The Korean People’s Army Air Force of North Korea did not detect the second M-9 missile until after it had crossed the coast and was headed down over the center of the Korean Peninsula. The KPAAF’s SA-2 and SA-3 fixed missile sites at Kaesong and one SA-5 mobile missile site at Dosan were the only units capable of attempting to intercept the M-9 missile, but all of these missiles were older, larger, less reliable strategic air defense missiles and were not designed to shoot down something as small and as fast as a ballistic missile. Untouched and unimpeded, the Chinese M-9 missile streaked out of the sky… and detonated its nuclear warhead about 20,000 feet above the large military city of Wonsan, on North Korea’s east-central coastline.
The warhead had the explosive power of 20,000 tons of TNT, so although the missile missed its preprogrammed target coordinates by over a mile and a half, the effect of the blast was devastating. The nuclear explosion leveled the southeast portion of the city, completely destroying half of the aboveground buildings and facilities of the Korean People’s Army’s Southern Defense Sector headquarters, and substantially damaging the KPA Navy’s Eastern Fleet headquarters and the surface and submarine naval bases located on Yonghung Bay. Although the city of Wonsan itself was spared from much of the nuclear blast because of the miss distance, almost twenty thousand civilians were killed or wounded in the blink of an eye that night, along with thousands of military men and women and their dependents on the military installations.
Sun Ji Guoming scanned all the possible radio frequencies for any signs of the death and destruction he had caused that night, but the atmosphere for hundreds of miles around had been charged by the nuclear detonations and all the bands were jumbles of static — he could not communicate with anyone until he was almost all the way across the Gulf of Chihli and over the coast near Tianjin, just sixty miles from Beijing. No matter, he thought. The war was on.
Soon, Sun knew, China would be handed the keys to its twenty-third province, Taipei, by a world praying for the bombing and missile attacks and the nuclear devastation to cease. The world would soon know that China would not be denied complete reunification.
“The invasion of Taiwan appears to be under way,” the intelligence officer said casually. If it were not such a serious matter, many of the men assembled before him might be laughing at the understated irony of that statement. It was not just Taiwan that was under attack — it seemed the stability of the entire planet was crumbling.
“The Chinese are on the move everywhere,” the intelligence officer continued. He was standing at the podium on the stage in the U.S. Strategic Command command center, three stories underground in the middle of Offutt Air Force Base in central Nebraska. “At least three divisions massing along Xiamen Bay at Amoy, Liuwadian, Shijing, Dongshi, and Weitou. At these and several other locations, PLA artillery and rocket units have begun shelling the northern shoreline of Quemoy in an obvious ‘softening-up’ attack. We’re looking at three hundred multiple rocket launcher units, two hundred and twenty artillery batteries, and at least sixty short-range ballistic rocket units arrayed along the bay. Resupply is coming in mostly by rail and by truck.”
“What about amphibious landing capability?” one member of the STRATCOM staff asked. “We’ve been briefed that the Chinese don’t have much of an amphibious assault capability. How are they going to move three divisions to Quemoy? ”
“The reports of the People’s Liberation Army’s lack of amphibious capability was apparently grossly underestimated,” the briefer responded. “Most forces needed for an amphibious invasion were not based with active-duty units, but sent instead to reserve and militia units that kept them separate and inactive. Now that the reserves and militia have been called up to support the invasion, we have a better picture of the PLA’s amphibious assault capability, and it is quite substantiaclass="underline"
“The Taiwanese government has already reported airborne assaults in the early-morning hours by several cargo aircraft, with as many as a thousand commandos dropped on Quemoy in the past couple hours. They also report several forty-five- and thirty-five-meter air-cushion landing craft spotted along the western shores of Quemoy, including three on the beach. Each of these can carry as many as fifty troops and two fast armored assault vehicles, armored trucks, mobile antiaircraft artillery units, or small tanks. The Taiwanese have not reported where these commandos may be massing; they speculate that it may be part of a large reconnaissance or artillery-targeting patrol, or perhaps a plan to insert a great number of spies on the island. China was reported to have only a few of these air-cushion landing craft, but we’re seeing reports of as many as a dozen.
“Several classes of amphibious assault ships have been spotted on shore, including some never classified previously and many thought to have been discarded or not in service,” the briefer continued. “It’s very difficult to determine exact numbers, but one estimate said that the PLAN has enough ships for a twenty-thousand-man assault on Quemoy anytime. They could possibly lift an entire brigade onto Quemoy in two to three days if unopposed.”
“How many troops does Taiwan have on Quemoy?” one of the staff officers asked.
“Estimated at between sixty and seventy thousand,” the briefer replied. “But we have not been given any casualty reports from the attack earlier today. Any troops stationed in unprotected areas might have been injured enough to make them combat-ineffective.”
“Estimate of that number?”
There was a slight pause, as the enormity of the number he was about to give caught up with him; then he responded in a hard-edged monotone: “Half. As many as thirty-five thousand casualties possible on Quemoy. ”
The STRATCOM members listening were stunned into silence. They could hardly believe what had happened: in repelling a Taiwanese air invasion of Chinese invasion forces arrayed around Quemoy, the People’s Republic of China had launched several surface-to-air missiles armed with nuclear warheads. The entire Taiwanese air invasion armada, estimated at thirty-two frontline U.S.-made F-16 Fighting Falcon fighter-bombers— two-thirds of its F-16 fleet and 10 percent of its entire active military air inventory — had been destroyed instantly.
“The five massive nuclear explosions occurred almost directly over Quemoy Island at an altitude of about thirty thousand feet, high enough so the fireballs did not touch the ground, but near enough to cause extensive damage from the heat and overpressure,” the briefer went on. “Danger of radioactive fallout is low; the southern portion of Taiwan and northern Philippines might be affected. The aircraft carrier George Washington has been diverted to keep it out of the danger area.”
“In apparent retaliation for the attacks on the mainland, China staged a massive counterattack, beginning with a feint by large fighter formations that drew away Taiwan’s air defense fighters, followed by three large formations of heavy bombers attacking with short-range nuclear cruise missiles and conventional gravity bombs that almost completely destroyed four major air bases in the western portion of Taiwan,” the intelligence officer continued. “The Chinese then followed up with medium-range nuclear ballistic missile attacks on three eastern Taiwan air and naval bases. The nuclear warheads were small high-altitude air- bursts, less than forty-kiloton yields, but they were very effective. Half of Taiwan’s air defense system, including substantially all its air forces and a third of its ground-based air defense weapons and radars, were destroyed.”