his family. The uprising was known as the Great April Revolution. On May 1, Nur Mohammad Taraki became General Secretary of the PDPA. The country was then renamed the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan.

The new Marxist government almost immediately sought more explicit backing of the Soviet Union. The USSR however had under Alexa Zhadanova assumed an isolationist stance and despite calls by more militant factions the Second Revolutionaries who controlled the majority of the Duma were unwilling to divert resources away from the comprehensive reforms still sweeping the USSR to what the Zhadanovan technocrats considered a backwards middle of nowhere. The Union recognized the legitimacy of the PDPA government and provided a trickle of aid, but did little more than that.

Undeterred by the Soviet indifference to the political sea change, the PDPA moved to permit freedom of religion and carried out an ambitious land reform, waiving farmers' debts countrywide. They also made a number of statements on women’s rights and introduced women to political life. A prominent example was Anahita Ratebzad, who was a major Marxist leader and a member of the Revolutionary Council. The majority of people in the cities including Kabul either welcomed or were ambivalent to these policies. However, the secular nature of the government made it unpopular with religiously conservative Afghans in the villages and the countryside, who favoured traditionalist 'Islamic' restrictions on women's rights and in daily life.

In the United States meanwhile the CIA under Richard Nixon was following the situation in Afghanistan with interest. Nixon considered the sitting Democratic president Andrew Carnegie III weak and ineffectual and he sought to continue former president Westmoreland’s policy of containment. In 1980 the CIA began to covertly fund and train anti-government Mujahedeen forces through the Ministry of Intelligence and National Security of the Islamic Republic of Iran. These Mujahedeen belonged to various different factions, but all shared, to varying degrees, a similarly conservative 'Islamic' ideology.

In the ensuing years the US and Iran-backed Mujahedeen, using divide-and-conquer strategies that exploited old tribal grievances and religious differences, swept through the country, driving back the disorganized forces of the PDPA government. Lacking in manpower and material government forces were driven back until by 1983 they controlled little more than the capital of Kabul, which was under siege by Mujahedeen forces and fell in February 1984.

In the aftermath of the fall of Kabul and the neutralization of the Marxist government the US rapidly lost interest in Afghanistan, and open US backing of the Kingdom of Iraq during the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1987) had rapidly soured relations between the United States and Iran. As a result, US aid to the Mujahedeen began to dry up and ceased entirely by July 1984.

Throughout the latter half of the 1980’s and the 1990’s however fighting continued among the now greatly diminished loyalist PDPA remnants scattered through the outlying provinces and the various victorious Mujahedeen factions, giving rise to a state of warlordism. The most serious fighting during this period occurred in 1994, when over 10,000 people were killed in Kabul alone. During this entire period however there was little international interest in the war-ravaged country, the world being mainly occupied with the Second and Third Gulf Wars.

This all changes on September 11, 2001. A series of terror attacks rocked Moscow, killing thousands of Soviet citizens. The KGB traced the attacks back by to a notable collection of Islamic warlords in Afghanistan, which had the Duma howling for blood. At the dawn of the new millennium the hawks who had pushed for open support of Afghanistan in 1988 had coalesced into what had become the Ultramilitant wing of the Soviet parliament, and over the course of a decade they had gathered a great deal of influence; on September 12 even the most notoriously isolationist Second Revolutionaries echoed their calls for immediate military action. Even the normally diplomatically inclined Premier Nadya Kiralova could not allow the brutal attacks to go unanswered. There could be only one response to this. As of September 11, 2001, the Soviet Union was at war.

On December 7, 2001, a wall of steel thundered across the Kazakhstan-Afghanistan border. An entire Army Group, consisting of tens of thousands of tanks, armored vehicles and artillery pieces and no less than 750,000 soldiers, the largest field army the USSR had assembled since the end of the Great Patriotic War, slammed into the hastily assembled Mujahedeen defences along the Afghani border and annihilated them. Soviet forces, led by Field Marshal Iosef Sechalin, carved a black swathe of destruction through the countryside, destroying all opposition in an orgy of overwhelming firepower and reaching Kabul by the end of the month. The USSR then made a common cause with the many members of the political and intellectual elite who had fled to the USSR during the ‘80’s and ‘90’s, and Anahita Ratebzad was installed as Secretary General of the new Autonomous Republic of Afghanistan.

Although the Cold War had been steadily thawing during the 1990’s, the Soviet actions during the Third Gulf War together with the invasion of Afghanistan lead to a re-freezing of East-West relations, and nearly lost Raymond Barclay the race for the US presidency. Come election time however the charisma of Premier Kiralova and the general outpouring of sympathy over the seemingly unprovoked terror attacks won out over the ‘Red Scare’ which was the main thrust of Republican candidate Doug McConnell’s campaign.

During the first decade of the 21st century 200,000 Soviet troops were stationed in Afghanistan. Withdrawal did not start until 2011, although some troop reshuffling took place during the Russian Crisis of 2010-2011. For the duration of the occupation sectarian and religious differences are brutally suppressed, which is combined with a rigid propaganda campaign aimed at hammering out dissent among the populace. Even then, the Autonomous Republic of Afghanistan is expected to have a significant Soviet presence at least until 2025, and likely until such time as the nation is ready to enter the USSR proper, which is clearly something both the Soviet leadership and the government of the ARA are aiming for.
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Re: Countries and Regions

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I like it. I love how it parallels real-life while being in CSW's bizzaro world, and how Red 9/11 caused the rise of Ultranationalism and a renewed Cold War. The political implications on the Much Different World does work, and that's good.

Goddamn Director Nixon! I wonder what he'd have to say about Chandra Gossley's shit.
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Re: Countries and Regions

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The USSR's period is interesting, to say the least, as is the bizarre covert team up by the US and Iran (although, actually, it isn't that weird if you think about it.).
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Re: Countries and Regions

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Shroom Man 777 wrote:Goddamn Director Nixon! I wonder what he'd have to say about Chandra Gossley's shit.
I'll throw you a bone here: guess who mentored Chandra Gosely?
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Re: Countries and Regions

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Hell, after WRAITH and all that is done with, maybe it can be revealed that Richard Nixon orchestrated everything in an evil conspiracy of... EVIL!

Or some other feat of Magnificent Bastardry.
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Re: Countries and Regions

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Slightly touched up, the first bit to be plucked from ye ancient database. Lord knows I've been looking for this...

The Avalonian Woods

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Isla Penumbra, code-name AVALON WOOD
AVALON WOOD, colloquially known as the Avalonian Woods, has a well-known reputation amongst the American armed services as being a death-trap. Though hundreds of miles from any significant enemy border, this geographical area, spanning some several hundred squares miles, has garnered an urban lore equal to that of Area 51 and Leonov-3, although no known base of any country is known to exist in the area; It is rumored, however that the US keeps a top-secret base hidden in the woods as a testing site for something that eats young platoons alive.
- Excerpt from Lore of the United States Armed Forces, by Maj (ret.) Sarah McDonnell, published 2016
The island code-named AVALON WOOD (more commonly known as the 'Avalonian Woods') is located on a Pacific Ocean island approximately 207 miles off the coast of Costa Rica called Isla Penumbra. The island is close to, but not a part of an island chain called "Las Cinco Mujeres" ('The Five Women'). Most of the islands in that chain are privately owned, bought as they are by Western corporations who for one reason or another prefer to a have remote, out-of-the-way place to do whatever; the majority of those corporations are very insistent upon their privacy and have warned that trespassers can and will be fired upon. Although most locals insist they steer well clear of the chain, a number of ships still are known to have disappeared in the region. The islands have consequently acquired the nickname among local fishermen of "Las Cinco Muertes" ('The Five Deaths').

This dubious reputation among the local Costa Ricans, as well as the neighbors' penchant for self-isolation, suits the current owner of Isla Penumbra (the US Department of Defense) just fine. Like the proprietors of Las Cinco Mujeres the DoD wants no troublemakers on its premises: it has implemented a shoot-on-sight policy for any trespassers and enforces a strict cordon of the island by way of armed motorboat patrols. Whatever it is the DoD is doing here, they obviously don't want anyone looking at it, leading to all kinds of rumors concerning what they are up to.

History
Unfortunately for gossipmongers, not much of the goings-on can be gleaned from the island's code-name. Even though the island is covered in lush, tropical vegetation service personnel aware of the place have come to refer to it as 'the Avalonian Woods', the codename AVALON WOOD is, in best US Military tradition, nothing more than an intentionally oblique combination of words arbitrarily grabbed from a dictionary,

As little as there is to glean from its codename, there is even less on the books about the place: the US government bought the island from Costa Rica in 1925 to build a Navy coaling facility there. It was used as a fuel and munitions depot during WW2 and the subject of two failed long-range Japanese submarine attacks. The facility was decommissioned and abandoned in 1967, but Isla Penumbra remained in American hands. Sometime during the next decade possession of the island changed from the DoD to the CIA, which allegedly used it as an extraterritorial base for experiments that could not legally be conducted within US borders. CIA involvement with the island came to an abrupt end in 1983 when its main facility was almost totally destroyed in an unexplained explosion. The Department of Defense retook possession of the island shortly thereafter and has been using it as a testing site ever since, although it is notoriously tight-lipped about what is being tested.

Beside its function as a military test site the expansive jungle of the island is also used as a training- and proving ground for green platoons enrolled in jungle warfare training, and its active volcanic composition and the resulting treacherous geography of the island are likely how the island acquired its reputation as a death-trap for young, inexperienced soldiers, some of whom are reported to have been lost in the jungle and were never seen again, once more proving that a soldier should not take anything for granted, not even an exercise.

Incident
On July 4th, 2005 seismic sensors in Central America picked up a massive tremor that was triangulated to the middle of the island, followed by a thick plume of black smoke visible even from well outside Las Cinco Mujeres' no-go zone. Eye-witnesses (mainly Costa Rican fishermen and a few tourists on sailing yachts) further report spotting large numbers of military aircraft in the area during or directly after the event, some of whom warned the witnesses not to approach any closer. No two days later the carrier USS Kitty Hawk was seen arriving at the island at the head of elements of the US Navy's 7th fleet. Its presence in the area was later confirmed in a press statement by the Joint Chiefs, who would however not divulge any mission details “in the interest of national security”.

Although initial reports speculated of some catastrophic accident or malfunction or possibly even an open nuclear test on AVALON WOOD, the DoD in the same statement explained that sudden and unexpectedly violent volcanic activity had triggered an earthquake on the island, causing the destruction of several of its key facilities. The arrival of Kitty Hawk and significant numbers of military personnel could then be explained as a rescue or salvage attempt. Reportedly the DoD resumed some degree of operations at Avalon Wood in early February of 2008.

Topography
Technically Isla Penumbra is not a true island; rather, it is a seamount, a volcanic upthrusting of rock from the ocean floor. It is tear drop shaped, thicker at the north than at the south, and measures 30 miles long and 15 miles wide at the widest point, making about a total area size of about 267 square miles. The highest peak of the island is the old volcano at its heart, which rises roughly 2,100 feet above sea level. The climate on the island is tropical, with dense jungles and two rivers running across the island to the east and northern coasts. There also is at least one large lake to the north, and a series of smaller lakes scattered across the rest of the island. The volcano is still active and produces heat and occasionally pyroclastic flows, geysers and lava fountains. As a result of this the island is still hot in some areas and often even hot under foot. Due to this heat and prevailing currents much of the island lies regularly covered in fog; a feature from which it most likely derived its Spanish name.'
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Re: Countries and Regions

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Hahahaha! I vague remember this article. As I probably said before; Sarah McDonnell = Awesome? A retired marine Scout/Sniper perhaps? ;)

Also by way of nitpick: I can't actually find the word Avalon in the Oxford Dictionary :P Well not the concise one anyway.
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Re: Countries and Regions

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Las Cinco Muertes! :D

There must be an Isla Sorna and Nublar somewhere over there. :P

The article makes the place sound un-nice, while not even spelling out anything nasty that's definitely going on there - like the events of SHADOW TEMPEST.
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Re: Countries and Regions

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On a side note: I just read the Afghanistan article. Compared with real life; the Russians probably managed to get out first. It's weird how much closer all the 'near future' dates are now compared with when you started CSW. I mean in four weeks it will be 2010. That scary.

I mean I've gone off xkcd recently but this one still strikes true for me:

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Re: Countries and Regions

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Ah, yes, I remember this article. Definitely not a place you want to visit often, if at all.
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Re: Countries and Regions

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I have to admit 'perpetually shrouded in fog' is kind of amusing. The Department of Defense are so pulpy sometimes. :)
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Re: Countries, Regions and Locations

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Well, if it's pulp you like...

XK-Masada

Every great power has its dirty secrets, its skeletons in the closet and its buried memories better left forgotten. But sometimes those memories are too useful, the secrets too life-saving, to simply leave to rot in slowly rusting file-cabinets in hidden bunkers. XK-Masada is one of those terrible, invaluable secrets.

Nature
The name 'Masada' refers to a site of ancient Israeli palaces and fortifications on top of an isolated rock plateau on the eastern edge of the Judean Desert overlooking the Dead Sea. It was the last redoubt of the Sicarii rebels after the First Jewish-Roman War, when a siege of the fortress by troops of the Roman Empire led to the mass suicide of the rebels, who preferred death to surrender.

XK-Masada is an alien world orbiting a dying red giant, several thousand light years closer to the galactic core, inward along the same spiral arm. It is connected to Earth through the gate system researched by the CIA, and serves as a fallback position for the US Government in case of global thermonuclear war or another major catastrophe. XK-Masada is a truly ancient world. It was once clearly alive, but now the only signs of those times are petrified forests standing near the dried-out beds of long-gone rivers, a scummy sea of algae near the equator that feeds oxygen into the thin atmosphere, and the incomprehensibly ancient ruins of an alien civilization scattered across the surface of the world. Its volcanic ranges are long extinguished, the air is bone-dry, and plate tectonics have long since ceased. The world exists in a perpetual twilight: the star does not produce enough light for a true distinction between night and day. Alien constellations, seen through diaphanous sheets of gas blasted off the dying star, are occasionally blocked out of the twilight sky by dust storms.

Here, on a huge, dust-swept mesa overlooking the equatorial sea, has the USA built its last and ultimate refuge: a city of bunkers and geodesic domes, powered by its own fission generator, and stocked with enough supplies to last decades under stringent rationing. There is military hardware stockpiled as well: fighter jets and armored vehicles, and even air defense batteries with radars that perpetually scan the threatening alien skies, looking for foes that do not come, and perhaps have died eons ago.

There is a gate leading to XK-Masada, buried deep underneath the tidal basin of the Potomac in Washington D.C., opposite the Pentagon, which can be reached through an ancient network of tunnels carved beneath what is now the National Mall during the Civil War. There is a biometrically accessible basement in the Capitol, guarded by US Marines twenty-four hours a day. From it an electrified rail system leads through fortified concrete tunnels to an airlock, this time guarded by Activity personnel, which can be opened only with a specific twelve-digit alphanumerical code. The airlock is not actually an airlock but a self-contained pressure capsule: once the outer doors close, the capsule rumbles through the gate, to arrive - hopefully - at XK-Masada.

History
To publicly acknowledge the existence of XK-Masada would mean to be forced to explain the terrible research carried out between 1942 and 1968 by the CIA's Directorate of Science and Technology; research conducted under the code-name DOUBLE DREAM, a project denied and persecuted by consecutive US Governments who tried their desperate best to destroy all evidence of it. It would mean to acknowledge the existence of ancient gates linking Earth to alien worlds: gates that nobody knows how to create or destroy but the Precursors that built them -- and they are not talking. But most of all, it would mean to acknowledge the terrifying reality that humanity is not alone in the cosmos, and that most of the Others found out there are uncaring, inscrutable and horrifyingly alien at best, and actively malevolent world-ending forces at worst. And so, one by one, the file cabinets were burned, the tape drives melted, the scientists 'retired', until the second Kennedy government felt safe in its victory over the forces that had spawned that terrible knowledge.

And yet, XK-Masada remained. The Cold War was in full swing; the Soviets were rapidly closing the Missile Gap, and staring into the face of Armageddon even the most principled and steadfast politician would be hard-pressed to close his one surefire escape hatch from thermonuclear hell. And so predictably perhaps XK-Masada was deemed too useful to abandon. It was maintained, classified six levels beyond Top Secret, removed from the hands of a CIA that had lost the Secret War and what's more, removed from the national command structure itself. Control was handed to the United States Secret Service, and by extension the United States Department of Treasury, although knowledge of the existence of XK-Masada is unlikely to have ever extended beyond the USSS and into the Department of Treasury.

It remained under supervision of the Secret Service until the reorganizations of national defense carried out by the Reagan Administrations during the 1980s, when operational control over XK-Masada was transferred to the US Army Intelligence Support Activity. Shortly thereafter the Activity was itself removed from the national command structure, officially because they had been stood down from active status pending the outcome of consideration of the organization for inclusion in the next round of arms reduction talks between the Reagan and Zhadanova governments. Unofficially however the Activity had been transferred to the top-secret Special Access Program known as SPECCON – Special Conditions Command, a unified combatant command and umbrella organization for a number of deep cover groups raised and trained to combat 'anomalous activity'.

Secrecy
The people who know of this escape hatch number only in the low double digits: even so, most of them will think this is merely another bunker tucked away under Washington D.C. In case of nuclear war or another catastrophe virtually everyone in the US Government believes the President will board Air Force One, or relocate to an underground facility such as Mount Weather or Greenbrier Resort per the Continuity of Government Plan drawn up by the Pentagon (the details of which are itself classified). Even the President is not normally aware of the existence of XK-Masada; indeed, such is the secrecy that surrounds this place that the very codename is itself classified -- most top secret documents instead use the codewords 'Site Alpha' and 'Site Beta' for respectively the D.C.-site and extrasolar site. The number of people fully in the know about XK-Masada can be counted on two hands. Knowledge of this place is extremely restricted, existing only in the heads of cleared Activity personnel, a handful of remaining Secret Service agents, and in the archives of a clandestine CIA operation known solely as the 'Men in Black'.


Name and concept shamelessly stolen from inspired by Charles Stross' novella "A Colder War".
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Re: Countries, Regions and Locations

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I must say I found this article rather difficult to read. In that it told me lots about Masada's history who's jurisdiction it was under and so forth but I was struggling to pick out what it actually was. So its a serious of interdimensional portals going godknowswhere that the USSS have used to set up their own self containted' super last resort bunker?
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Re: Countries, Regions and Locations

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I've modified the article a bit so that it's nature is explained first and the history of the place second. To answer your question: yes, it's basically a Continuity of Government installation, except on another world. However it has only been that since the Secret Service took over, the CIA used it for, well, God knows what. It's now maintained by the Activity, who use it in a similar fashion as the USSS.
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Re: Countries, Regions and Locations

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XK-Masada was always oneo f those things I found kind of terrifying, simply because of the labyrinthine array of lies created to cover its existence. In a way, it seems a little like the US Government is hiding from its own creation. They don't want acknowledge what they've unlocked, don't want to acknowledge what the CIA found. In a sense, even though it is supposed to be for the Continuity of Government in face of Thermonuclear Ragnarok, I think using it is almost certainly a mistake.
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Re: Countries, Regions and Locations

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I can't express how happy I am with the retrieval of the following article, which was written way back when by Artemis and myself, but seems to have stood the test of time and canon-changes surprisingly well! It has everything: bloodshed, carrier battle groups, mujahedin and El Commandante!

The Persian Gulf: A Brief (But Violent) Recent History

The Persian Gulf Conflict Series, as it is called in the history books, has become one of the longest and multi-faceted conflicts in the latter half of the 20th Century, rivaling Korea as a poster-war for the ongoing conflict between NATO and the Warsaw Pact.

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A 1979 map of the Middle East, showing the pre-war borders.


First Gulf War, a.k.a. Operation: Grand Slam (September 1980-February 1987):
The Iraq-Iran War (as it was called at the time) started after the escalation of a heated dispute over key areas along the Iran-Iraq border. The progressive, pro-western Iraqis controlled a string of very profitable resource deposits (most prominently oil) and strategic areas in pockets along the border despite Iranian claims that the demarcation lines drawn up during decolonization put those areas firmly within Iran. Iraq's continued refusal to accept UN mediation on the issue, the heavy fortification of many of these pockets by the Royal Iraqi Army, the radicalizing Islamization of Iran and the view of Iraq by many in Iran as the inheritors of the British oppressors were all contributing factors to the outbreak of hostilities and later the particularly bloody nature of the war.

Western historians generally agree that although the Kingdom of Iraq that formally declared war upon the Islamic Republic of Iran, it was Iran which had at that point already touched off the conflict with border clashes along the border and the raiding Iraqi and Kuwaiti tankers in the Persian Gulf. So, these historians claim, Iraq only formalized what was already a de facto war. Many Arabic scholars on the other hand point out that it was the Kingdom of Iraq which had, through decades-long antagonism and its continuing militarization of the border with ever more high-tech western weapons, made the war an inevitability.

Whichever version you might put stock in, it was King Faisal III who officially declared war on September 20th, 1981, beginning with a bombardment of Iranian holdings in the south of the country, killing dozens of civilians though the Iraqis claimed to be targeting an Iranian military port. Ayatollah Khomeini ordered an immediate counter-attack, and called for Shi'a Muslims around the world to join Iran in destroying Iraq. However, the two countries soon proved equally matched with Iraq having more advanced technology and better-trained troops than Iran, whilst the Iranians vastly outnumbered the Iraqis, all the more from the ensuing Jihadi influx that arrived over the next month. Stalemate after stalemate bogged both forces down, with the Iraqis calling for help to NATO and the Iranians continuing to urge other Muslim nations to step in on their side.

Image
The cover of the October, 1981 issue of Time Magazine


For several years the war dragged on as a bloody stalemate, with whole sections of the Iran-Iraq border turning into a bloody reflection of the nightmares of the Somme: endless corpse-littered trenches, ceaseless artillery bombardments and, ultimately, the deployment of nerve gas and biological agents by the increasingly desperate Iraqi high command. But it was not the only the Iraqis who were growing desperate: despite promises of paradise after death and harsh punishment for deserters, the horrifying casualty rates on their side of the line caused Iranian morale to plummet like a broken freight elevator. Day after day, hundreds of Iranians died in the trenches: not just of bullets or Iraqi gas, but in equal numbers of the contagious diseases that plagued the ill-equipped Iranian front sectors.

After years of bloody fighting the war ultimately turned around in Iraq's favor when Iran targeted four America and two Saudi oil tankers over the course of two weeks coming into the Gulf to make dock in Kuwait. Thinking these freighters were bound for bound for Iraq, Iran justified their actions by claiming that the United States and their allies had been using oil tankers and other trade vehicles to smuggle weapons and WMD into Iraq. Although the Iranians were actually correct, President Reagan responded to the accusation with indignation and declared war on Iran, citing the loss of innocent life on the freighters moral reason to end the theocratic regime in Iran. The Soviet Union criticized this move as brash and opportunistic, but the Soviets had as much to gain by the volatile Iranians being pacified as the United States did and the new leader of the Union, Alexa Zhadanova, had little respect for the mullahs. So the Soviets stood idly by, maintaining only pre-existing weapon sales contracts and a few military advisers. The intervention proved decisive and the war was quickly over as two carrier battle groups (USS Robert Kennedy and USS Abraham Lincoln) steamed into the Gulf, deploying an aerial umbrella that tore through the Iranian lines like the fist of an angry god, pushing the Iranians back across all fronts. Faced with the prospect of an imminent joint Iraqi-American invasion, Iran had no choice but to surrender.

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One of the American freighters after the Iranian attack


Though many would have liked to see Revolutionary Iran removed from the picture of the Middle East, President Reagan realized that forcing an unwilling Iran into reforms would equal a new Versailles. Furthermore, Reagan was unwilling to deploy American troops on foreign soil if doing so didn't serve the benefits of the American people, and so the USA held back its forces. This further allowed Reagan to maintain the moral high ground; King Faisal III was 'convinced' (or rather, pressured quite forcibly) to accept Iran's terms, and many believed that the solution to this war, bloody as it might have been, was a good step toward stabilizing the Middle East.

Second Gulf War, a.k.a. Operation: Desert Storm, The Persian Gulf Revolutions, The Four Swords War (April 1990-July 1992):
Although their control of the country was not taken away, the theocratic regime of Iran was seriously destabilized by the aftermath of the war. After all, did not losing the war mean that Allah was not, in fact, with the mullahs? Loss of face was followed by a serious loss of control, riots, minor revolutions and eventually, in the summer of '89, a massive student revolution aimed at taking away power from the theocratic government and setting up a Westminster-style democracy or, as the other half of the revolution wished, a socialist democracy based on Zhadanovan make. Orignially non-violent, the revolution quickly turns ugly as the clerics unleash the Iranian Revolutionary Guard on the students, killing dozens and wounding hundreds more. The revolution seems repressed for weeks, but then turns out to have transformed into a guerilla movement that harrows the already weak clerical regime with a series of bomb and gunman attacks against military, police and governmental targets.

The Iranian intellectual revolutionaries receive support from an unusual corner: nationalistic students in Iraq turn to the streets en masse to demonstrate their moral support to their Iranian brethren. But what began as a simple movement with the desire to express sympathy to the Iranian revolutionaries slowly transmutes into a revolution of its own as radical elements of the Iraqi intelligentsia, already for some time deeply unsatisfied with the King and his authoritarian regime, gain control of the protests and turn them to the purpose of dethroning King Faisal and setting up a Westminster-style democracy. Several clashes with police and the Royal Iraqi Army lead to arrests, beatings, and eventually the death of sixteen students at the hands of soldiers claiming the students were throwing heavy articles of pottery in "an attempt to injure or kill soldiers and police." The so-called Baghdad University Shootings touched off responses world-wide, with the United States and Great Britain finally sending several diplomats to the region urging Faisal III and his ministers to reach a compromise with the students and salvage the peace in what quickly turned into a hotbed of international revolution.

But they were far too late. On March 5th, 1991, Ernesto "Che" Guevara announced his presence in the Iran-Iraq border regions, calling on all the factions of the revolution to band together to overthrow the corrupt regimes in either country. It is now strongly suspected that Guevara, easily one of the world's most renowned experts in guerrilla warfare and armed revolution, instigated at least a significant part of the Iranian revolution, and quite possibly had a hand in its Iraqi counterpart as well. Others claim he merely took control of the unruly mobs and shouldn't be given credit for all of the revolutionary mood sweeping the region; the truth is probably somewhere in-between, but Che still managed to unite what had originally been two separate movements with separate goals into a more or less unified neo-communist revolution almost overnight, supervised by the veteran revolutionary. Though creeping up into his sixties, Che continued to lead from the front. For a revolutionary and insurgent of Che's caliber, taking full advantage of fractures along socio-economical, tribal, ethnic and religious lines was a relatively simple matter, and within comparatively limited time he encouraged Sunni clerics, Kurdish rebels and even army group commanders to begin uprisings of their own.

Mere weeks after unveiling his presence, Guevara had turned the region into absolute chaos. With more police and army units splintering away every day to join various revolutionary factions and turncoats and infiltrators manifesting on every level of government, the situation in Iraq quickly proved far beyond the abilities of the authorities to control. On August 14th of 1991, with revolutionary brigades and turncoat soldiers marching into the outskirts of Baghdad, Faisal III flees to the British Embassy and from there goes into exile in Scotland on the advice of his ministers, there to plead for foreign assistance.

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Che announcing his bid to assist the Iraqi students in their revolution


Although the revolution began earlier, the situation in Iran was less harrowing for the clerics. A mercilessly brutal offensive had pressed the student guerrilla onto the defense and into Iran's northern provinces. Then, seeing Iraq critically weakened and on the verge of being taken over by the very blasphemous movement that was plaguing Iran's own countryside, opportunistically Ayatollah Khomeini ordered an invasion of his fracturing neighbor, again bringing with him Jihadis and other allies. Despite still having barely recovered from the horrors of the First Gulf War, Iranian troops began pouring into the disjointed border, easily defeating both the disheartened and thin-spread Iraqi military ad the spirited but unorganized revolutionaries, and made a bee-line for Baghdad. However, Iran's overzealousness would be its undoing - previously, the United States had been blocked in the UN by the Soviets from interfering from what was believed to be (despite the nature of the revolution) an internal Iraqi affair, whether one of America's Most Wanted was operating in the country or not. When Iran invaded, however, the Soviets no longer had any real reason to stall the Americans, and--although the Soviets put stringent limits on what his army was allowed to--once more President Reagan sent the military into the warzone, this time for a much more difficult conflict than they had faced in the first war.

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U.S. Marines landing at Bandar-Abbas, January 6th, 1992


The American entry into the war began with a marine invasion of Iraq, coupled with air and seaborne artillery strikes that knocked out several military bases and factories along the Iranian coast, slowing the Iranian push into Iraq. A series of maneuvers followed along the Iraqi coast and into the hinterland, destroying or capturing Iranian military bases along the way. Eventually, the American and hard-pressed Iraqi loyalist military forces met up in Al-Basrah, and started a campaign to secure southern and central Iraq and then lead an offensive into Iran. It is believed that contrary to Soviet demands a special CIA force was also dispatched to find and eliminate Che Gueverra, though no conclusive evidence of this plot exists to this day, and considering Che is still alive and free today even if this plot was hatched it obviously failed to accomplish its goals.

Meanwhile, Che himself could see the writing on the wall - he had spent a good deal of his life evading the CIA and other agencies in the South American rain forests, but war-torn Iraq provided less of such safety, and they clearly could not stand up to the combined military might of the Iraqi loyalists and the American military. Che and his revolutionaries in Iraq decided to withdraw north, into the provinces held by Kurdish peshmerga. With him came whatever remained of his coalition of former generals, socialist revolutionaries and Sunni guerillas. What happened next, no one is certain if Che had planned or not, but would vastly change the landscape of the Middle East up to the present day. With the revolutionary element apparently in a strategic retreat the American general staff decided to first concentrate on routing the Iranian forces in Iraq. This allowed the revolutionaries to settle down and link up with their brethren in northern Iran, forming a unified front broadly along the edges of what was claimed by the Kurds as a to-be independent Kurdistan. There, appealing to agrarian townsfolk and moderate Muslims as well as the intellectual base and the Ayatollahs' rivals, Che began to cement his transnational revolutionary coalition, forging a single movement incorporating dispossessed moderate Shi'ite, nationalist Kurds, renegade Iraqi army personnel, neo-communist guerillas, republican intelligentsia and student revolutionaries, using a unique mixture of populism and Zhadanovan socialism to cement his unlikely coalition. And with most of the armed forces on either side of the Iran-Iraq border tied up fighting each other, neither Americans nor Iranians could spare the military force to dislodge them.

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The cover of the July, 1991 issue of Time Magazine


From the late winter of 1991 to the spring of 1992, the three-sided war between Royal Iraq and their American allies, the revolutionaries led by Che, and the Ayatollahs' forces continued. Steadily, Iraq began to regain composure as the revolutionaries withdrew and by April ' 92 Iraq had pushed the front back to the pre-war borders, but a four-week conflict between Iraq and Syria over a Syrian airliner shot down accidentally by Iraqi air defense caused significant damage to the peacemaking process. Meanwhile, the northern regions of both Iran and Iraq continued to remain unruly - even as the Iranian military and police were fighting revolutionaries in the very streets of Tehran, more and more Jihadis, primarily from Afghanistan and Pakistan, had joined the conflict in an attempt to keep an Islamic nation from falling to communist rule, and were continuing to add fuel to the fire, as the ideologies of revolutionary communism and fundamentalist Islam clashed head-on at the edges of revolutionary-controlled territory. Meanwhile, the Turkish military stepped up its presence in southern Turkey to prevent Kurds there from joining their brethren across the border in establishing their own territory. This proved much harder than the Turks expected, as Che's Revolutionary Army had preciously little regard for the sanctity of Turkey's national borders. It is theorized that many members of al-Qaeda took part in this struggle, and certain is that the terrorist organization WRAITH, then in its infancy, made most of its start-up fortune selling arms to all sides of the struggle.

In early 1992, Che publicly requested support from other communist countries, something he made clear he felt he shouldn't have to ask for. Urged on by their Cuban allies and after a heated debate in the Duma Premier Zhadanova for the first (and last) time in her career authorized the deployment of Soviet troops to hostile foreign territory with the argument that Che's enclave was de-facto Soviet territory and that the Soviet Union therefore owed him their allegiance and help as part of the International Worker's Struggle. Although this later turned out to be a historic and much-applauded decision by Warsaw Pact historians, is believed that the notoriously isolationist Zhadanova would have rather stayed out of the conflict for fear of escalation, a military fiasco and the belief that the Soviet military, which was still undergoing reformations, was not yet ready for a foreign action such as this.

Mere days later the first Soviet armored divisions rolled across the border of Azerbaijan and into revolutionary territory. Spetznaz special forces air-dropped into Afghanistan and Soviet elements contracted around the Turkmenistan border in the east. The Western world shit a collective brick: after so many years of isolationism few had believed the Soviet Union would actually come to the aid of Guevara. The United States protested the deployment but in a world-famous six-word declaration in front of the Security Council, Alexa Zhadanova responded to the protests by telling Republican president Miles Warren to his face to "Mister President, compromise or shut up”. More than anything else it is this quote, replayed over and over on CNN and every other news network, that is widely believed to have cost Warren his second term.

With Zhadanova utterly unwilling to withdraw her advancing armored elements as long as the Americans did not do exactly the same and fearful that a head-on collision of Soviet and American military forces might spark off a much larger conflict, the two governments reached a zero-interference agreement that provided for both nations to pull out of the war zone entirely. This agreement has often been compared to that reached decades earlier by John F. Kenney and Nikita Kruschev during the Cuban Missile Crisis, but where Kennedy was often recognized as the moral victor then, the mutual withdrawal from the Iran-Iraq is commonly perceived to be a victory on the part of Zhadanova and a stinging defeat for Warren, who at home was often accused of running with his tail between his legs at the first sight of Soviet armor. In the general elections only a few months later he would be crushingly defeated by Democratic nominee William "Bill" Clinton.

Without further aid of their American allies the Kingdom proved unable of taking the fight into Iran, and faced with technologically superior Iraqi forces the Iranian military was unable to truly take the fight to the revolutionary stronghold in the north. Guevara's forces were at that stage unable to form a coherent military front on either side of the border, but proved sufficient of a threat that neither Iraq nor Iran could ignore. Finally in July of '92 British and Norwegian diplomats were able to broker a cease-fire between the three warring parties. King Faisal III returned to Iraq in August, though he was forced to agree to a series of constitutional reforms that limited his power.

Ayatollah Khomeini never saw the end of the war, as the aircraft transporting him back to Teheran from a conference with mujahedin leaders in Bazman was shot down by revolutionary insurgents in november of '91. A similar unfortunate fate had befallen several of the old hardliner clerics (this is generally not believed to have been a coincidence), and at the end of the war the Iranian government was formed around a set of progressive moderates who had risen to fill up the void left by the hardliners.

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Russian Spetznaz during deployment to the Iran-Afghanistan border


Third Gulf War, a.k.a. Operation: Desert Shield, New October, Tehran Storm (October 1999-March 2001):
The end of the Second Gulf War might have been considered a victory for Zhadanova (who resigned a month after the signing of the peace and was succeeded by Mikhail Gorbachov); it was nonetheless clear that its ultimate result was highly unsatisfactory to all involved. Iraq and Iran lost significant chunks of territory to the revolutionaries, and although they had their independent zone the revolutionaries had to settle for less than they had aimed for. It shouldn't have been much of a surprise to anyone that the Third Gulf War was considered by many to be little more than a continuation war.

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Royal Iraqi Air Force F-15E Strike Eagles are readied for take-off during the initial stages of Desert Shield.


In October of 1999 three Al-Faisal SCUD missiles carrying a deadly nerve gas payload fell onto Tehran, killing thousands of civilians. Iran almost immediately declares war upon the Kingdom of Iraq, which is the only nation in the region to deploy such missiles. It is only when the Third Gulf War is already well underway that Mossad agents, aided by Western intelligence agencies, discover that the terror organization WRAITH is responsible for the attacks. With the war apparently having been caused by the Kingdom its Western allies are unwilling to throw their weight in, so in its initial stages the war rapidly bogged down in the sort of familiar gruelling trench warfare that had characterized the Iran-Iraq conflicts from the get-go.

However despite the best efforts of the moderate leaders of Iran their severely weakened nation cannot sustain the war effort for very long, and the economy of Iran implode after several months of fighting, leading to internal turmoil. Then in January of 2000 Guevara once more turns up in the Gulf region, making a proclamation from Soviet Kurdistan, encouraging revolutionaries and reformers alike to once again attempt to throw off the shackles of Western imperialism.

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Reports of his demise turned out to be greatly exaggerated


In the following months Kurdish communists manage to take several cities in northern Iran, further weakening the regime in Tehran, which causes the war-tired country to pretty much splinter at the seams. The rest of the war is more a protracted peace-keeping operation by Iraqi, loyalist Iranian, Soviet and later Western forces within the rapidly disintegrating state of Iran than it is an actual war. The country is eventually stabilized after Soviet and Western peace keepers are simultaneously deployed in tightly delineated 'sectors', an euphemistic term for spheres of influence.

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Many American soldiers who fought in Desert Shield were already veterans of Desert Storm.
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Re: Countries, Regions and Locations

Post by Magister Militum »

Jesus Christ, Will Che EVER DIE!?! :D

This is a great little gem you have here Siege. Given my own penchant for delightfully complex political escapades, you definitely caught my attention.
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Re: Countries, Regions and Locations

Post by Shroom Man 777 »

Awesome. Though, yeah, without the Tri-Service whatevery-whatever, what on Earth are those F-15Es doing there? :P

Che Guevara, Guerrillero Heroico! Badass! I loved it when he appealed to the Soviet nations and the Red Witch ended up coming to back him up with everything from Spetznaz to tank hordes and telling alternate-universe goatee George H.W. Bush to shut his pie hole!
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Re: Countries, Regions and Locations

Post by Siege »

Shroom Man 777 wrote:Awesome. Though, yeah, without the Tri-Service whatevery-whatever, what on Earth are those F-15Es doing there? :P
Used to be that the F-15, F-16, etc. were designations for export aircraft the USA didn't use itself. Nowadays... I'm not so sure about that.
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Re: Countries, Regions and Locations

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The Moon

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The Moon, as seen from Earth.


The Moon is Earth's only natural satellite and the fifth largest satellite in the Solar System. At an approximate distance of 378,000 kilometres from the Earth the Moon is also one of the very closest celestial objects – close enough for its orbit around the Earth to cause ocean tides to rise and fall and for its passage through the heavens to inspire a thousand mythologies in primitive people. The Moon has been the subject of many works of art and literature and the inspiration for countless others. In many prehistoric and ancient cultures, the Moon was thought to be a deity or other supernatural phenomenon, and astrological views of the Moon continue to be propagated today.

By the Middle Ages, before the invention of the telescope, an increasing number of people began to recognise the Moon as a sphere, though they believed that it was "perfectly smooth". In 1609, Galileo Galilei drew one of the first telescopic drawings of the Moon in his book Sidereus Nuncius and noted that it was not smooth but had mountains and craters. Later in the 17th century, Giovanni Battista Riccioli and Francesco Maria Grimaldi drew a map of the Moon and gave many craters the names they still have today. But it wasn't until the late-19th century that mankind began to contemplate the idea of actually going there. In his 1865 novel From Earth to the Moon the Frenchman Jules Verne proposed launching humans to the Moon using a giant space gun. In 1893 the Russian Konstantin Tsiolkovsky wrote On the Moon, one of the earliest stories about human occupation of the moon, something which by the 1950s had become one of science-fiction's most prevalent themes.

The idea that humans might at some point visit the moon wasn't the exclusive providence of fiction writers either. As technology advanced, and concerns about the future of humanity on Earth increased, the argument that space colonization was an achievable and worthwhile goal gained momentum. And as the Cold War heated up, governments in both the East and the West were beginning to think about space, and by extension the Moon, as the ultimate high ground, a place from where bombs and missiles could be lobbed at earthly opponents. Those very same governments simultaneously feared their opponents beating them to that high ground, knowing anyone would be hard-pressed to defend against such an attack.

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The Apollo 1 crew, from left to right, Roger Chaffee, Ed White and Gus Grissom.


In the first half of the 1960s both the Soviet Union and the United States rapidly put a large number of humans into space. In the space of a mere couple of years rockets developed from hastily jerry-rigged MRBMs barely capable of throwing a single micro-satellite into LEO to dedicated boosters that could put thousands of kilograms into space – and indeed capsules capable of sustaining the life of humans for prolonged periods of time. Space technology developed at a relentless pace. And when the Soviet Union on 12 April 1961 put the first human into outer space, everyone on Earth knew that the Race for the Moon was on.


The Soviets

In January 1956 the Soviet Union first approved plans for Earth-orbiting satellites to gain knowledge of space (Sputnik), and four unmanned military reconnaissance satellites (Zenit). Further planned developments called for a manned Earth orbit flight by 1964 and an unmanned lunar mission at an earlier date. Khrushchev was a firm believer in the space program, and under his leadership the Soviets developed the Vostok spacecraft which could be used both as two-man capsules and as spy satellites, as well as the subsequent Voskhod series. The Soviets went on to achieve remarkable early successes, launching the first animal into space (the dog Laika on Sputnik 2), followed quickly by the first human (Yuri Gagarin on Vostok 1) and, in 1959, achieved the first moon impact with the Luna 2 probe.

Unfortunately for the Soviets, despite these remarkable initial successes the Soviet space program remained tied to the USSR's Five-Year Plans. This made it difficult for the Chief Designers to respond in 1961 to the US launching a crash program for a manned lunar landing, as the next five-year plan would not start until 1964. Centralized planning and the concentration on production targets also made it difficult for middle management and engineers to highlight defects in equipment. Fierce internal competition between design bureaus also impeded the progress of the Soviet space program, because designers were loathe to share breakthroughs in rocket technology with their competitors, whose headstrong leaders were unlikely to accept such help even if it had been available in the first place.

As a result, by the mid-1960s the Soviet Union's lead in space had all but evaporated and the USA seemed poised to overtake the USSR in the race for the moon. Unwilling to let such a thing happen, one of the first acts Leonid Brezhnev undertook as General Secretary of the Communist Party after Khrushchev's party colleagues removed him from power in 1964 was to order the consolidation of all USSR design bureaus working on the space program under a single Ministry of Science and Technology. At its head the Supreme Soviet appointed the relatively unknown but undoubtedly brilliant head of the OKB-7 design bureau, a female aerospace engineer named Alexa Zhadanova. This decision would eventually be Brezhnev's undoing, but that was yet two decades away.

Under Zhadanova's iron rule the efforts of the design bureaus were focused, concepts and secrets were shared and those engineers who proved incapable of appreciating the new management were redeployed to factories in northern Siberia. Despite protests from Sergei Koryolov's OKB-1 the N1-L3 moon rocket was scrapped as 'impractical' and 'unlikely to work'. Instead the Soviets now focused on the super-heavy UR-700 Lune rocket designed by Vladimir Chelomei. In its original form, the first stage of the three-stage UR-700 rocket would consist of eight rocket stages, clustered around the second stage. Each booster was equipped with a single RD-270 engine. The second and third stage of the rocket used components developed for the UR-500 Proton launcher. The first and second stages of the rocket would ignite at takeoff.

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The UR-500 Proton rocket was the workhorse of the early Soviet space program.


The UR-700 was ready for launch in the early months of 1968, and was used in January and February to launch unmanned probes that circumnavigated the moon, taking a series of pictures that would be used to determine where a manned capsule was to land. Over the course of the same year the Soyuz 7K-L3 LOK (Lunniy Orbitalny Korabl, Lunar Orbit Craft) and LK lander were successfully tested in low earth orbit, and a crew of elite Cosmonauts under the command of the second human in space, Colonel Gherman S. Titov, were being trained to flawlessly execute a manned mission to the moon. But at the same time and an ocean away, the Mercury and Apollo programs of the United States had evolved along similar lines, and after several successful launches the crew of Apollo 11 were similarly readying themselves for a manned landing on the moon. It was quite clear that, excepting a catastrophic failure during one of the two missions, whoever would arrive first would beat the other by a margin of at best months, and perhaps as little as mere weeks.

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Flight stages of the UR-700 Lune moon rocket.



The Americans

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President John F. Kennedy ordered a crash expansion of the US space program.


The NASA spaceflight endeavour that was to carry the first Americans to the Moon was conceived during the presidency of Dwight Eisenhower, but didn't begin in earnest until after John F. Kennedy had taken office. On 25 May 1961 Kennedy announced his support for a manned moon landing, famously promising that the USA would be “landing a man on the Moon” by the end of the decade.

Although the USA had recently begun to fall behind the Soviet Union, it nevertheless had a significant technological base to build upon. Project Mercury, the NASA program that would put the first Americans in space, was already well underway. And the US Army Ballistic Missile Agency was in the first stages of developing 'Project Horizon', a plan to construct a military base on the Moon.

By the mid-1960s Project Mercury had finished successfully and NASA had launched – quite literally in this case – its successor, Project Gemini. Unlike Mercury, which could only change its orientation in space, the Gemini spacecraft could translate in all six directions, and alter its orbit. It was designed to dock with the Agena Target Vehicle, which had its own large rocket engine which was used to perform large orbital changes. It was the first manned American spacecraft to include an onboard computer. It was also unlike previous NASA craft in that it used ejection seats, in-flight radar and an artificial horizon - devices borrowed from the aviation industry.

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Gemini 6 views Gemini 7


NASA successfully completed its first rendezvous mission with two Gemini spacecraft - Gemini VII and Gemini VI - in December 1965. This was an instrumental step toward eventually landing a man on the moon, because NASA (much like the Soviets) had decided on a Lunar Orbit Rendezvous type mission. This meant that one Saturn V would launch a spacecraft that was composed of modular parts. A command module would remain in orbit around the moon, while a lunar module would descend to the moon and then return to dock with the command module while still in lunar orbit. In contrast with the other plans, LOR required only a small part of the spacecraft to land on the Moon, thereby minimizing the mass to be launched from the Moon's surface for the return trip.

After 10 successful flights, the Gemini program clearly placed the United States in the lead over the Soviet Union, who were at that time still ironing out the design of what would become the Soyuz 7K-L3. The first manned Apollo flight (Apollo 7) took place on 11 October, 1968. By the summer of that year it became clear to program managers that a fully functional lunar module would not be available for the Apollo 8 mission. Rather than perform a simple earth orbiting mission, they chose to send Apollo 8 around the moon during Christmas, a direct response to the piloted Zond mission (a Soyuz 7K-L1 spacecraft) the Soviets sent around the moon weeks earlier.

Between December 21, 1968 and May 18, 1969, NASA launched three Apollo missions (8, 9, and 10) using the Saturn V launch vehicle. In the same time the Soviets launched two missions (Zond 6 and Zond 1969A) using the Proton UR-700. Come March 1969 it was clear that it was a matter of months before the first man would set foot on the moon, but it was still very much up in the air whether that man would be an American or a Russian.

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The Apollo 11 mission blasts off atop a Saturn V rocket.


As it turned out, fortune favoured the Americans. On 21 February, 1969 a severe thunderstorm rolled over Kazakhstan, which damaged the UR-700 launch pad at Baikonur Cosmodrome, necessitating repair work that inevitably postponed the Soviet mission into space. On July 16, 1969 the Apollo 11 mission departed Earth for the Moon. President William Childs Westmoreland from the Oval Office watched how on July 19 at 17:21:50 UTC, Apollo 11 passed behind the Moon and fired its service propulsion engine to enter lunar orbit. In the thirty orbits that followed, the crew saw passing views of their landing site in the southern Sea of Tranquility (Mare Tranquillitatis) about 20 kilometers (12 mi) south-west of the crater Sabine D. It was July 20 when the Eagle lunar module separated from the Columbia command module and the two-man lander began its descent toward the lunar surface.

Throughout the descent Buzz Aldrin had called out navigation data to Neil Armstrong, who was busy piloting the LM. A few moments before the landing, a light informed Aldrin that at least one of the 67-inch probes hanging from Eagle's footpads had touched the surface, and he said "Contact light!". Three seconds later, Eagle landed and Armstrong said "Shutdown". Aldrin immediately said "Okay, engine stop. ACA - out of detent." Armstrong acknowledged "Out of detent. Auto" and Aldrin continued "Mode control - both auto. Descent engine command override off. Engine arm - off. 413 is in." Charles Duke, acting as CAPCOM during the landing phase, acknowledged their landing by saying "We copy you down, Eagle".

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The Eagle lander approaches the lunar surface.


Armstrong continued with the remainder of the post landing checklist, "Engine arm is off." before responding to Duke with the famous words, "Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed." Armstrong's abrupt change of call sign from "Eagle" to "Tranquility Base" caused momentary confusion at Mission Control and Duke remained silent for a couple of seconds before replying: "Roger, Twank...Tranquility, we copy you on the ground. You got a bunch of guys about to turn blue. We're breathing again. Thanks a lot!" expressing the relief of Mission Control after an unexpectedly drawn-out descent.

At 02:39 UTC on Monday July 21 (10:39pm EDT, Sunday July 20), 1969, Armstrong opened the hatch, and at 02:51 UTC began his descent to the Moon's surface. Climbing down the nine-rung ladder, Armstrong at 02:56 UTC (10:56pm EDT) set his left foot on the surface. Despite some technical and weather difficulties, ghostly black and white images of the first lunar EVA were received and broadcast to at least 600 million people on Earth mere minutes later. After describing the surface dust ("fine and almost like a powder"), Armstrong stepped off Eagle's footpad and into history as the first human to set foot on another world. It was then that he uttered his famous line "That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind" six and a half hours after landing. Aldrin joined him, describing the view as "Magnificent desolation."

The crew of Apollo 11 had fulfilled John F. Kennedy's mandate to land a man on the moon before the end of the 1960s, and in doing so had beaten the Soviets to Earth's satellite, a fact that Brezhnev grudgingly accepted and confirmed a day later, when he congratulated the Americans with their “exceptional achievement for all mankind.”

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The 1970s: Colonization

The Americans had scored a massive PR coup by beating the Soviets to the Moon, but the fact of the matter was that both nations realized the race was far from over. The Soviet mission ended up being postponed nearly two months in order to have a crew of Russian and Ukrainian cosmonauts land in the Mare Nubium (Sea of Clouds) on 25 October 1969, the fifty-second anniversary of the October Revolution. After leaving a flag of the USSR and a copy of the complete works of Lenin on the moon, the crew of Colonel Gherman S. Titov returned to Earth, leaving the Moon once again void of human life.

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Soyuz 7K-L3 LOK with docked LK moon lander, shortly before Titov's departure toward the lunar surface.


The moon would not stay quiet for long however. Believing the moon to be the next theatre where the USA would vie with the USSR for influence, President William Westmoreland, a retired four-star general responsible for the successful suppression of the Vietnam insurgency by American, French and Vietnamese forces, gave the green light for Project Horizon, saying that, “our country must fulfil its commitment to the Moon. By virtue of the Moon, the U.S. can hold the line on the ultimate high ground for 10 years and can stop the dominoes from falling in outer space.”

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Col. Titov plants the Soviet flag on the moon.


Project Horizon had first been proposed by the Army Ballistic Missile Agency, which had since ceased to exist. The ABMA had first been folded into US Army Missile Command, but under influence of Vice-President Curtis LeMay, a former SAC commander, the Strategic Air Command had become the principal agency responsible for the ballistic missiles and orbital operations of the US Military. The Horizon Project as approved by the Westmoreland administration in January 1970 was for a military base in the Mare Imbrium region of the Moon. The base, ferried to its ultimate location by Saturn V heavy lift rockets and their planned Nova successor, would consist of half-buried cylindrical metal tanks and would be powered by two compact portable nuclear reactors. Empty cargo and propellant containers would be assembled and used for storage of bulk supplies, weapons, and life essentials. The base would be defended against Soviet overland attack by man-fired weapons: unguided rockets with low-yield nuclear warheads and conventional claymore mines modified to puncture pressure suits. Provisions were made for the defences to include, eventually, a battery of modified Nike-Hercules surface-to-air missiles.

Such defences might seem excessive in hindsight, but at the time the Soviets under Brezhnev were obviously aiming to develop their own moon base as well, and considering that under the confrontational and aggressively militarist Westmoreland administration the USSR and USA at several points came very close to nuclear war, American and Soviet fears of being outmatched in outer space were not as far-fetched as they might seem in retrospect. Westmoreland and LeMay did everything to ensure they had a military lead in space, even going as far as to incorporate NASA as a part of the military – a decision that would not be reversed until the Carnegie administration did so in 1978.

That is not to say the Soviets weren't equally aggressive: under leadership of Alexa Zhadanova the Ministry of Space & Technology was pushing the envelope of heavy lift vehicles, pioneering the UR-700-11B. This variant of the heavy Lune lifter rocket deployed a nuclear thermal upper stage which produced over 4,000 megawatts of thermal energy and could be used to lift much larger payloads to the Moon. The Soviet adoption of nuclear propulsion for space lift caused NASA to introduce a NERVA nuclear propulsion stage for its new Nova lifter rocket.

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Comparison between Saturn V heavy lifter and its Nova successor.


By the mid-1970s both the Soviets and Americans had landed multiple crews on the moon, and the next generation of super-heavy lifter rockets required to economically build and maintain a semi-permanent base on the moon had finally become available. These new rockets dwarfed all other previous rockets in both size and payload capacity, with both Nova and later UR-700 models boasting a lunar payload capability in the 48 – 75 ton range. Both designs used conventional chemical rockets to lift the rocket beyond Earth's atmosphere, before engaging a nuclear upper stage that pushed the payload into lunar orbit.

There were small differences in the American and Soviet approach to the moon base construction however. The Americans, who landed the first sections of their Horizon base in the Mare Imbrium in 1977, would use a Nova rocket to deliver a manned mission to lunar orbit. Once there, the rocket's payload section would detach and land on the surface, leaving a manned command module (including the thermal drive) in orbit. A small crew could then install the first modules of a lunar base on the surface, before returning to the command vehicle much like the astronauts and cosmonauts of earlier moon landings had done. Each consecutive mission to expand the base was manned, until the base became operational in late 1978.

The Soviets meanwhile used a large rocket to push a Salyut 5 (OPS-3) military space station of the Almaz series into orbit around the moon. This space station acted as an orbital base and fuel depot for cosmonauts. A sequence of smaller, unmanned rockets then delivered the pieces of the moon base to the Salyut station, from which they were deorbited by the cosmonauts. The Soviet approach was more expensive, but it had the advantage of both giving the Soviets a temporary base in orbit around the Moon as well as allowing cosmonauts to remain in the lunar vicinity longer than their American counterparts. The Soviet base in the Mare Nubium became operational in January of 1979, and was named Zvezda (Star). Unlike the Americans the Soviets had opted for solar panels as the primary source of power for their base.

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Zvezda base, ca. 1978


These early moon bases were a far cry from the sprawling complexes that would gradually form around them in the decades to follow. They were pressurized metal cylinders barely a few meters wide and long, and could house only a handful of astronauts for a limited amount of time. Compared to the early landers however they were a massive step forward, and they had the advantage of modular design, allowing these primitive bases to be rapidly and easily expanded.

The two first moon bases, Horizon and Zvezda, were located in relatively close proximity to each other. Horizon sat on the southern ridge of the Lambert crater in the Mare Imbrium, and Zvezda was built near the Reinhold crater in the Mare Nubium. Whilst not exactly in driving distance, this did mean that spacecraft from both nations in orbit around the moon would practically overfly each other's facilities. This might appear a potential source of tension between the two superpowers, but the bases were purposely constructed in close proximity to one another: despite the rapid development of space technology both nations were aware that they were pushing the envelope at a breakneck pace, and that there was a very real possibility of something going dramatically wrong on one of their missions. If such a thing were to happen it was unlikely that help could arrive from Earth in time, Earth at this point in time still being a very long way away from the Moon. Despite the sometimes violent rhetoric exhorted by the political leaders of both nations there was a mutual understanding between the leaders of respectively the American and Soviet space programs that in case of serious trouble the other side would make an attempt to come to the rescue of their fellow astronauts.

This informal understanding was put to use two times in the early 1980s. The first time was when the manoeuvring rocket of a Soyuz capsule misfired and stranded its crew of cosmonauts in the Sea of Tranquility in 1981: the American crew of an orbital Aurora capsule managed a successful unmanned de-orbit of their Eagle lander, which returned the cosmonauts to the Salyut 7 station in orbit around the Moon. It was a massive publicity coup by the Americans (much to the chagrin of the Soviet leadership).

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A Soyuz 7K-T/A9 (Soyuz 27) capsule crashed in the Sea of Tranquility


The Soviets repaid the favour however when a year later an electrical malfunction caused a fire aboard the Horizon base. In the hyper-oxygenated atmosphere of the base the fire spread incredibly rapidly, consuming a large amount of the base's oxygen reserves and destroying two modules before the astronauts aboard the station managed to seal themselves away in the remaining two modules. After transmitting an emergency broadcast the Soviet Union dispatched a Cosmos lander to extract the astronauts to the Salyut station.

Although neither resulted in any fatalities, the two incidents illustrated several of the problems spawned by the space race. First of all there was no standardized docking mechanism yet, which caused serious problems especially for the Soviet cosmonauts retrieved by an American lander – they had to perform an extremely dangerous untethered space-walk in order to get from the American lander to the Soviet station in lunar orbit, because neither could dock with the other. And the American astronauts retrieved from the damaged Horizon base had to travel back to Earth in a Soviet capsule for much the same reason, much to the embarrassment of the American government. This issue was resolved in 1985 when the Soviet Union and United States signed the Intercosmos Treaty, which – amongst other things – standardized docking hatches and final approach electronics.

The Americans also realized that the Soviet space station in lunar orbit, whilst cramped and small and uncomfortable, was a huge advantage in terms of ease of transit from Earth to the Moon. The following years would see an American endeavour to develop a similar capability.

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Horizon Base, ca. 1984.
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Re: Countries, Regions and Locations

Post by Magister Militum »

Hmm, so does this mean that if they are indeed separated by as little as a few weeks the American's might run into the Soviets on the moon? And how would that confrontation work out? :)
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Re: Countries, Regions and Locations

Post by Siege »

Assuming they landed right next to each other, I'd sooner expect handshakes and congratulations than shooting incidents to be honest. Sort of how Soviet bomber crews waved happily at the American jet pilots who intercepted them, before zooming away over the Bering Strait. After all, hysterical Cold War paranoiacs who obsess about bodily fluids and the evils of communism probably make for poor astronauts ;).
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Re: Countries, Regions and Locations

Post by Siege »

Updated with the second part, "the Americans". I know we said before that the Soviets beat the Americans to the moon but frankly that would be cutting them old Reds too much slack. Besides, Apollo 11 might very well be the most awesome thing humanity ever did, so I'm keeping it pretty much as-is.
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Re: Countries, Regions and Locations

Post by Shroom Man 777 »

Awesomesauces, mangoes.

It WOULD be awesome to have some Strangelove-like affair on the moon, though. With one particularly loopy astronaut developing space-dementia and going Moonbeam on us, as he looks out of his moon base's windows, sees the communists on the opposing moon base on the other side, and starts imagining all sorts of paranoid delusions about what the perfidious commies are SCHEMING and PLOTTING on the other side. Then, in his derangement, he pilots the Lunar Rover and starts trying to run over communists... ON THE MOON!
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