updated Deter, Detect, Defend - 1962

[DirtyFred]

just started playing... will post a detailed AA-Report when finished

duck and cover!!!

[Randomizer]

Find attached an updated version of my very first CMANO scenario.

Change Log:
- Updated for Build 813 in CMANO V1.11
- All Soviet missions have been re-written using ROE and WRA criteria
- All units updated to latest CWDB
- The Seattle Space Needle is now a potential Soviet target.
- Scoring should now work as intended. NORAD's task is to defend British Columbia's coastal cities and America's Pacific Northwest. The Player starts out with 1500 points and destruction of civilian cities (-100 VP) and towns (-50 VP) costs are subtracted from that total.
- Fort Lewis is now represented including Gray's Army Airfield.
- The Seattle area Nike Hercules defenses have been degraded somewhat. Some launchers are off-line, some missiles have been deleted and several radars start damaged. These were Army Reserve installations and it's pretty rare to see an un-posed photo of a Nike battery where everything looks operational; where all the missiles are sitting on their launchers and presumably the electronics also had serviceability of less than 100% Because the batteries are reserves, their proficiency is reduced to Novice.
- All Soviet units and the civil airliners now have random starting locations.
- There are a couple of additional "flavour" messages for the Player.
- The Soviets have jammers now.

Hopefully the defence of the Pacific Coast of North America has gotten a bit more difficult. Unzip into wherever your Community Scenarios live, overwriting the original files. Please advise in case of problems or with suggestions for improvements and run the scenario for 1-minute before giving any orders. Thanks in advance for any feedback.

-C

[WBailey]

In reality, back in 1962 would any of the Seattle area Nike Hercules missiles have been equipped with their nuclear warheads? Is that information available publicly?

[Randomizer]

I spent a considerable amount of time and effort looking for some non-anecdotal information on this question and while I found nothing that seemed believable, my assessment is that the available W7 warheads were probably stored at the special weapons magazine in Fort Lewis and not dispersed to the firing batteries unless necessary. Since the war portrayed in Deter, Detect, Defend starts without warning, only the conventional warheads are used. There are a number of reasons for this:

1. In 1962 the armed services were in a continual battle over custody of nuclear weapons with the Department of Energy (DoE) responsible for the manufacture and storage of all nuclear weapons and components that had not been allocated to direct military control. Most Nike Hercules batteries were National Guard with the high-readiness installations in Alaska and south Florida as exceptions. For the most part it appears that the custodial requirements for storage and maintenance of nuclear material exceeded what might be practical for most NG units with regards to infrastructure, training and personnel qualifications.

2. In December 1962, President Kennedy vetoed a DoD plan to increase the dispersal of warheads from DoE to DoD custody. Since clawing the weapons back from the services seems unlikely in this era, presumably they had not yet been delivered to the military. In any event, SAC and the Navy probably had priority over the Army in the CONUS.

3. The presence in nearby Fort Lewis of appropriate special weapons storage facilities and technical expertise makes dispersal to the Puget Sound Hercules firing batteries expensive and arguably unnecessary since in a crisis, warheads and personal could be quickly deployed under Regular Army control.

4. Information indicates that only 2500 W7 warheads were manufactured for some 25,000 MIM-14B missiles. This means that even under ideal circumstances nine out of ten missiles would be conventionally armed.

5. The 1960 BOMARC accident in New Jersey pointed to the hazard of nuclear warheads mated to live missiles near urban centres.

My assessment for designing the scenario was that the Puget Sound Hercules firing batteries were probably equipped with conventional warheads at this time. Spent considerable time in The Nuclear Vault (nsarchive.gwu.edu) were there is a large document archive but much of the relevant material is still redacted to uselessness.

-C

[WBailey]

That is a very detailed and appreciated reply!
But you should really take into consideration whether the air defenses would be kept at a higher readiness if the Soviet bomber force was as strong as portrayed in your scenario [;)]

[Randomizer]

In the public threat assessment the Soviet bomber threat WAS as strong as portrayed in the scenario even though the reality was far different and the "bomber gap" was overwhelmingly in the United States' favour. Add all the air defence nukes you want, I think the status quo as presented is reasonable and accurate.

-C

[Eggstor]

Something very odd happened to the scenario in the Community Scenario Pack rebuilds - the CF-101s at RCAF Comox that had been loaded with air-to-air missiles switched to a (nonexistent) Offensive ECM loadout, and because the magazine at the airbase also was jazzed up, they cannot be rearmed.

Worse, I attempted to rebuild the scenario from the last link in this post, and the game kicked back several "missing loadout" messages because of differences between CWDB 442 and CWDB 467 (the current one).

[Randomizer]

There sometimes seems to be issues when scenarios created for older, less capable and detailed versions of CMANO get rebuilt during the Community Scenario updates. That's why I posted an updated (to Build 936.11) version of the scenario (and others) extensively re-written and with additional features and details:

Randomizer's Nuclear Apocalypse Collection

I suspect that most scenario authors do not spend a lot of time updating their earlier works for the community at large as it's time consuming and for the most part, subject to the law of diminishing returns. Updates of older scenarios also do not seem to make into newer versions of the Community Scenario downloads either. This is not intended as a complaint, maintaining the scenario bank has to be labour intensive and a fairly thankless task and all credit to Mr. Molina for taking on the job.

Most scenario authors will probably fix specific items that are brought to our attention so thank you for posting this. However, sometimes fixes that go beyond just a deep rebuild are just not worth the effort; the references are not so available anymore or we have just moved on to other scenarios. I updated the above scenarios and packaged them together because I have an odd fondness for Cold War nuclear Armageddon situations but currently have no plans to tweak my other scenarios in the Community pack.

Thanks for the heads up, hope that you enjoy the CMANO v1.12 version of Deter, Detect, Defend, now with aircraft damage, reduced Nike Hercules readiness and more randomized Soviet and Commercial deployments.

-C