The artillery fell so fast and hard it sounded like the roar of a storm and an earthquake even though the bunker was buried 30 feet down. “Give me Taipei before our comm links get cut!”
Within seconds, the signal corpsman handed him a phone. He had raised Army Command in Taipei. “This is Brigadier General Mao on Hsiao Quemoy. We are under heavy bombardment. We are returning counter battery fire. We are preparing to receive an enemy amphibious assault.”
“Understood, stand-by, General Ming wants to…” In a loud crack of static, the line went dead.
General Mao was now left alone to face what he was sure was the first Chinese landing attempt on Nationalist soil since 1949.
21
War
Two Chinese M-11 missiles roared skyward from two launch sites in coastal China. One flew in the direction of northern Taiwan, the other, the southern half of the island.
Taiwan’s missile defense network picked up the incoming missiles three minutes after launch and a few seconds later they determined the launch points and the aim points. Taiwan’s air defense officers were pleased to see that the missiles would impact into the Pacific Ocean well to the east of Taiwan. Clearly, these missiles were intended to intimidate, not damage, just like the Chinese missiles fired into the sea in March 1996. The officers ordered the Patriot surface-to-air missile batteries to a state of alert and passed word of the Chinese launch up the chain of command to the civilian authorities.
In the space of two milliseconds, the People’s Republic of China had tied the previous record for the use of atomic weaponry in combat set by the United States in 1945. Then, as now, the nuclear bombs were used against nations that held no countervailing deterrent.
Unlike the crude bombs used over Japan, however, these bombs were not designed to kill people, vaporize military equipment or crush buildings. These bombs, painstakingly built from plans stolen from America ten years before, were specifically designed to minimize the three traditional destructive components of atomic weapons: thermal energy, blast, and radiation. Instead, these weapons produced a highly concentrated and extremely brief pulse of electro-magnetic energy. This electro-magnetic pulse (EMP) effect didn’t even interest the original users of the A-bomb in 1945. But, in 21st Century, the effects of an EMP burst would prove devastating to a modern society, its military machine, and, most importantly, its national command authority.
Using the highly accurate time signal from the U.S. Global Positioning System (GPS) satellites, the warheads were set to go off within milliseconds of each other at an altitude of 100 miles to deliver a crippling blow to the electronics below for a diameter of 200 miles.
The bombs were extremely specialized, but not especially complex nuclear ordnance. Their nuclear efficiency wasn’t very high — when detonating, they left a fair amount of nuclear fuel unburned. The bombs worked on a simple principle: convert the energy of a nuclear explosion into a highly focused unidirectional cone of electromagnetic energy.
A standard nuclear bomb is composed of a sphere of conventional explosives encircling the nuclear material. The explosives are carefully designed to rapidly compress the fissionable material into a dense critical mass to trigger a self-sustaining and explosive nuclear chain reaction.
The nuclear-driven E-bomb was different; it had an atypical arrangement of explosive lenses encircling its fissionable material — much like an upside-down fluted glass. The explosive part of the bomb was itself surrounded by two coils of an alloy of platinum and depleted uranium. Each coil was embedded within a non-conductive composite ceramic and Kevlar epoxy case, itself within a tube of super hardened steel.
The bomb’s detonation cycle began with a sudden electrical current surging through the coils from a capacitor. At the peak of electrical discharge and concurrent magnetic energy generated by the coils, the bomb began its detonation. Explosives at the closed end of the upside-down glass started to compress the Uranium 235, beginning a chain reaction. Within nanoseconds, the explosive ring fired downward, sending a shock wave of compression into the fissionable material just ahead of the spreading nuclear reaction. The material was held in place long enough (a few nanoseconds) by the plate at the bottom, so that it did not fly apart until it had accomplished its purpose.
This carefully timed directional nuclear blast multiplied the electrical and magnetic forces in the surrounding coils 10,000 times over, creating what engineers call an explosively pumped flux compression generator. Each coil was tuned to produce a desired frequency to maximize destruction of the intended target systems. The resulting electromagnetic shock wave raced downward in a focused cone, destroying most things electrical in its path.
The damage inflicted by the nuclear driven E-bombs was similar to the damage from a nearby lightning strike. Commercial computers, aircraft avionics, the civilian electrical grid and especially anything connected to an antenna were damaged. Interestingly, many transmitters, especially radars, continued to operate; however, without a functional radar receiver or computer to display the information, the transmitter was useless.
To protect their own systems, the Chinese had taken simple precautions. They were highly confident the E-bombs would perform as the engineers and scientists said they would, only producing a cone of electronic destruction aimed at Taiwan. Just in case, however, military electronics were turned off just before the detonation. Batteries were disconnected from devices. Antennas were disconnected as well. Radios and computers were wrapped in aluminum foil. Submarines stayed submerged.
Ironically, old, vacuum tube-based electronics were relatively immune to the effects of EMP. Thus, many of the older Chinese military systems were hardened to EMP by virtue of their “obsolete” design even as the newer commercial hardware they often interfaced with, such as GPS navigation modules, were not.
To minimize any potential damage to the civilian infrastructure, the power grid for southeast China was blacked out five minutes before the detonations. The energy from the blasts was tightly focused. There was no collateral damage to Mainland China.
A few civil aircraft, both Chinese and foreign, inadvertently fell victim as well. These were counted as regrettable and unavoidable losses of war. To be safe, key officials were kept out of aircraft near the danger zone.
Chinese policy planners had pondered long and hard about engaging in what some thought amounted to nuclear war. They decided that the United States would not respond for three reasons — first, the E-bombs would produce no direct civilian casualties; second, Chinese ICBMs and its one nuclear missile submarine could threaten American cities; and third, there would probably be no damage to U.S. military forces, especially its space assets. Regarding the latter, the Chinese knew that most U.S. military satellites were carefully hardened against EMP. If the E-bombs focused their energy downward, with any luck, the U.S. would lose no major systems and would therefore have no grounds for complaint or immediate concern.
Japan and South Korea would, of course, view the use of nuclear weapons with alarm, but, Chinese planners had taken this into account as well. If the U.S. could be shown to be powerless to stop a Chinese takeover of Taiwan, the strategists were confident that, within a year, East Asia would be under the protective umbrella of Chinese military might. There was simply nothing any other nation could do to stop it.