So let's talk about something besides war and apocalypse and death: cats.

I've been a cat owner for most of my adult life. The reason is fairly simple: I'm rodentophobic. It's not that I don't like rats or mice; I'm sure your pet rat is very nice and sweet in a rat sort of way. It's that I'm terrified of them thanks to unfortunate encounters as a youth and again as a young adult. I freeze up and if I'm feeling brave I might be able to squeak "take that away please". A few years ago when a mouse got into our house, I managed to corral it into a rat trap and felt like I had just won the Battle of the Somme singlehandedly.

So, the rodents being my enemy, I thus befriended their enemy, a predator genetically disposed to rip them limb from limb as a hobby. It has been a mutually beneficial relationship: I get a fuzzy weird little guy around the house who takes pleasure in dismantling any living being smaller than itself, and it gets fed and its litter box is magically emptied daily. Most of the time the relationship isn't much deeper than that.

For example, I had a cat named Ellie who was very chill. As she got older, she got extremely chill. As in, the aforementioned mouse I managed to corral, I was forced to do so because Ellie's reaction to a mouse being in the house was "Ehh. Whatever." Ellie was an older cat and eventually passed away, though it may have been hard to tell. Her passing was, like most cats, very peaceful. Sleepy time now.

After a short period I adopted a new cat. Or rather, she adopted me; when I went to the local animal shelter to see how the locals reacted, she crawled in my lap and then looked around as if to say "Yes, I'll take this one, thank you." Her name at the shelter was Amber; I promptly renamed her Xena because she liked to fly through the air at things. Chill she was not. At the time there was a bat colony near our house and one managed to get inside; Xena managed to FLY AT THE BAT and GROUND IT somehow. She was quite irritated that we took the poor bat away and set it free. I'd be irritated too, that took quite some coordination.

She had a fairly difficult life before we adopted her; she was a stray who had given birth to a litter in a parking lot and a car ran over her hips, causing her to stay in surgery and convalescence for a good part of six months. Once we brought her home, she promptly went into heat and stayed in heat, which for female cats is very painful. A few surgeries later (free of charge from the original vet who, I strongly gathered, preferred the cat's company to my own) she was back to prowling and leaping.

As the years passed, she bonded with me fairly strongly. I would talk to her as I worked and she would quietly nod and occasionally patrol the perimeter to ensure nothing had invaded the house in the past ten minutes. But mostly she would sit at my feet, or perch on my lap, or occasionally pop onto the desk to see what she could contribute to whatever I was working on.

She never lost her hunter instinct; once when baby opposums had somehow gotten loose into our bedroom (look, wild animals just seem attracted to my house, I don't get it either) she literally would "point" at them with her head as I collected them from whatever cabinet they were hiding behind, and watch approvingly as I piled them into a box. (She didn't register disapproval at their being set free, I suppose oppossums not being her flavor of the week.) But mostly she would sit with me and listen, and very occasionally answer back. She was quite intelligent, and could recognize a few cat-oriented words like "food", "no", and "please for the love of all that's holy stop trying to get into the bird cage", but mainly she picked up on emotional cues. When I was feeling down, she would make a point of nudging my leg and demand attention. It was her way of fixing it, and mostly it worked.

The years passed, and Xena aged, as all cats do. She eventually tired of vertical leaps and instead focused on staking out comfortable perches; my PC was ideal for her because it emitted heat, was flat and roughly Xena-shaped, and she could keep an eye on me.

We thought she might like some cat company as she aged, and adopted a white Siamese/tabby hybrid named Gabrielle. (Because, of course.) Unfortunately she didn't really have time for a hyperactive kitten constantly running at her at full speed, and as Gabrielle aged and quickly became larger than Xena, she returned the favor by bullying her when no one was looking. The companion I'd brought home for Xena's old age turned out to be, in retrospect, one more thing for her to endure.

Perhaps from the bullying, but most likely because of some other physical ailment, one day Xena stopped eating. She lost almost half her body weight before we finally discovered food she would eat; instead of her dry kibble she now would only eat wet canned food and the occasional liquid treat. We took her to vets repeatedly, only to have them shrug; her teeth seemed fine, her blood work seemed fine, she's an old cat (our guess was 13 or 14) and Things Happen.

And then, in December, things happened. Very bad things.

While Xena was walking around the hallway, she suddenly threw herself to the ground and began spinning around like a demonically possessed top. This went on for about five minutes; after a half hour it repeated. We immediately took her to the emergency pet hospital; the conclusion was that she was suffering epileptic seizures. There wasn't any apparent cause for these either; we were given some medicine and told to bring her back if it got worse.

A few days later, it was clear that as a result of brain trauma, she was now blind.

Heartbroken, we could only watch as she gingerly did her feline best to figure out how to work with her new parameters, carefully stepping around the perimeters of rooms she knew by heart from living in for over a decade.

Well, I have a blind cat now, I thought. Could be worse.

It then got worse. She suffered another bout of seizures, and then could no longer walk. She would try to stand up, lose her balance, fall over, and meow angrily. And then try again.

My heart was now utterly shattered. It was time to tell my friend goodbye.

The vet was very nice about it and I left in a fury immediately afterwards, part of me telling myself I was a fucking murderer, the rational part of me saying that what life Xena had left would have been miserable and it was my duty to put a painless coda to her story.

I still feel the empty space by my feet where she'd be perched.

Meanwhile, there's Gabby.

Xena was extremely intelligent for a cat. Gabby has two brain cells and very occasionally uses both of them. She jumps at the mirror because she's convinced it contains another cat. One day she discovered ceilings existed and spent the next week staring upwards in openmouthed wonderment at how there was a floor up there and maybe it had things. She will occasionally take off at an extremely fast speed and promptly slam into a wall. I don't think she's brain damaged so much as she is quite profoundly stupid.

She's very different from Xena in other ways. She can take or leave me; doesn't really like being petted but will tolerate it, unless she decides it's time for her to get attention, after 30 seconds of which she will then immediately go do something else.

She's not all bad. She's a cat. As she ages, she'll calm down, and I'm fairly certain, from how she, like Xena, constantly attacks the very cat-proof bird cage, that were a rodent to get into the house she would gleefully dismember it. The eternal bargain remains in place; I get protected from rats and mice by a weird little guy, and the weird little guy gets food.

But there's always going to be a spot on top of my computer that's empty, and a spot in my heart as well.

July 1, 1989
NUCLEAR WAR – BUSH AUTHORIZES LIMITED COUNTERFORCE STRIKE; SOVIET FORCES RESPOND WITH FULL SCALE ATTACK; UNITED STATES RESPONDS IN KIND; CITIES BURNING ACROSS NORTHERN HEMISPHERE; REPORTS AS THEY BECOME AVAILABLE

ANCHORAGE, Alaska — At 05:47 Alaska Daylight Time today, four hours and seventeen minutes after the detonation of nuclear weapons over five Atlantic cities, the President of the United States, aboard the National Emergency Airborne Command Post in continuous orbit over the central United States, authorized the execution of a limited strategic option of the Single Integrated Operational Plan, designated by its planning code as Major Attack Option Three (Counterforce), against the strategic forces, command and control facilities, and selected leadership targets of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The order was transmitted at 04:51 ADT. The first weapons detonated upon Soviet territory at 05:23 ADT.

At 13:31 ADT, the Soviet Strategic Rocket Forces, the Long-Range Aviation, the Northern and Pacific Fleet ballistic missile submarine forces, and the strategic forces of the Warsaw Pact directly subordinate to the Soviet General Staff executed what every surviving American intelligence assessment has identified as a general strategic release against the territories of the United States, the United Kingdom, France, the Federal Republic of Germany, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, Greece, Turkey, Canada, Japan, the Republic of Korea, Australia, and the People's Republic of China. The Chinese release was directed against the strategic forces of the People's Liberation Army Second Artillery Corps and against the principal cities of eastern China; the Chinese strategic response, executed approximately fourteen minutes later, was directed against the cities and military installations of the eastern Soviet Union.

At 13:46 ADT, the National Emergency Airborne Command Post, in coordination with the airborne command posts of the Strategic Air Command, the United States Atlantic Fleet, the United States Pacific Fleet, and the strategic forces of the United Kingdom and France, executed the general response contemplated by the Single Integrated Operational Plan against the residual targets of the Soviet Union and its remaining allies.

The exchange, in its entirety, occupied approximately thirty-eight minutes from initiation to substantial completion. Subsequent strikes, conducted by surviving forces of all parties against targets of opportunity and against pre-designated alternate target sets, continued through the afternoon and into the early evening Alaska time. By nightfall in the Pacific theater, the strategic forces of the principal participants had largely expended their immediate-launch arsenals.

The number of nuclear weapons detonated upon the surface of the Earth between 05:30 ADT and approximately 22:00 ADT on this date is estimated by the surviving United States Strategic Air Command Post here at Elmendorf Air Force Base, which has been, this reporter must add, incredibly professional under the worst conditions imaginable in providing briefings to the media, in coordination with surviving NORAD assets at Cheyenne Mountain whose tunnel doors were sealed at 14:14 ADT and who remain in restricted communication, at between four thousand and five thousand. The figure cannot be more precise. It does not, in any case, much matter.

This dispatch is filed from Elmendorf Air Force Base, near Anchorage, Alaska, at 23:30 ADT on the 1st of July 1989. It is filed by means of a single high-frequency single-sideband military radio circuit linking the Joint Operations Center at Elmendorf to the Royal New Zealand Air Force base at Whenuapai, near Auckland, by which means it is to be transmitted to the surviving offices of the Reuters news agency in that country, which are, by every report we have received, the only offices of any international news agency presently operational anywhere in the Pacific theater. The dispatch is composed in the open press style by which this correspondent, three days ago in the office of his bureau in San Francisco, would have composed it. The bureau in San Francisco, by the report received here at 16:40 UTC from a survivor of the Naval Air Station at Alameda, no longer exists. This correspondent is, by the assessment of the public affairs officer of this base, alive in a way that the correspondent's wife, his three children, and his mother are not.

Anchorage

The city of Anchorage was not struck. The strategic logic of the choice, by the assessment of the duty officer at the surviving NORAD facility here, is that the Soviet strategic warhead inventory, in the configuration of the morning of the 1st of July, was inadequate to the targeting of all American cities of significance, and that Anchorage — chiefly important as the location of Elmendorf Air Force Base and of the principal radar facilities of the western approaches — was a target upon which only the air base itself was struck. The Elmendorf strike was a single 200-kiloton warhead. It detonated above the eastern runway at 14:39 UTC. The base is no longer operationally a base. The runways are cratered. The hangars, the headquarters buildings, the principal housing areas, and the F-15 alert facility are destroyed. The Joint Operations Center, located in a hardened underground facility on the western perimeter, survived. It is operational. From it, this dispatch is being filed.

The city of Anchorage itself, separated from the base by a distance of approximately five kilometers and by the terrain features of Ship Creek and the Knik Arm, sustained substantial blast damage in the eastern districts of Government Hill, Mountain View, and Russian Jack Springs. The downtown commercial core, the airport, and the residential districts of Sand Lake, Spenard, and the Hillside are largely standing. The hospitals — Providence Alaska Medical Center, Alaska Regional, and the Alaska Native Medical Center — are operational, are overwhelmed, and are receiving patients in numbers that the facilities cannot, in the assessment of every physician this correspondent has spoken to, treat at any standard recognizable in medical practice. The Mayor of Anchorage, Mr. Tom Fink, addressed the city by radio at 18:00 Alaska time and informed the population, in language of considerable simplicity, that the city would not be evacuated, because there was no place to evacuate to that the Mayor could in good conscience recommend; that the city would maintain order; that food, fuel, and medical supplies would be allocated by the city emergency operations center; that looters would be shot; and that the citizens of Anchorage were Alaskans, were Americans, and would, in such time as the world that confronted them permitted, be both.

The Cities

This correspondent has, since 16:00 UTC, attempted to compile from the reports reaching the Joint Operations Center a list of cities in the northern hemisphere upon which nuclear weapons were detonated during the exchange of this afternoon. The list is incomplete. It is, by the assessment of the Elmendorf duty intelligence officer who has been assisting me, the most complete list compiled at any single point on the planet. The Soviet Pacific Fleet submarine command facility at Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, struck by American counterforce weapons in the early phase of the exchange, was the principal alternative compilation point in the Pacific theater. It is no longer compiling.

The cities, in alphabetical order, in such measure as the reporting permits.

In the United States: Washington (Soviet first strike, morning); New York (Soviet first strike, morning); Atlanta (the surviving CNN bureau ceased filing at 15:14 UTC); Boston; Chicago; Cleveland; Dallas-Fort Worth (the Strategic Air Command auxiliary at Carswell Air Force Base); Denver; Detroit; Houston; Kansas City; Los Angeles; Miami; Minneapolis-Saint Paul; New Orleans; Norfolk and the Hampton Roads naval complex; Omaha (Strategic Air Command headquarters at Offutt; the Looking Glass airborne command post survives); Philadelphia; Phoenix; Pittsburgh; Saint Louis; Salt Lake City; San Diego (Naval Base San Diego); San Francisco and the Alameda complex; Seattle and the Puget Sound naval complex (the Bangor submarine base); the silo fields of Wyoming, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Missouri, and Colorado, in patterns of multiple ground-burst weapons over each silo of which not less than 1,054 silos were so targeted; Cheyenne Mountain (multiple weapons; tunnels sealed; status uncertain); Site R near Blue Ridge Summit, Pennsylvania (multiple weapons; status uncertain); Mount Weather, Virginia (multiple weapons; status uncertain); the Greenbrier facility at White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia (one weapon; status uncertain).

In the United Kingdom: London (morning); Birmingham; Glasgow; Manchester; Liverpool; Leeds; the strategic submarine base at Faslane; the bomber bases at Marham, Coningsby, Lakenheath, Mildenhall; the early warning station at Fylingdales.

In France: Paris (morning); Lyon; Marseille; Toulouse; Bordeaux; the strategic submarine base at L'Île Longue; the strategic missile field on the Plateau d'Albion in Vaucluse; the bomber base at Mont-de-Marsan.

In the Federal Republic of Germany: Munich (morning); Hamburg; Frankfurt; Cologne; Stuttgart; Bremen; Hannover; Düsseldorf; Bonn (the Federal Republic's principal command facility at Marienthal in Rhineland-Palatinate; status of the Chancellor and senior government uncertain).

In Italy: Rome (the Holy Father, in Geneva, was confirmed alive at 19:00 UTC; Geneva was not struck; the city of Rome was struck); Milan; Naples; Turin; the naval facility at La Spezia.

In the German Democratic Republic, the Polish People's Republic, the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic: every principal city, in patterns consistent with Soviet counterforce strikes against United States and allied forces then operating in those territories. The Soviet command, in the assessment of the duty officer here at Elmendorf, conducted these strikes upon territories nominally allied to the Soviet Union because the alternative — permitting the territories of the western Warsaw Pact states to remain occupied by NATO forces while the Soviet Union itself burned — was a calculation that the men in the Kremlin made in the affirmative. The advance elements of the United States Army that crossed into the German Democratic Republic three days ago and into the Polish People's Republic this morning are, by every report, no longer reporting.

In the Soviet Union: Moscow; Leningrad; Kyiv; Minsk; Kharkov; Odesa; Riga; Vilnius; Tallinn; Gorky; Sverdlovsk; Chelyabinsk; Novosibirsk; Volgograd; Kuybyshev; Perm; Ufa; Kazan; Voronezh; Saratov; Krasnodar; Rostov-on-Don; Tbilisi; Yerevan; Baku; Tashkent; Alma-Ata; Frunze; Murmansk; Arkhangelsk; Vladivostok; Khabarovsk; the Plesetsk Cosmodrome; the silo fields of the Strategic Rocket Forces; the bomber bases of Long-Range Aviation; the submarine bases at Yagelnaya, Polyarny, Severodvinsk, Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky.

In the People's Republic of China: Beijing; Shanghai; Guangzhou; Tianjin; Shenyang; Wuhan; Chongqing; the missile fields and bomber bases of the Second Artillery Corps; the leadership facilities at Zhongnanhai. The General Secretary, Mr. Jiang Zemin, has not been heard from since 14:00 UTC.

In Japan: Tokyo (the United States Forces Japan headquarters at Yokota Air Base); Yokohama; Osaka; Nagoya; Sapporo; Yokosuka and the United States Seventh Fleet base. The Emperor, the Imperial Family, and the Cabinet of Mr. Uno are reported alive at the dispersal facility at Matsushiro.

In the Republic of Korea: Seoul; Busan; Daegu; Osan Air Base; Kunsan Air Base.

In Canada: Ottawa; Toronto; Montreal; Vancouver; Halifax (the Canadian Forces Maritime Atlantic command); the NORAD station at Comox.

The list is incomplete. The list will be extended as further reporting is received. The reporting, at the hour of this dispatch, is becoming sparse.

The Survivors

The principal command authorities reported alive at this hour, in such measure as can be confirmed by communication from this facility:

The President of the United States, aboard the National Emergency Airborne Command Post.

The Vice President of the United States. Status: confirmed alive at Site R; communication intermittent; the facility itself reported heavily damaged from multiple nuclear impacts but for now functional.

The Speaker of the House and the leadership of the Congress at the Greenbrier facility: status uncertain. A single weapon was reported to have detonated near that facility. The facility was hardened against precisely such a strike. Communications, since 15:30 UTC, have been silent.

The Chief Justice of the United States: location undisclosed at the hour of the strikes; status uncertain.

The Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Mrs. Thatcher, at PINDAR. Confirmed alive at 17:00 UTC. The status of PINDAR itself, struck by what is reported to have been multiple weapons in counterforce targeting of the central British government, is reported as "intact, but with serious damage to surface communication infrastructure." Communications now exclusively by survivable submarine-relay link.

The President of France, M. Mitterrand, at the Taverny command facility. Confirmed alive at 18:00 UTC. The Taverny facility, hardened against direct strike, was struck. It survived.

The Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany, Dr. Kohl, at the Marienthal command facility. Marienthal was struck. Communications since 16:00 UTC: silent.

The General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the chairman of the Council of Ministers, the chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, the chairman of the Committee for State Security, the Minister of Defense, the chairman of the so-called Emergency Committee: all unaccounted for. The Soviet command authority at this hour, by every report, is exercised, to the extent that it is exercised at all, by surviving regional military commanders of the strategic forces operating under the procedures of the Soviet "Dead Hand" perimeter system, which was, by the available reports from surviving signals intelligence here at Elmendorf, activated at 13:53 UTC and which has, since approximately 16:00 UTC, been issuing launch authorizations to surviving Soviet strategic forces in the absence of any human authority in Moscow.

The President of the People's Republic of China, the General Secretary, the Premier: unaccounted for.

Mr. Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev, reportedly held at a naval medical facility north of Murmansk: the city of Murmansk was struck. The facility, by every report received here, was within the radius of total destruction.

The Holy Father, in Geneva, confirmed alive.

The Secretary General of the United Nations, in Geneva, confirmed alive.

This Correspondent

This correspondent does not propose, in this dispatch, to elaborate upon the personal circumstances of those who have, this afternoon, lost what they have lost. He observes only the following.

The duty officer of the Joint Operations Center, Major Catherine Reilly of the United States Air Force, addressed the assembled survivors at this facility at 22:00 Alaska time and informed them that this base, this city, this state, and this nation would, in such measure as remained possible, continue. She did not elaborate. She did not need to.

The military and civilian personnel at this facility, this evening, are at their posts. They are not, for the most part, speaking. They are doing the work that is required of them. The work, this evening, consists chiefly of the compilation of lists. The lists are necessary, the duty officer has said, because the work that follows the lists shall be conducted by reference to them, and shall not be possible without them, and shall, in the assessment of every officer present, be required.

This dispatch ends here. There is no further information that this correspondent is, at this hour, able to convey.

—Stephen Lambert, Reuters, Anchorage, Alaska, 1 July 1989

JULY 2, 1989
REPORTS THAT WAR CONTINUES IN EUROPE; THE FIRST GLOBAL ASSESSMENT

VALLETTA, Malta — From this small island in the central Mediterranean, the only neutral state of the European theater whose principal city was not struck and whose government remains in continuous communication with the surviving organs of the Atlantic alliance and with the surviving authorities of the European nations, we report this morning that the war that began on the inner-German frontier at 04:14 Central European Time on the 27th of June, that became a nuclear war at 04:30 Coordinated Universal Time yesterday, and that became a general nuclear exchange at 14:23 UTC yesterday afternoon, is by the reports reaching this island this morning continuing.

It is continuing in Europe in a form that has no precedent in any conflict of any prior generation. Surviving NATO ground forces, deep within the territories of the former German Democratic Republic and the former Polish People's Republic, are reported by such fragmentary signals as have reached the surviving British military communications relay on Gozo to be operating in the absence of orders, in the absence of communications with rear-area headquarters most of which no longer exist, in conditions of catastrophic logistical disruption, and in environments contaminated by fallout from the counterforce strikes on the Polish silo fields at Pinsk and the Soviet strikes on the territories occupied by NATO. The forces are reported to be moving westward, in such order as their officers have been able to maintain. Many are reported not to be moving at all.

Surviving Soviet ground forces, in the territories of the former East Germany and Poland, are similarly reported to be in conditions of disintegration. Soviet airborne and air-assault formations in northern Iran, where the war began, are reported by the British signals relay at Akrotiri in Cyprus to have made contact yesterday afternoon with surviving Iraqi forces under conditions of extreme confusion, neither side at the point of contact apparently aware of the events of the preceding twenty-four hours and neither side any longer in communication with rear-area headquarters that could inform them. The reports, this morning, indicate that the contact resulted in fighting that ceased only after both sides had received, by separate channels, reports of the destruction of their respective national capitals, and that the two formations have since broken contact and are, by the available reports, conducting parallel withdrawals to no clear destinations.

In the central German plain, in the eastern marches of the Federal Republic, in the Polish countryside, isolated NATO and Soviet armored formations continue to encounter one another in conditions of mutual disorientation and to engage in reflexive combat whose military significance is zero, and whose human cost continues to accumulate.

The cities of the German Democratic Republic, of Poland, of Czechoslovakia, of Hungary — many of which were not directly struck — are receiving fallout in volumes and in patterns whose epidemiological consequences will be the subject of medical inquiry through the remainder of the lives of any inquirers. The civilian populations of those cities are reported, in such fragmentary accounts as have reached this island, to be largely sheltering in place, in the absence of evacuation routes that lead to any destination not also affected, in the absence of food and fuel deliveries from rural districts, and in the absence of medical infrastructure that has, in the principal, ceased to function.

The Holy Father, in Geneva, has by the reports reaching this island today addressed the surviving European peoples at 9 a.m. Geneva time. He spoke for forty minutes. He spoke in the languages he had spoken on the 25th of June: Italian, Polish, German, Russian, English. He spoke for considerably longer in Russian than he had spoken on the previous occasion. He addressed, by name, the dead. He did not complete the address before requesting an interruption to compose himself. He requested of the surviving leadership of the World Council of Churches, of the World Health Organization, of the International Committee of the Red Cross, and of the Conference of European Churches, all of whom are with him in Geneva, that they consider with him in the days to come "what may be done by those who have not been killed, for those who have." The address was transmitted by every surviving broadcasting authority capable of transmitting it.

In Malta, the Prime Minister, Dr. Eddie Fenech Adami, addressed the Maltese people at noon today and announced the offering of asylum, of medical care, of food, and of such accommodation as the island may provide, to "any human being who shall reach this island, by any means, from any direction, of any nationality, whose nationality may at this hour be ascertained or may not." The harbor of Valletta, this afternoon, has begun to receive small craft and a number of larger vessels from the burning ports of Italy, of southern France, of the Adriatic coast.

A Maltese fisherman, in the harbor at Marsaxlokk this morning, was overheard by a correspondent of this dispatch addressing his son, who is twelve. He said: "We are an island. We have always been an island. We have buried Carthaginians, we have buried Romans, we have buried Arabs, we have buried Knights, we have buried Frenchmen, we have buried British. We shall, this summer, bury what reaches us. It is what an island is for."

AUCKLAND — From this city, in this country, on this morning of the 2nd of July 1989, the first comprehensive assessment of the global circumstance produced by the events of the preceding 36 hours is, by the available evidence, here being undertaken — for the simple reason that this country, alone among nations of any consequence, possesses the surviving telecommunications connectivity and political authority to undertake it.

New Zealand was not struck. Australia suffered impacts but not at the scale, as we can determine, suffered by other nations. The decision by the Soviet strategic command — to the extent that "decision" remains the appropriate term for the algorithmic execution of pre-delegated launch authorities through the perimeter system — to omit Australasia from the targeting plan is, by the assessment of every analyst at the New Zealand Intelligence Bureau in Wellington, attributable to the simple absence of strategic targets of priority sufficient to justify weapons in the diminishing Soviet inventory after the principal targets in the northern hemisphere had been allocated. The American military bases in Australia — Pine Gap, Nurrungar, North West Cape — were struck. The cities were not.

Australia, this morning, has lost three remote signals intelligence facilities and approximately 600 American and Australian personnel. The continent is otherwise intact. New Zealand is intact in its entirety. The cities of Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch, Dunedin, and Hamilton are intact. The agricultural districts of the Waikato, Canterbury, and Otago are intact. The harbors are operating. The hospitals are receiving patients in numbers that have not yet exceeded their capacity. The schools, the universities, the courts, the parliaments at Wellington and Canberra, the broadcasting authorities, the newspapers, the banks, the markets are functioning.

The Prime Minister of New Zealand, Mr. Geoffrey Palmer, addressed the New Zealand people at 9 a.m. local time today by way of Radio New Zealand and Television New Zealand, in a speech of which the substance has been transmitted to such surviving broadcasting authorities of the southern hemisphere as the engineers in the basement of the Bowen House parliamentary complex have, through the night, been able to raise.

He said in part: "Fellow New Zealanders. Yesterday afternoon, the Northern Hemisphere of our planet was, by the choices of men in places far from this country, made the subject of an event that will be, in the assessment of every honest soul, the gravest event in the history of human life upon this planet. The cities of those hemispheres are burning. The peoples of those hemispheres are dying, in numbers that we are not at this hour in a position to estimate and that, when we are, we shall regret having estimated. The institutions of those hemispheres — the governments, the universities, the hospitals, the economies, the cultures, the ten thousand things by which a civilization sustains itself — are damaged in measures that we shall, in the years to come, learn the names of, and that we have at this hour no names for.

"New Zealand is not damaged. New Zealand is, this morning, in possession of the things that the world's surviving peoples shall require, in such measure as our small country may be able to extend them. New Zealand shall extend them. We shall extend our food. We shall extend our medicines. We shall extend our shipping. We shall extend our broadcasting. We shall extend our universities, which shall, in the months to come, become a refuge of every kind of learning that has, in the past day, been deprived of its homes in the cities of the burning hemisphere. We shall extend the asylum of our country to such persons as shall reach our shores by any means, of any nationality, in such numbers as our country may receive. We shall not, in the year ahead, sleep easily. We shall not, in the year ahead, eat easily. We shall not, in the year ahead, regard our small country as a country whose ordinary affairs are, in any sense, the appropriate subjects of our ordinary attention. The ordinary affairs of New Zealand have, this morning, become extraordinary, by the simple fact that we are still here when so many are not.

"I ask of every New Zealander, in this hour, the willingness to do the work that has come, by the catastrophe of others, to be ours. I ask the farmers to plant. I ask the doctors to attend. I ask the teachers to teach. I ask the broadcasters to broadcast. I ask the merchant marine to sail. I ask the New Zealand Defence Force to defend, in such measures as may, in the months ahead, become necessary, the things that we have, by the small mercies of our geography, retained.

"I ask, finally, the prayers of every faith of every New Zealander, for the dead of the Northern Hemisphere whose names we shall not know, and for the living of that hemisphere whose names we shall."

The Prime Minister concluded by announcing the formation, in concert with the Prime Minister of Australia Mr. Hawke, the Prime Minister of Fiji, the Prime Minister of Western Samoa, the Prime Minister of Papua New Guinea, and the President of the Republic of the Philippines — the latter in such communication as has been possible through surviving Pacific telecommunications cable — of a Council of Pacific States, to coordinate the humanitarian, economic, and political responses of the surviving Pacific nations to the events of the past 36 hours.

The first meeting of the Council was scheduled for tomorrow morning, in Auckland.

The atmospheric scientists of the University of Auckland, of Victoria University at Wellington, and of the Australian National University at Canberra, in coordination with surviving colleagues at the Australian Bureau of Meteorology, the New Zealand Meteorological Service, and the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research, issued at noon today a preliminary technical assessment of the climatic consequences to be expected from the events of yesterday. The assessment, signed by Dr. Jim Salinger of the New Zealand Meteorological Service and by Dr. Will Steffen of the Australian National University, drew upon the existing scientific literature on the atmospheric effects of large-scale nuclear exchange — the so-called "nuclear winter" hypothesis advanced in 1983 by Drs. Sagan, Turco, Toon, Ackerman, and Pollack — and upon the preliminary observational data available from the southern hemisphere weather stations that had through the previous evening detected the early atmospheric signatures of the burning northern cities.

The principal conclusions of the assessment, in such language as the public broadcast permitted:

The mass of fine particulate carbonaceous material injected into the upper troposphere and lower stratosphere of the Northern Hemisphere by the burning of approximately 600 to 1,000 major urban areas across that hemisphere is consistent with the upper bound of the Sagan et al. modelled scenarios.

The expected reduction in incident solar radiation upon the surface of the Northern Hemisphere over the 90 to 180 days following the event is on the order of 70 to 95 percent.

The expected mean surface temperature reduction in the Northern Hemisphere continental interiors over the same period is on the order of 15 to 25 degrees Celsius below seasonal norms.

The agricultural growing season in the Northern Hemisphere temperate zones is, for 1989, to be considered effectively cancelled.

The crossing of the smoke and ash plume into the Southern Hemisphere by way of equatorial atmospheric circulation is expected to occur on a timescale of weeks rather than months. The climatic effects in the Southern Hemisphere will be substantial. They will not, by the available modelling, equal those in the Northern Hemisphere. The agricultural growing seasons in the temperate Southern Hemisphere — Australia, New Zealand, southern Africa, Argentina, Chile — will be substantially reduced. They will not be eliminated.

The Southern Hemisphere will be cold. It will not be uninhabitable.

The remainder of the assessment, the authors have requested, shall be released to the public in the form of supplementary reports through the coming week, "as the data permit, and as the public is in a condition to receive them."

The harbor at Auckland, this afternoon, is full. Ships, from every flag of the Pacific and many of the Atlantic, have made for this country in the past 36 hours from such distant ports as their bunkering permitted. The hostels and the schools and the marae and the churches of Auckland and of Wellington and of Christchurch are, by the order of the Prime Minister, opening their doors. The receiving stations are being established. The volunteers, this afternoon, are queuing in lines around the blocks of the principal cities, registering to assist.

A Māori elder, at the Ōrākei marae in Auckland this morning, addressed those gathered in Te Reo Māori, in language that has been translated for the purposes of this dispatch by the Māori Language Commission. He said: "The waka that come are not our waka. The peoples that come are not our people. The land they come to is not their land. But the land has, by the gift of the ancestors, been given to us to keep, and to keep is to receive. We shall receive them. We shall mourn with them the dead they have lost. We shall feed them what we have. We shall bury, when the time comes, those of them who shall die here. We shall, in the years that remain to us, be the country that we have always claimed to be, and we shall do so by the simplest of expedients, which is the keeping of our promises."

The harbor of Auckland, this evening, is filling with lights.

JULY 1, 1999
TEN YEARS AFTER THE DAY: A REPORT

AUCKLAND — On this tenth anniversary of the events of the 1st of July 1989 — referred to in the surviving English-language usage of the Southern Hemisphere as "the Day," and increasingly, by the generation born since, simply as "It" — the Council of Surviving Nations, meeting since 1991 in this city, has issued through its statistical secretariat the decennial assessment that has, since the second anniversary, been the principal occasion of public reckoning with the events of that day and with the decade that has followed it.

The assessment is grim. It is, in the assessment of the President of the Council, the New Zealand jurist Dame Sian Elias, "less grim than the assessment of the fifth anniversary, and more grim than the present generation of New Zealanders shall, in the years remaining to them, find easy to live with."

The principal findings, in such measure as the present account may convey them.

Population

The population of the Earth on the morning of the 1st of July 1989, by the best estimates of the surviving demographic authorities at the University of Auckland and the Australian National University, was approximately 5.18 billion persons.

The population of the Earth at the close of 1989, six months after the event, by the same estimates: approximately 3.4 billion. The reduction, of approximately 1.78 billion persons, was distributed as follows. Direct fatalities from the nuclear exchange itself, including blast, thermal, and acute radiation effects in the immediate days: approximately 720 million. Fatalities from the collapse of medical infrastructure, sanitation, and food distribution in the affected hemispheres in the six months following: approximately 410 million. Fatalities from the agricultural failure of the 1989 Northern Hemisphere growing season and the collapse of food import-dependent populations: approximately 480 million. Fatalities from delayed radiation effects, infectious disease epidemics enabled by the disruption of public health, and exposure during the first nuclear winter: approximately 170 million.

The population of the Earth at the close of 1994, five years after the event: approximately 2.6 billion. The further reduction reflected continued elevated mortality in the affected hemispheres from cancer, infectious disease, malnutrition, and the secondary economic and political collapses of those hemispheres, against suppressed birth rates throughout the affected world.

The population of the Earth at the present writing, by the Council's decennial estimate: approximately 2.4 billion. The decline appears to have stabilized. The proportion of the surviving population resident in the Southern Hemisphere — in 1989, approximately 12 percent — is, at present, approximately 38 percent.

The Northern Hemisphere

The Northern Hemisphere, ten years after the event, is not uninhabited. It is depopulated.

Surviving population in North America, by the best estimates of the surviving Canadian Department of Statistics and the surviving United States Census Bureau in its post-event headquarters at Anchorage, is approximately 95 million persons against a 1989 figure of approximately 275 million. The largest concentrations are in Alaska, in northern Canada (in particular the Yukon and the Northwest Territories, whose populations have multiplied by orders of magnitude through migration from the affected south), in northern Maine and the Atlantic Canadian provinces of New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Newfoundland, in the Pacific Northwest north of the Olympic Peninsula, in the desert Southwest of the United States, in Hawaii (now, as of 1992, an independent constitutional monarchy under the restored House of Kalakaua), and in the Caribbean basin.

The continental United States is no longer, by any meaningful measure, governed as a single political unit. The United States Government in continuity, headquartered since 1991 at Anchorage, claims jurisdiction over those territories and populations of the former Union that recognize its authority. The recognized territories include Alaska, Hawaii, the surviving portions of Washington and Oregon north of the latitude of Seattle, the unaffected portions of the desert Southwest under the New Mexico Compact of 1993, the Atlantic Northeast under the Boston Compact of 1992, and a number of smaller jurisdictions. The recognized authority in much of the former territory of the lower forty-eight states is, in practice, exercised by surviving state governments, by religious authorities, by surviving military commands, by the warlordships of the agricultural midwest and California Central Valley that emerged in the famine years of 1990-92, and in many areas by no authority at all.

Surviving population in Europe, west of the Urals, is approximately 35 million persons against a 1989 figure of approximately 540 million. The pattern of survival is geographically uneven. The Iberian Peninsula — Spain and Portugal, neither of which received direct strikes — retained substantial populations through the catastrophe, although both have lost more than half their pre-event populations to famine, disease, and the migration pressures of the past decade. Ireland, peripherally affected, retains a substantial population. The Scandinavian peninsulas and Iceland, lightly struck and shielded from southerly fallout patterns by atmospheric circulation, retain substantial populations and have absorbed, in the past decade, several million migrants from continental northern Europe. Switzerland, in possession of the most extensive civil-defense infrastructure of any pre-event nation, retained an estimated 60 percent of its pre-event population through the first nuclear winter. Surviving Switzerland, with a present population of approximately 4.2 million, has emerged as the principal continental European center of government, finance, scholarship, and humanitarian coordination. The provisional Government of the European Communities sits, since 1992, in Geneva.

The Holy Father, John Paul II, returned to Rome in 1991, after the fallout in the Lazio region had declined to levels permitting unsuited entry. He took up residence in such of the Vatican as could be made habitable, and resumed the formal exercise of his pontificate. He was assassinated in November 1994 by a member of an apocalyptic fraternity that had emerged in the famine years of central Italy, on the steps of the basilica of St. Peter's, which he had been engaged in restoring with his own hands. He was succeeded by his vicar in Geneva, Cardinal Etchegaray of France, who took the name Pius XIII and who has from Geneva continued the works that his predecessor had commenced.

Surviving population in the territories of the former Soviet Union is estimated at approximately 8 million persons against a 1989 figure of approximately 287 million. The estimate is highly uncertain. The territories of European Russia are, in the principal, depopulated. The territories of central Asia, less heavily struck and supported by surviving Iranian and South Asian agricultural systems, retain larger populations. There is no successor state recognized by any external authority. There are, by the reports reaching Auckland, surviving local authorities of varying scale and varying character, in numbers and in patterns that no surviving authority has had the means to enumerate.

Surviving population in the territories of the People's Republic of China is estimated at approximately 220 million persons against a 1989 figure of approximately 1.13 billion. The Chinese surviving authority, headquartered in Kunming in the southern province of Yunnan under the surviving leadership of the Chinese Communist Party, exercises authority over a substantial portion of the southern and southwestern provinces. Northern China is for the most part depopulated. The southeastern coastal provinces are administered, in practice, by a successor authority headquartered in Hong Kong, which received the British transfer of sovereignty as scheduled on the 1st of July 1997, and which has since 1997 administered an expanding territory of the former southern coastal provinces under arrangements that the Council of Surviving Nations has, in 1998, formally recognized.

Surviving population in Japan, struck severely but possessed of a coherent surviving government and substantial unaffected southern and western prefectures, is approximately 38 million against a 1989 figure of approximately 123 million. Japan, since 1992, has emerged as the principal industrial power of the surviving Northern Hemisphere.

The Southern Hemisphere

The Southern Hemisphere is changed. It is not, by the principal measures of human civilization, broken.

Australia and New Zealand have, in the decade since the event, become the principal political, economic, scientific, and cultural centers of the surviving world. The Council of Surviving Nations, meeting in Auckland, comprises 47 member states. The Council's principal executive arm — the Pacific Reconstruction Authority, headquartered in Wellington — coordinates international shipping, agricultural distribution, refugee resettlement, and scientific research across the surviving world. The combined population of Australia and New Zealand, augmented by approximately 6.8 million accepted refugees over the decade, is at present approximately 28 million. The strain upon the social, economic, and ecological systems of both countries has been, in the testimony of every authority in both countries, considerable. The strain has been, in the testimony of those authorities, accepted.

Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay — South American countries spared direct strike, possessed of substantial agricultural systems, and shielded by southerly latitudes from the most severe nuclear winter effects — are, with Brazil, the principal South American powers of the present world. The combined population of those four countries is approximately 320 million, against a 1989 figure of approximately 240 million. The increase reflects the absorption of refugees from the central and northern parts of the hemisphere.

Sub-Saharan Africa, lightly struck, was not spared. The agricultural collapses of the first nuclear winter, the disruption of import dependencies, the collapse of medical infrastructure (in particular the response to the AIDS epidemic), and the political and military disorders of the decade have reduced the surviving population of the continent from approximately 480 million in 1989 to approximately 280 million at present. The political map of the continent is, today, very different.

India, struck only at military targets and possessed of a coherent surviving government and substantial agricultural capacity, retains approximately 540 million of its 1989 population of approximately 832 million. India is, today, the most populous nation upon the planet. Its government, at New Delhi, exercises an influence in surviving Asian affairs that no Indian government had in 1989 contemplated.

Climate

The first nuclear winter, of the seasons 1989-90 and 1990-91, has receded. The atmospheric particulate burden of the event has, by the measurements of the Australian Bureau of Meteorology and the New Zealand Meteorological Service, declined to levels approaching the pre-event baseline, although certain anomalies in stratospheric circulation persist. Global mean surface temperatures, at present, are approximately 0.4 degrees Celsius below the 1989 baseline. The Northern Hemisphere agricultural growing seasons have, since 1992, returned to approximately 70 percent of their pre-event productivity in the surviving cultivated areas. Those areas are, however, much reduced from their 1989 extent.

The radiological situation is, by the assessment of the International Commission on Radiological Protection at its present headquarters in Geneva, "manageable in the longer term and severe in the medium term." Cancer mortality, in particular among populations exposed to the early fallout patterns of 1989-90, remains at multiples of pre-event baseline rates and is expected to remain so through approximately 2020. The genetic effects of the exposures will, by the assessment of the Commission, be the subject of inquiry through the present generation and the next.

The Closing

The Prime Minister of New Zealand, Jenny Shipley, in her address to the Council of Surviving Nations this morning at Parliament House in Wellington, observed that the work of the past decade had not, on the whole, been the work that any of the persons who undertook it had been raised to do.

"We were, in the country of my upbringing," she said, "the children of a small and prosperous and peripheral nation. We were taught to be modest about our country and modestly to expect of it modest things. We have, since the events of ten years ago today, been called upon to be a great deal less modest, and a great deal more, than the country we were raised to be. We have, by the testimony of every honest soul among us, fallen short. We have also, by the testimony of those who have looked to us, exceeded what was, in the catastrophe of that day, expected of us. We do not know whether we shall, in the decade to come, sustain what we have, in the decade past, accomplished. We know only that we shall continue to attempt it."

The Prime Minister concluded by reading the names. They are read each year, on the anniversary, in the proceedings of the Council. The reading lasts approximately twenty minutes. The names read are not the names of the dead, of which there are no lists. They are the names of the cities. They are read in the order in which the cities were destroyed.

JULY 1, 2039

A LETTER TO MY GREAT-GRANDDAUGHTER

On this fiftieth anniversary of the events that the surviving English language has agreed, by long usage, to call the Day, the New Zealand Broadcasting Corporation has invited a small number of citizens born before the event to compose, in such measures as their failing energies permit, accounts of the period that the present generation, now in its possession of the surviving world, has begun to ask after with the urgency that all generations bring to the questions about the times of their grandparents. I am, at 79, one of the persons asked. I shall, in the form of a letter to my great-granddaughter Mereana, who is six and who shall not, in the order of nature, read this until I am long buried in the cemetery at Karori, attempt the account.

Mereana, my dear,

You have asked me, in the way of small children, what the world was like before the Day. I have, in the way of the old, evaded the question, on the principle that you have been spared knowing what we lost and that our duty to you is to keep the sparing intact for as long as we may. Your mother has, however, informed me that you have begun to ask the question of others, and that you have begun to receive answers that are, in her judgment and in mine, not the answers that the question deserves. I shall therefore, in this letter, attempt my answer, in such language as I have, with the intention that you read it when you are older, and with the apology that I have, in the giving of it, taken longer than the asking required.

I was twenty-nine years old on the Day. I was a journalist for the Wellington bureau of the New Zealand Press Association. I was, on the morning of the 1st of July 1989, in my office on the Terrace, drafting a report on the parliamentary debate of the previous evening regarding the proposed amendments to the Resource Management Bill. I remember the topic because I have, in the half-century since, often considered how strange it is that such a topic should have been the work of my hands an hour before the world ended.

The world that ended was not the world that has, in the decades since, been described to you. It was a richer world. It was a more crowded world. It was, in the regions you have heard described as "the burning lands," a world of lights at night so numerous that, if you flew above the Earth as the astronauts of that period flew, you saw the cities of Europe and America and East Asia as patterns of light upon the darkened surface of the planet, and the patterns were beautiful, continuous, and they extended for thousands of kilometers across continents that had, for centuries, been in possession of a civilization that built and built and built. The civilization built badly in many ways. It built well in others. It built, above all, more than the present world has built or, perhaps, shall build.

It is gone. The lights are gone. The cities are gone, and many of the people, and most of the institutions, and the better part of what the human species had taken five thousand years to construct. They were gone in approximately one afternoon.

You have asked me what was lost. I shall not, in this letter, give you the lists. The lists are kept by historians of greater patience than I possess. I shall give you only the categories, and you shall, when you are older, fill them in with the materials of your own inquiry.

We lost, in approximately five hours, the principal cities of the Northern Hemisphere — every great metropolitan center of the United States, of Europe, of the Soviet Union, of China, of Japan, save a small number that were, by accident or by oversight, spared. We lost, in approximately six months, the populations of those cities not killed in the strikes themselves but killed in the famines, the diseases, the cold, and the disorders that followed. We lost, in approximately five years, a further great fraction of the survivors, in numbers that the demographers of your generation are still computing.

We lost, in approximately five hours, the great libraries of the world. The British Library, the Library of Congress, the Bibliothèque nationale, the Lenin Library, the libraries of Beijing and Tokyo, the great university libraries of every continent. The collections at the Vatican, the Hermitage, the Louvre, the British Museum, the Metropolitan, the National Gallery in Washington, the Prado, the Uffizi. The historical archives of every European nation, of which the substantial preponderance had been collected at central locations and were, in those locations, destroyed. We have, in the decades since, recovered such fragments as had been microfilmed in advance, or copied to repositories outside the affected regions, or were carried out by individuals with the foresight and the means and the strength. The fragments are, by the assessment of the present custodians at the National Library here in Wellington and at the State Library in Canberra, perhaps two percent of what was. Perhaps less. The figure is, in the testimony of every honest librarian I have met, the most painful figure that the catastrophe has produced.

We lost, in approximately five hours, the institutions of higher learning of the Northern Hemisphere. Cambridge and Oxford and the Sorbonne and Heidelberg and Berlin and Moscow and Leningrad and Beijing and Kyoto. Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, Chicago, Berkeley, Stanford, M.I.T. The medical schools, the law schools, the polytechnics, the conservatories. The faculties were, in the principal, in their offices and laboratories at the hour of the strikes. The students were, in the principal, on their summer arrangements but in numbers still resident at their universities. The institutions are gone in nearly every case. The traditions they sustained are, in many cases, gone with them.

We lost, in approximately five hours, the great hospitals and medical research institutions of the affected hemispheres, with consequences that the public health records of the past five decades have spelled out. The cures and treatments that those institutions had been on the verge of producing in 1989 — for cancer, for HIV, for aging itself, can you believe it? — were, for the most part, not produced. They have, in the decades since, been produced by the surviving institutions of India and Japan and Hong Kong, in fewer numbers, at slower rates, and at higher costs. Many of the diseases that, in the world before, had been on the verge of mastery, are still, in the present world, killing people who would not have been killed by them in a land without the Day.

We lost, in approximately five hours, an entire generation of the world's children, in the hundreds of millions, who were on the morning of the 1st of July 1989 in school, in nursery, at play in the streets of cities that no longer exist. I have found that the loss of the children is the loss that is, in the small hours, hardest to bear. The other losses can, in some measure, be reckoned. The loss of the children cannot.

I could give you many more categories. I shall give you only one more. We lost, in the slower time of the decade following the Day, the political imagination by which the world had organized its affairs since the conclusion of the Second World War. The system of the United Nations, the system of the great trading institutions, the system of the alliances, the system of the international scientific and cultural organizations. They were not destroyed in the strikes. They were destroyed in the absence of the people that had, for forty-four years, sustained them. They have not been replaced by anything of comparable ambition. The Council of Surviving Nations, here in Auckland, is a brave and capable institution, and it has, for fifty years, done such work as the surviving world has required of it. It is not the United Nations. It does not aspire to be.

You shall ask me, my dear, why this happened. I shall, in this letter, attempt only the briefest answer.

It happened because a small number of men in a single building in Moscow, having seized power in their country by force, having found themselves in possession of a war that they could not win and a country that they could no longer govern, having heard the false counsel of an even smaller number of men who told them that a demonstrative employment of the weapons in their possession would produce a political outcome they could survive, employed those weapons. It happened because, in the moment of that employment, the political authorities of the United States and its allies, finding themselves confronted with a choice that the strategic doctrines of forty-four years had taught them to make in the manner they made it, made it. It happened because, in the moment of that response, the surviving Soviet command authority, executing pre-delegated launch authorities through automated systems that had been constructed precisely to remove the human element from the decision in the event of a decapitating strike, fulfilled its grim task. It happened because, having begun, the Day could not be stopped.

The deeper question, the one you are old enough now to begin asking and not old enough yet to receive a sufficient answer to, is why did we, in 1989, organize our affairs so that an outcome of this character was within the power of any small group of fallible men to produce. The answer to that question is the work of your generation, my dear, and of your children's generation, and of the historians of the centuries to come. I shall not attempt it. I shall observe only that the world I was born into, in 1960, was a world in which approximately seventy thousand nuclear weapons were, by the calculations of the strategic analysts of that period, deployed by the principal nuclear powers, and that in the world I was born into the existence of those weapons was treated, by the political and intellectual authorities of every great nation, as a circumstance that the species had no choice but to accept. We accepted it. We accepted it for forty-four years. On the forty-fifth year, we paid for the acceptance, and we paid in such measures we have not yet finished counting.

I shall close, my dear, with what your mother has asked me to close with. She has asked me to tell you that the world you have been born into, while smaller and harder and colder than the world that I was born into, is not a world without hope. She is right. The world you have been born into has, in the half-century since the Day, learned things that the world before never learned. It has learned that the Earth is small and that the human species is one species. It has learned that the institutions of civilization are precious and that they are not, in any sense, automatic. It has learned that the great tasks of human life — the feeding of the hungry, the teaching of the young, the healing of the sick, the consoling of the bereaved — are tasks that must be done by hand, every day, by people of patience and of care, and that the technological and political abstractions by which the previous world had attempted to relieve itself of those tasks were, in the catastrophe, the first things to fail.

You shall, when you are older, do these tasks. You shall do them in a country that, by the patience and the care of the people of your great-grandmother's generation and of your grandmother's and of your mother's, has remained a country in which the tasks may be done. You shall do them in the company of others who have, by the inheritance of their grandparents' choices, the same opportunity. You shall, in the course of your life, encounter persons who have asked, as I have asked, whether what was preserved was worth what was lost. You shall, my dear, give them the only answer that is, in the world we now inhabit, available.

You shall say: the world is what we have. We shall make of it what we may.

Your great-grandfather loves you.

He shall, in the time remaining to him, continue to do so.

—David Lange Whitley, Wellington, 1 July 2039

This is a out-of-universe explanation of why I made the choices I did in this piece, explaining how it is, as best as I could, historically grounded, in a 1989 we thankfully did not see. Needless to say, spoilers abound so read this only after the preceding two posts.

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The Iranian plot: The Soviets have coveted Iran since before the Soviet Union existed – the Russian Empire yearned for "washing their boots in the warm waters of the Indian Ocean", to paraphrase Vladimir Zhirinovsky. Khomeini's incipient death and Iranian instability was well known in the late 1980s, so of course the KGB would have a plan for it. In our tale, that plan went wildly out of control – ambitious junior officers (I had initially intended on one Major V. V. Putin to take the lead, but that would have been too cute by half and he was busy in Germany at the time) grasping for the One Weird Trick that would hand the Soviets the Middle East. So, killing Khomeini's designated successor, framing one of the two contestants for the throne, and then causing a general governmental collapse preceding an invasion is pretty much what the KGB does (and how they took over Afghanistan a decade earlier). The problem is that this is 1989 and Mikhail Gorbachev would not have countenanced it. Thus what triggers the failure cascade that follows – the KGB just did it anyway.

The Russian coup: obviously, extremely plausible – after all, it happened in our timeline only two years later. However, in this timeline the KGB was forced to act by Gorbachev discovering the Iran shenanigans, and Kryuchkov responding to his firing by instead removing Gorbachev from power. No drunken Yanayev appearing on state TV, and poor Boris Yeltsin is shot trying to take his place in history. Everything else happens as it did during the actual coup – only with more brutality, and more effectiveness. The initial press conference, which in reality led to the coup's collapse, instead resulted in the doubtful reporters being arrested. The demonstrations in Moscow and Lithuania, in this timeline put down with excessive force. The problem is that the coup leadership is still incredibly unstable – and committed to war in Iran.

The Iran war: the KGB plan at first goes off without a hitch, but there was no planning for US intervention. And the US would never let the Strait of Hormuz be held by a hostile power, would it? (Pause for me to laugh maniacally.) Thus the RDF/Central Command seizes most of the southern Iranian coast, with zero resistance from a very bemused Iran which is watching all sorts of superpower invaders run around with a very Persian detachment. The inevitable escalations happen as the Soviet and American forces meet; neither has the strength to meet each other with full force but both skirmish and real losses occur.

The first escalation: The Soviets attempt to hit the US supply lines in Diego Garcia, but fail; in response, the Americans hit the base that the attack was launched from. The problem is that this base is in Russia – an extreme act of escalation which somehow does not occur to American planners (this constant escalation heedless of consequence happens throughout this tale; anyone who believes it stretches credulity is invited to study the first year of the Korean war). Meanwhile protests in eastern Europe, instead of triggering the peaceful changes of government in our timeline, meet a Russian armored fist and escalate into open revolt. The Soviet junta feels that events are out of control, and the only response they can see is to escalate further. Thus: the invasion of Germany.

The German war: I'll put it plainly – in my opinion, the West has always wildly overestimated the Soviet threat to Europe. What NATO planners saw as an advantage - the Warsaw Pact allied armies – in reality were a third column behind the Soviet lines, at best sitting out the conflict and at worst in open revolt. Soviet hardware never measured up to NATO standards and by 1989 were outclassed in virtually every way. Thus, the Soviet Air Force wipeout, and the Soviet invasion, thanks to a few days warning due to heightened tensions, meets a ready NATO line that turns them back at the border. Losses are severe the first day, but the rest resembles what, in our timeline, those same units would do in Iraq a year later, against much the same hardware. The war was folly for the Soviets to launch; an act of desperate escalation to try to seize advantage and was lost on the first day.

The second escalation: Americans gonna America. As it becomes clear that the Soviet Army has collapsed, US military leadership sees an opportunity to run the table and clear Europe of its longtime enemy. The problem is that in a nuclear world, a superpower cannot lose a war if it is a threat to its existence, and NATO driving towards the Soviet border definitely qualifies. Every single desperate message the Soviets send to back off is completely ignored and on the final day NATO is bombing targets within Russia (well, the Kaliningrad exclave, which counts and wasn't an exclave in 1989).

The nuclear war: having exhausted all other messages, the Soviets fire what they consider a warning shot. It being Russia, their version is hitting virtually every NATO capitol. (Why Munich? Maybe Kryuchkov was a technodisco fan.) The result is predictable; the Soviet military removes Kryuchkov immediately, Gorbachev is restored, and Bush responds. I had mapped out three possible options for Bush - the savagely proportional counterstrike that killed millions more innocents, declining to respond in kind which would have dire consequences for the Allied governments (the UK or France may have retaliated on their own at that point) or a "counterforce" strike seeking to destroy the Soviet nuclear force, which would have quickly escalated to the end of the world. The proportional response seems very Bush to me.

The results: even a very limited nuclear exchange like I describe eventually results in the deaths of a billion people. (Famine is a killer.) The world, ironically, is somewhat of a better place in many respects; fusion power, no climate crisis, a united Europe, a global community that is mostly peaceful, and in general, especially compared to today, a more thoughtful, contemplative public. Near death experiences do that. Donald Trump died in 1989, and his brand of populism did not survive the blast. There was no al-Qaeda, no Iraq or Afghan war. Still, it is a world that collectively has the worst case of PTSD ever recorded, the millenial generation is forced to basically remake the planet, and nuclear weapons, though greatly reduced, still exist.

The center: in my story, the moral center of the tale is Pope John Paul II, a role he would assume with relish, I think. The absolutely medieval reaction of his prostrating himself in a Geneva cathedral (the Vatican moved him the day before as Rome could have been targeted) and never coming out as the cathedral bells toll the death of nations is something he would very much have done. The world of 2049 is far more religious than our own – again, near death experiences do that.

Side points/trivia: I started with the image of Saddam Hussein meeting the ambassador of Kuwait and going "what the actual fuck" as the world collapses around him. His being, somehow, a pillar of stability in the Middle East is frankly absurd, but sometimes the world is absurdist. And hey, why not have Schwarzkopf help out with his strategic planning, since he's not that great at it.

If you think Lech Walesa's declaration of war on Russia is outside the bounds of possibility, you haven't spoken to many Poles. They remember. That's kind of their thing.

The news being obsessed with two US POWs the first week of the war and then promptly forgetting them as everything devolves into hell is very US media. (It's OK, Rodionov let them go at the border. No hard feelings.)

The way East Germany collapses is, as per the prime directive of counterfactuals, reality reasserting itself. The Alexanderplatz massacre shocked the Soviets almost as much as the Germans, and they were ordered not to repeat this under any circumstance (instructions which, obviously, did not apply to Poland). The NVA opening the Berlin Wall is pretty much what happened in our timeline, only with much less risk on their part. The Czech velvet revolution happens almost identically to our history.

Ukraine always gets screwed. At this point it's a law of physics. And yes, I used Kyiv over Kiev and similar namings intentionally, although it's anachronistic. (Dnepropetrovsk instead of Dnipro, though - that didn't happen until 2016)

I really don't have anything against John Galvin; he just happened to have the job at the time.

Viktor Anpilov's "of what use is a world without the Soviet Union" quote is taken directly from Dmitry Kiselyov's “Why do we need a world if Russia is not in it?” quote on Russian state TV in the aftermath of the invasion of Ukraine. Today's Russian media is very fond of threatening nuclear annihilation.

We're going to assume that nearly dying in a nuclear blast made Dan Quayle grow up. George W. Bush presumably remains governor of Texas, or possibly a baseball team owner.

The Pugwash Declaration disavowing Herman Kahn's nuclear war theory is real. Just another callout from someone who reads about this stuff too much.

South Africa's fate was my way of saying the new world isn't uniformly better - in the absence of our world's 1990s, South Africa got the Nazi Eugene Terre Blanche of the AWB instead of Nelson Mandela. It's safe to say it did not go well. The South African nuclear program actually existed, but in our timeline was closed much earlier. On the other hand, North Korea presumably is no longer a nuclear power; we'll give China credit for that one. And yes, the Chinese century is still on schedule, and probably will be the next major global conflict in that timeline. Thankfully, not a nuclear one.

I hope you enjoyed reading all this. Writing it was certainly cathartic in many ways. My generation, "GenX", has always been convinced we would die in a nuclear explosion; as we careen towards forgetting what that means reminders are good.

BONN — At 4:14 a.m. Central European Time today, ten days and seven hours after the seizure of power in Moscow by the so-called Emergency Committee, the Group of Soviet Forces, Germany crossed the inner-German frontier in a co-ordinated offensive across a front of 280 kilometers, opening upon the soil of Western Europe a war that the populations of two continents had hoped, with diminishing conviction over the past week, might yet be averted.

By midnight tonight the offensive had been, in the words of the Supreme Allied Commander Europe, Gen. John R. Galvin, "checked along the entirety of its axis of advance, at a cost in human life and in materiel that has no precedent in the history of this alliance, and at a result whose meaning the historians of the next century will study and the soldiers of this one will not soon forget." Soviet ground forces had advanced no further than 25 kilometers beyond the frontier at any point. Soviet air forces had been driven, by the assessment of NATO's Allied Air Forces Central Europe, from the contested airspace over the Federal Republic. The price of the day, on both sides, had been catastrophic.

The Air Battle

The campaign opened, twenty-three minutes before the ground assault, with what the United States Air Force would later describe as "the largest single offensive air operation conducted by any nation since the operations against Japan in August 1945" — a co-ordinated strike by an estimated 1,400 aircraft of Soviet Frontal Aviation, Long-Range Aviation, and Naval Aviation, against the principal NATO airbases of the Federal Republic of Germany, the Low Countries, the United Kingdom, and Italy. The strike package, rising from forward bases across the German Democratic Republic, Poland, the western military districts of the Soviet Union, and from the bomber fields of the Soviet Arctic and the Kola Peninsula, was directed against 47 fixed installations across NATO Europe. Its objective, in Soviet doctrine, was the destruction on the ground of the tactical air forces upon which the alliance depends for the defense of the central front.

It miscarried at every level.

The strike was detected in its earliest assembly phases by the United States Air Force's E-3 Sentry airborne early warning aircraft of the 552nd Airborne Warning and Control Wing, on continuous patrol since June 23, and by signals intelligence collection that has been, in the words of one NATO official, "extraordinarily fortunate this past week, for reasons that will perhaps be discussed at greater length in another generation." NATO interceptors, on cockpit alert at every active forward operating base since the Mozdok strikes of June 25, were airborne at every base across the alliance within seven minutes of the warning. By the time the leading Soviet strike packages crossed the inner-German frontier at high altitude shortly after 4 a.m., they were being engaged, at long range, by F-15C Eagles of the 36th Tactical Fighter Wing at Bitburg, by F-4F Phantoms of the German Luftwaffe, by Tornado F.3 interceptors of the Royal Air Force, by F-16As of the Royal Netherlands Air Force, and by Mirage 2000C interceptors of the French Armée de l'Air operating, for the first time in the postwar history of the Republic, in fully integrated co-ordination with NATO's air defense system.

The result, by the assessment of NATO air officers reached at Ramstein and at High Wycombe in the late evening, was the most lopsided air engagement in the history of modern aviation.

Approximately 900 Soviet aircraft were destroyed in the air over the course of the day. The losses encompassed every category of the Soviet inventory committed to the strike: MiG-29 and Su-27 escort fighters, Su-24 Fencer strike aircraft, Su-25 Frogfoot ground attack aircraft, Tu-22M Backfire medium bombers operating from bases in Belarus and Ukraine, Tu-95 and Tu-160 Blackjack strategic bombers operating in the unaccustomed role of stand-off cruise missile carriers from the Arctic. The entire operational fleet of the Tu-160 Blackjack — sixteen aircraft, the most modern strategic bomber in the Soviet inventory and a system the United States had publicly identified as the cornerstone of Soviet long-range aviation — was committed to the strike, and the entire operational fleet was destroyed, in the air or in the recovery phase of its mission, by F-15s and F-14s vectored against the bombers across the North Sea, the Norwegian Sea, and at the limit of NATO radar coverage above the Arctic Circle.

NATO air-to-air losses, against this immensity, were reported by Gen. Galvin at his evening press conference at Casteau as "negligible." A single F-15C of the 32nd Tactical Fighter Squadron from Soesterberg, in the Netherlands, was lost over the North Sea in circumstances that may have included a midair collision with a Soviet aircraft it was engaging. A French Mirage 2000C was lost over Lower Saxony to fratricidal engagement by a NATO surface-to-air missile, the pilot recovered alive. A Tornado F.3 of No. 11 Squadron, Royal Air Force, was lost over the southern North Sea, the crew ejected and recovered. The total NATO air-to-air combat losses of the day, as confirmed at the close of business, stood at three aircraft and one airman.

The Soviet aircraft that did succeed in penetrating to their assigned targets — perhaps 200 of the 1,400 launched — inflicted significant damage on the ground at a number of NATO airfields, principally at Bitburg, at Hahn, at Spangdahlem, at Twenthe, at Volkel, and at Geilenkirchen. Approximately 200 NATO aircraft were destroyed or rendered non-operational on the ground, the great majority transport, support, and second-line aircraft of lower readiness. The hardened aircraft shelters that have characterized NATO basing since the early 1980s — much disparaged in their cost, and never before tested — performed in nearly every case to specification.

The destruction of the Soviet strike force was such that, by midmorning, the second wave of the planned operation — assembling at forward bases across the German Democratic Republic and Poland — did not depart its hardstands. By midafternoon, what remained of Soviet Frontal Aviation in Germany had been driven onto the defensive over its own airfields. By the evening, NATO strike aircraft were operating at will above the GSFG rear areas, and had begun the systematic destruction of Soviet air-defense radars, command posts, fuel depots, and forward bridging assets across the GDR.

The Ground Battle

The ground offensive, opening at 4:37 a.m., was directed along three principal axes corresponding to the doctrinal expectations of NATO planners across forty years.

In the north, three divisions of the 3rd Shock Army of GSFG crossed the frontier in the Lüneburg Heath sector north of Helmstedt, on the historic North German Plain axis toward Hannover, against the British I Corps and the West German I Corps of NORTHAG. In the center, the four divisions of the 8th Guards Army crossed in the Fulda sector toward the Hessian heartland, against the United States V Corps of CENTAG. In the south, two divisions of the 1st Guards Tank Army out of Dresden moved through the Hof corridor toward Bavaria and the U.S. VII Corps. By 7 a.m., elements of a Soviet motor rifle regiment, unaccompanied by any East German forces, had entered West Berlin from the Soviet sector and proceeded to the Allied Kommandatura, where the small American, British, and French garrisons of the city — by the standing orders of the Allied governments, deployed not as a defending force but as a tripwire — surrendered after symbolic resistance, the senior officer of each garrison having broken his sword in the presence of his Soviet counterpart.

The ground campaign in West Germany proper unfolded otherwise.

In the Fulda sector, the lead division of the 8th Guards Army, the 79th Guards Tank Division, encountered upon crossing the frontier the prepared positions of the United States 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment — the so-called Blackhorse — supported by the 3rd Armored Division and by tactical aviation including AH-64A Apache attack helicopters of the 6th Cavalry Brigade and A-10A Thunderbolt II close-air-support aircraft of the 81st Tactical Fighter Wing. By midmorning the 79th Guards Tank Division had ceased to function as an organized formation. Its commander, Maj. Gen. Vladimir A. Sorokin, was reported by intercepted communications to have been killed in his command vehicle at approximately 9:30. The 39th Guards Motor Rifle Division, attempting in the early afternoon to pass through the wreckage of the 79th and to continue the advance, was halted approximately 18 kilometers inside the federal territory and was, by evening, in the early stages of withdrawal toward the frontier.

In the Lüneburg sector, the 10th Guards Tank Division, advancing against the British 1st Armoured Division and elements of the U.S. 2nd Armored Cavalry Regiment, achieved the deepest Soviet penetration of the day — 25 kilometers, to the village of Bahrdorf — at a price its surviving officers will not, in the assessment of one NATO intelligence officer, "willingly recount in the years remaining to them." The 10th Guards Tank Division, the most decorated armored formation in the Soviet ground forces, with battle honors stretching from Stalingrad to Berlin, ceased to exist as a divisional organization shortly after 4 p.m. The 30th Guards Motor Rifle Division, ordered to pass through and to continue the advance, declined the order. The text of its commander's response, as intercepted at SHAPE, was reported by one source as: "There is nothing through which to pass."

The defending NATO forces did not escape unscathed. The U.S. 2nd Armored Cavalry Regiment, in the Fulda sector, suffered casualties on a scale not experienced by an American formation of its size since the closing engagements of the Korean War. The West German 5th Panzer Division, holding the right flank of the British I Corps in the Lüneburg sector, was reported by NORTHAG to have lost in killed, wounded, and missing approximately one-third of its divisional strength, including its commanding general, Generalmajor Klaus Reinhardt, killed when his command vehicle was struck by Soviet artillery in the late morning. The 1st Battalion, the Royal Tank Regiment, holding the village of Brome against repeated assault by elements of the 10th Guards Tank Division, lost 38 of its 57 Challenger tanks engaged.

NATO casualty estimates issued at midnight gave killed-in-action figures of 1,840 American, 920 British, 1,470 West German, 280 Dutch, 60 Belgian, and 40 French. Wounded figures were given as approximately three times the killed-in-action totals. The total of NATO killed for the day exceeded any single day's losses by the alliance in any preceding conflict.

Soviet ground losses, by NATO assessment, were approximately 22,000 killed, an unknown but substantially larger number wounded, and prisoners of war — chiefly from disintegrated forward elements of the 79th Guards Tank Division and the 10th Guards Tank Division — totaling at the close of business approximately 4,200 men.

The Collapse Of The Warsaw Pact

Across the rear of the offensive, the political assumption upon which the entire Soviet operation had been constructed — that the armies of the Warsaw Pact, however reluctant, would broadly perform the missions assigned to them in the Soviet plan of campaign — collapsed in the course of the day with a comprehensiveness that no Western intelligence service had been prepared to anticipate.

Of the six East German divisions of the National People's Army nominally available to the Soviet command, two — the 11th Motor Rifle Division at Halle and the 8th Motor Rifle Division at Schwerin — refused orders to deploy and remained in their barracks under the authority of officers' councils improvised in the early morning hours. Two — the 4th Motor Rifle Division at Erfurt and the 9th Panzer Division at Eggesin — disintegrated, the troops simply walking from their positions in the direction of their homes. The remaining two were committed to the offensive in supporting roles and performed indifferently, the 7th Panzer Division refusing toward midmorning to advance further than the frontier itself.

Of the five Polish divisions nominally constituting the Polish Front of the Soviet plan, none crossed the frontier into the German Democratic Republic. The 11th Armored Cavalry Division at Zagan ordered its tanks parked. The 5th Mechanized Division at Gubin reported, in language audible to Western intelligence, that its trains were not yet ready. The 12th Mechanized Division at Szczecin reported that "the Polish Army does not at this time engage in operations against the German people." The Polish Defense Ministry in Warsaw, dispatching peremptory orders for movement, received in reply the equivalent of silence.

Of the three Czechoslovak divisions in the second strategic echelon, all three remained in their garrisons in Bohemia and Moravia, the political situation in Prague having, by every indication, advanced overnight to the point at which the Czechoslovak Defense Ministry had ceased to issue orders to its own field formations. Hungarian forces, formally allocated to the southern strategic direction, made no movement of any character.

The Soviet second-echelon armies — the 28th Combined Arms Army at Brest in the Belorussian Military District, the 7th Tank Army at Borisov, and the 5th Guards Tank Army at Bobruisk — had been, since the morning of June 25, on movement orders toward Poland and onward to the GDR. Their movement, by the evening of the 27th, had been redirected. The 28th Combined Arms Army was reported by Western intelligence to be detraining at Bialystok, in northeastern Poland; the 7th Tank Army at Lublin; the 5th Guards Tank Army at Warsaw itself, where its lead elements were observed entering the city at sundown and proceeding to the principal government buildings, the railway stations, and the broadcasting facilities. The Group of Soviet Forces in Germany would receive, on this day, no second-echelon reinforcement.

The Country Behind the Lines

The civilian population of the Federal Republic of Germany, on whose soil the war was now being fought for the first time since 1945, was in motion in numbers that the federal authorities, in a midnight communiqué from the Interior Ministry, declined to estimate beyond "the millions." The autobahn network westward of the Rhine was solid with private automobiles. The principal rail stations of every western German city dispatched extra trains throughout the day toward the French and Belgian and Dutch frontiers. The French government opened its border without formality, in language echoing that of the Hungarian opening to refugees from the East three days earlier, and dispatched military and Red Cross personnel to the frontier crossings to assist with the reception. The Dutch and Belgian governments did the same.

In Berlin, fallen this day after twenty-eight years, the population of the western half of the city — three of whose Allied garrisons had surrendered in the early morning — gathered through the day at the Brandenburg Gate, at Checkpoint Charlie, at Wittenbergplatz, in the great squares of the divided city, in numbers and in silence that defied description.

In Bonn, Chancellor Kohl addressed the nation on television at 10 p.m., his voice unsteady, and confirmed the reports of the day. He read, slowly, the names of the German towns through which the front line of the war now ran. He thanked, by name, the United States, the United Kingdom, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, and Norway. He concluded: "Tomorrow we shall begin to bury our dead. We shall begin also to make Germany whole. The two are not separate works. May God help us, and may God help the Russian people, with whom we have, even tonight, no quarrel."

In Moscow, the Tass evening broadcast announced "successes of the Soviet armed forces in the western strategic direction" and called for the assembly of all Communist Party committees throughout the country at 9 a.m. tomorrow morning to "consider the situation."

IN IRAN, BOTH SIDES HOLD IN PLACE, WAITING

ABOARD U.S.S. INDEPENDENCE — The Iranian theater of operations, which a week ago appeared to be the principal locus of the Soviet-American war and which today became plainly its secondary front, was reported tonight to have entered upon a posture of mutual immobility, with neither Soviet nor American ground forces undertaking offensive operations of consequence in the course of the day, and with both sides — by every indication available to the senior American commanders embarked aboard this carrier — devoting the day to consolidation, to the evacuation of casualties, and to the close observation of events upon the German central front, 3,000 miles to the northwest, upon which the larger fortunes of both armies have, since 4 a.m. Central European Time, now plainly come to depend.

Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, the Central Command commander, in his daily morning briefing at the forward headquarters at Riyadh, advised reporters that "the Iranian theater is, as of this morning, neither the main theater nor the decisive theater of this war. It has become a holding theater. We shall hold." Asked whether American forces in Iran would be ordered to advance, the General replied: "We shall hold. The men in Moscow have begun a war in Germany that they will not finish. When that is understood by them, the disposition of forces in Iran will be a subject of negotiation. Until then, we shall hold what we have, we shall protect what we have taken, and we shall keep the strait open. That is the mission today. That is the mission tomorrow."

The Soviet 4th Combined Arms Army, halted since June 26 along the line Yazd-Hamadan-Ahvaz, made no forward movement today. Western intelligence reports indicated that its forward fuel and ammunition stocks were being consolidated at intermediate depots; that its casualties from the Bafq engagement of two days previous, estimated by Pentagon analysts at 4,000 killed and wounded, were being evacuated by helicopter to medical facilities in the rear and onward by Il-76 transport to the Soviet Union; and that no replacement personnel or replacement equipment had reached the theater in the previous 48 hours, the Soviet strategic airlift fleet being committed in its entirety to the support of the operation in Germany.

The Tudeh Party "provisional revolutionary government" in Tehran issued no proclamations today. Its nominal head, Ehsan Tabari, was reported by the BBC Persian Service, citing sources within the Soviet diplomatic community in the Iranian capital, to have died overnight, of natural causes, at the age of 73. No successor was announced. The Soviet military command in Tehran, headed by Marshal Igor Rodionov, was reported by the same sources to have placed the Iranian capital under direct military administration pending "the establishment of stable civilian arrangements." Marshal Rodionov was further reported to have ordered the cessation of all activities of armed Tudeh militants in the city, several of whom had on the previous evening become engaged in firefights with elements of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps not yet effectively suppressed in the southern districts of the capital. The Marshal's order, monitored by Western intelligence, included the unusual injunction that "the Soviet armed forces are not in Iran to settle the political disputes of Iranians among themselves."

In the southern theater, the United States 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault) and the 24th Infantry Division (Mechanized), now closing on its theater assembly area in eastern Saudi Arabia after its trans-Atlantic deployment, did not engage Soviet forces. American positions at Bafq, Kerman, Bandar Abbas, and Chah Bahar were reinforced through the day. The 7th Marine Expeditionary Brigade conducted limited patrolling north and west of Bandar Abbas without contact. The U.S.S. Theodore Roosevelt battle group, having transited the Suez Canal and the Bab-el-Mandeb in the previous 48 hours, took station this morning in the Arabian Sea, doubling the carrier strike capability available to Central Command.

A senior American intelligence officer aboard this ship, asked by a pool reporter whether the Soviet halt represented exhaustion or political calculation, replied: "It represents both, and they are at this point the same thing."

CHINA EXPRESSES "GRAVE CONCERN" AT HOSTILITIES

BEIJING — The Government of the People's Republic of China, which since the seizure of power in Moscow ten days ago has maintained a public silence of a comprehensiveness remarkable even by the customary standards of its diplomacy, broke that silence today in a statement of 184 Chinese characters, issued through the Xinhua News Agency at 6 p.m. local time, that expressed the Chinese Government's "grave concern" at the outbreak of armed hostilities between the Soviet Union and the United States, called upon "all parties" to "exercise the utmost restraint," and advocated "the resolution of disputes between great powers through the methods of peaceful negotiation rather than the methods of military confrontation."

The statement was attributed to a spokesman of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and was not delivered in person. It was rebroadcast on Central People's Radio on the 8 p.m. evening news. It was followed by no commentary, by no editorial, by no further elaboration, and by no answer to the questions of the foreign correspondents who attempted, in the hours after its release, to obtain one.

The statement contained no reference to the Soviet invasion of Iran, no reference to the Soviet invasion of the Federal Republic of Germany, no reference to the so-called Emergency Committee, no reference to Mr. Gorbachev, no reference to President Bush, no reference to the Atlantic alliance, no reference to the Warsaw Pact, no reference to the Polish Military Council, no reference to the German Democratic Republic, no reference to the Korean Peninsula, no reference to Taiwan, no reference to the Sino-Soviet frontier, and no reference to the situation in the Chinese capital itself, where the events of June 4 in Tiananmen Square had been followed in the intervening twenty-three days by a process of consolidation under the new leadership of General Secretary Jiang Zemin whose nature and direction remained, to outside observation, opaque.

It was, in the assessment of every Western diplomat in Beijing reached for comment, the most carefully empty statement of the year.

A senior Western ambassador, speaking on background and at length, offered the following analysis: "It is a statement that says nothing. That is its purpose. It says nothing because Beijing has not yet decided what to say. It has not yet decided what to say because it has not yet decided which of three propositions is most likely to be true at the close of business one week from today: that the Soviet Union shall have suffered a defeat from which it will not soon recover; that the Soviet Union shall have suffered a defeat from which it will not ever recover; or that the Americans, having brought the Soviet Union to its knees, shall now turn the apparatus of their concern upon the next great Communist power within their reach. Until Beijing has resolved which of these is the case, Beijing will say nothing of consequence. It will, in the meantime, say things like 'grave concern.'"

In Washington, the State Department spokeswoman, Margaret D. Tutwiler, asked by a reporter whether the United States had any reaction to the Chinese statement, replied: "We have noted it. We are in continuing diplomatic contact with the Government of the People's Republic of China. We take note of its expressed concern, which we share. We have nothing further at this time."

In Taipei, in Seoul, in Tokyo, in Hanoi, in Pyongyang, in New Delhi, the statement was studied with interest. None of those capitals issued, in response, any statement of its own.

The 38 divisions of the Chinese People's Liberation Army deployed along the Sino-Soviet frontier in Manchuria, in Inner Mongolia, and in Xinjiang, were reported by Western intelligence sources late tonight to have undergone, in the course of the past 24 hours, a quiet but unmistakable upward adjustment in their state of readiness, which had not been authorized by any public order, and to which the Soviet Far Eastern Military District had, by every indication, not yet responded.

SOVIET FOREIGN MINISTER BESSMERTNYKH DEFECTS, APPEARS IN LONDON, DESCRIBES IRAN INVASION AS "INSANE KGB PLAN BY LOW RANKING OFFICERS THAT BROUGHT DOWN THE SOVIET GOVERNMENT"

LONDON — Aleksandr A. Bessmertnykh, the Foreign Minister of the Soviet Union, appeared in the late afternoon today at a podium in the Locarno Suite of the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office on King Charles Street, in the company of the British Foreign Secretary, Sir Geoffrey Howe, and in the presence of an assemblage of foreign correspondents whose advance notice of the event had been measured in minutes, and confirmed in person, in his fluent English, what the world had through the day suspected and what the Soviet Union itself had not yet been told: that he had departed Moscow in the early hours of June 26 by means and through routes upon which he declined to elaborate; that he had reached the territory of the United Kingdom in the early hours of this morning by way of an undisclosed friendly capital; that he had requested and received the political asylum of Her Majesty's Government; that he repudiated the so-called State Committee for the State of Emergency in the U.S.S.R. as an unconstitutional and criminal organization; that he recognized as the lawful President of the Soviet Union Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev, "wherever he may at this hour be detained, and in whatever condition"; and that he had with him documents, observations, and accounts of which he proposed to make public, in the next three quarters of an hour, "a portion proportionate to the gravity of the moment, and the welfare of those whose lives remain in danger."

Mr. Bessmertnykh, 56, a career diplomat who had served as Soviet Ambassador to the United States from 1990 — Mr. Gorbachev had appointed him Foreign Minister in May, in succession to Eduard Shevardnadze, on the recommendation of the General Secretary's foreign policy adviser Anatoly Chernyaev — addressed the press for forty-three minutes from a prepared statement, of which the following was the substance.

The plan to invade Iran, he said, "was not a plan of the Soviet Government. It was not a plan of the Politburo. It was not a plan of the Council of Ministers. It was not approved by the President of the Soviet Union, the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the Foreign Minister of the Soviet Union, or any constitutional organ of the Soviet state. It was a plan of the Committee for State Security, the K.G.B., devised at the level of the First Chief Directorate and the Eighth Department of the Second Chief Directorate, executed by mid-rank officers acting upon the personal authority of Vladimir Aleksandrovich Kryuchkov, and concealed from the leadership of the Soviet state until the moment at which its concealment was no longer possible, at which moment the leadership of the Soviet state was, by the same Kryuchkov, removed from office, in a coup d'etat planned not as the natural fulfillment of the Iran operation but as its emergency cover.

"I wish to be precise," he continued, "because precision is owed to the dead, of whom there are now many. The events of the past three weeks did not unfold in the order in which they have appeared to unfold. The death of Ayatollah Khomeini was not engineered by the Soviet Union; it was a natural death of an aged man, long anticipated. The assassination of President Khameini, his designated successor, on June 5, in the course of the funeral procession, was not a natural event. It was carried out by an agent of the Tudeh Party of Iran, which had been since 1979 substantially infiltrated and at the senior levels controlled by the K.G.B., and the operation was conducted on the personal authority of Kryuchkov, with the knowledge of the Defense Minister Yazov, without the knowledge of the President of the Soviet Union or of any other organ of the Soviet state. The killing on June 18 of General Ali Shahbazi, the commander of the Iranian Army, was carried out by his own subordinates within the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, who had been informed by K.G.B. channels — falsely — that General Shahbazi was himself a Soviet asset, and were thereby induced to remove him as a prelude to seizing the Iranian government themselves, by which act they substantially destroyed their own organization, which was the intended operational consequence. The 'invitation' issued by Ehsan Tabari from Tabriz on June 19 was drafted in Moscow on June 7. The Soviet armies that crossed the Iranian frontier on June 19 had been moving toward their assembly areas since June 1, six days before the death of Ayatollah Khomeini, on contingency orders that had been concealed from the General Staff under the rubric of summer maneuvers.

"This entire enterprise," Mr. Bessmertnykh said, "was conceived by men who had spent their working lives in the corridors of the Lubyanka, who understood the world in the categories of those corridors, who believed that an opportunity had presented itself in the Iranian succession to alter the strategic balance of the Eurasian continent in the Soviet favor by methods to which the Americans would be unable to respond, and who undertook this enterprise without consulting the Soviet armed forces in any meaningful way, without consulting the Soviet diplomatic service in any way at all, and without consulting the Soviet leadership for the simple reason that the Soviet leadership would have stopped them. They proceeded. They were discovered, on June 16, by the President of the Soviet Union, en route from his visit to Bonn, who in the course of his return flight had been informed by sources within the General Staff of the southern movements. They were confronted, by the President, on June 17, in the Kremlin, in a meeting at which I was not present and the substance of which I learned only later. They responded, on June 17, by deposing the President of the Soviet Union and announcing on June 18 the existence of an Emergency Committee. They had to invade Iran on June 19 because they had killed the Soviet Union to do it, and there was no longer a Soviet Union remaining to undertake any other action.

"This was not a Soviet operation. This was a coup against the Soviet Union by men of the Soviet Union's own security service, who could conceive of no other way out of the situation they had created.

"Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev was, when last I had information, alive, and detained at a naval medical facility north of Murmansk. The conditions of his detention I do not know. I appeal, with all the strength remaining to me, for his preservation in life and for his restoration to his offices.

"As for myself, I have asked the British Government for the protection of an asylum to which my actions of these past ten days, taken at every juncture in defiance of the so-called Emergency Committee, may be thought to entitle me. I have not asked it for myself. I have asked it for my wife, my daughter, and my granddaughter, who reached this country with me in the early hours of this morning. I shall return to my own country at the hour at which my own country once more exists. Spasibo. Da khranit nas vsekh Bog. (Thank you. May God preserve us all.)"

Sir Geoffrey Howe, in a brief statement following Mr. Bessmertnykh's, confirmed that asylum had been granted; that the British Government recognized Mr. Gorbachev as the lawful President of the Soviet Union; that Her Majesty's Government had been in continuous consultation with its allies, and in particular with the Government of the United States, regarding the substance of Mr. Bessmertnykh's account; and that "the substance of his account is, as of this hour, the working basis of the policy of Her Majesty's Government toward the present situation in Moscow."

President Bush, reached at the White House for comment, said only: "Mr. Bessmertnykh has given us today the truth. We owe him our gratitude. We owe his country, in its present captivity, our continued resolution. The men in the Kremlin tonight are not the Soviet Union. They are her abductors. We shall, as we have said, set the captives free."

In Moscow, the Tass evening news bulletin made no mention of the Foreign Minister's appearance in London. The Soviet Embassy in London, asked for comment, did not answer its telephone.

June 28, 1989

SOVIET FORCES FALL BACK IN DISORDER INTO EASTERN GERMANY, NATO FORCES IN PURSUIT; GALVIN: "WE SHALL NOT STOP UNTIL ALL EUROPE IS FREE"

BONN — In a development that the senior commanders of the Atlantic alliance had not, in the assessment of those commanders themselves, considered probable forty-eight hours ago, the armies of the Group of Soviet Forces, Germany this morning broke contact with the formations of the alliance along the inner-German frontier and commenced a withdrawal eastward into the territory of the German Democratic Republic that, by the close of business today, had assumed the character not of a planned operational disengagement but of a rout.

Gen. John R. Galvin, the Supreme Allied Commander Europe, in a press conference at his forward headquarters here this evening that lasted seventy-eight minutes and that drew correspondents from every member nation of the alliance, confirmed the development, described its scale, and announced the decision of the alliance to which it had given rise.

"At approximately 0540 hours Central European Time this morning," Gen. Galvin said, "elements of the United States V Corps in the Fulda sector reported that Soviet forces in their immediate front were no longer present. By 0700 hours similar reports had been received from the British I Corps in the Lüneburg sector, from the German III Corps, from the United States VII Corps in the Hof corridor, and from the Belgian and Dutch corps in the second tactical echelon. The Soviet Group of Soviet Forces, Germany, in the course of the night of the 27th to the 28th of June 1989, withdrew from the Federal Republic of Germany.

"It did so, in the first instance, under cover of darkness, in good order. By midmorning today the order had not held. Soviet rear-guard formations engaged in counterattack toward the village of Sangerhausen, in the German Democratic Republic, were observed to disintegrate under the air-delivered fires of the United States 3rd Armored Division and the close air support of the United States Air Force. By midafternoon Soviet armored vehicles in numbers exceeding three hundred had been counted abandoned along the highway between Eisenach and Erfurt, in many cases with their engines still running. By the evening, the Soviet 8th Guards Army, against which yesterday the United States V Corps held the Fulda Gap at a cost which the soldiers of that corps and their families shall not forget, had ceased, in any meaningful organizational sense, to exist.

"I shall not characterize what we are observing as a retreat. I shall characterize it as a collapse. The Soviet Group of Soviet Forces, Germany, this evening, is not retreating in the operational sense. It is dissolving."

Gen. Galvin then announced that he had this afternoon, "in continuous consultation with the political authorities of the alliance and upon the explicit authorization of every member government," issued orders for NATO ground and air forces to cross the inner-German frontier in pursuit of withdrawing Soviet formations, to secure objectives of military significance within the territory of the German Democratic Republic, and "to liberate, by means of arms but with the minimum violence consistent with the accomplishment of that mission, the territory and the population of the German Democratic Republic from the occupation of foreign forces."

"The Federal Republic of Germany," Gen. Galvin continued, "has, in the past hours, communicated to the alliance through the Federal Government in Bonn a position which it is the privilege of this command to honor. The German people are one people. The territory of Germany shall not, by the choice of any government here represented, remain divided one hour longer than the Soviet armed forces remain present upon any portion of it. The peoples of the German Democratic Republic, of the Polish People's Republic, of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, of the Hungarian People's Republic, of the People's Republic of Bulgaria, and of the Socialist Republic of Romania are, by the long verdict of every standard the alliance has held since its foundation, no less entitled to the freedoms enjoyed by the peoples of Western Europe than were the peoples of France, of Italy, of Greece, and of the western half of Germany itself in the year 1945. The alliance does not propose to extend its membership to those nations by force of arms. The alliance does propose to extend to those nations, by such force of arms as may be required and not one ounce more, the elementary preconditions of national self-determination, of which the most fundamental is the absence of foreign armies upon their soil.

"Therefore, gentlemen of the press, I say to you what I have said this evening to my commanders. We shall not stop at the inner-German frontier. We shall not stop at the Oder-Neisse line. We shall not stop at the eastern frontier of Poland, nor of Czechoslovakia, nor of Hungary. We shall stop where the territory of the Soviet Union as constituted in 1939 begins, and we shall stop there because the alliance has no quarrel with the Russian people and no business upon their soil. We shall not stop until all Europe is free."

The General was asked by a correspondent of Le Monde whether the announced policy contemplated war upon the territory of the Soviet Union itself.

"It does not," Gen. Galvin replied. "The alliance has not been attacked by the Russian people. It has been attacked by a small number of men in Moscow who have already attacked the Russian people themselves. The Russian people, in the course of this present crisis, shall, by every measure available to the alliance, be assisted in regaining mastery of their own affairs. They shall not be invaded. They shall not be threatened. They shall not be coerced. They shall, in the assessment of every member of this command, accomplish what is required upon their own soil with their own hands."

By the close of business at SHAPE this evening, advance elements of the United States V Corps were reported in the German town of Bad Hersfeld; advance elements of the British I Corps in Helmstedt; advance elements of the United States VII Corps in Hof. The Soviet airfields at Wittstock, at Werneuchen, and at Allstedt were reported to have been overflown by NATO reconnaissance and to be, in two of the three cases, abandoned. The Soviet supply depot at Wünsdorf, the headquarters of GSFG since 1945, was reported still occupied by Soviet personnel, the headquarters element of GSFG having departed in the early afternoon for an undisclosed location east of the Oder.

In Bonn, Chancellor Kohl, in an address to the Bundestag at 9 p.m., used for the first time in the postwar history of the Federal Republic the word Wiedervereinigung — reunification — without the customary qualifications and adverbs. He used it in a single sentence. He said: "It begins tomorrow."

The Bundestag rose. The Christian Democrats, the Social Democrats, the Free Democrats, and the Greens stood together. The applause continued for eleven minutes. The Chancellor, in the recollection of one correspondent in the gallery, did not look like a man who had won. He looked like a man who had lived to see what he had not allowed himself to expect to see.

KRYUCHKOV APPEARS ON SOVIET TELEVISION IN "ADDRESS TO THE WESTERN PUBLIC", WARNS OF NUCLEAR ESCALATION, OFFERS "HONORABLE CEASEFIRE IN PLACE ON ALL FRONTS"; MARSHAL AKHROMEYEV REPORTED SHOT IN CONTINUING PURGE OF LEADERSHIP

MOSCOW (via Helsinki) — Vladimir Aleksandrovich Kryuchkov, the chairman of the Committee for State Security of the U.S.S.R. and the figure whom every account reaching the West in the past 48 hours has identified as the operational author of the present war, appeared this evening at 8 p.m. Moscow time on the principal television channel of the Soviet Union, in an address of twenty-two minutes' duration described in the program announcement as an "Address to the Western Public," and offered to the governments of the alliance an "honorable ceasefire in place on all fronts," coupled with what he characterized as "the most serious warning that has been issued in the postwar period concerning the consequences of further escalation upon the territory of the Soviet Union or its allies."

It was the first appearance of Mr. Kryuchkov upon Soviet television in his own person, identified by his own name and rank, since the formation of the so-called Emergency Committee on the night of June 17. He spoke from a desk in what appeared to be an office of the K.G.B. headquarters at the Lubyanka, against a backdrop consisting of the flag of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. He read from a prepared text. He was, in the testimony of those familiar with his appearances at smaller venues over a long career, perceptibly aged.

The address opened with what Mr. Kryuchkov described as "a clarification" of the events of the past eleven days. He acknowledged that "errors of execution" had been made in the conduct of "necessary measures undertaken in defense of the Soviet state and its allies." He acknowledged that "certain officers of the security services" had "exceeded their instructions" in the course of the operations in Iran. He acknowledged that "elements of the leadership" had been "removed from their posts" in the past 48 hours and that "investigations are continuing."

He turned then to the war.

"The Soviet armed forces," he said, "in the course of operations conducted upon the soil of the German Democratic Republic, have inflicted significant losses upon the aggressor. They have likewise sustained losses. The Soviet leadership, weighing the situation as it has developed, has determined that the further continuation of these hostilities serves no interest of the Soviet people, of the German people, of the Polish people, of the Iranian people, or of the peoples of the Atlantic alliance. The Soviet leadership therefore proposes, this evening, to the governments of the United States, the United Kingdom, the Federal Republic of Germany, France, and the other states arrayed against the Soviet Union, an immediate ceasefire upon all fronts, in place, with present positions to be held pending the convocation of a conference of all interested parties at a venue and a time to be agreed.

"This proposal is offered in good faith. It is offered without preconditions. It is offered in the interest of the preservation of human life and of the peace of the world. The Soviet leadership awaits the response of the Western governments with the gravest attention.

"In the absence of such a response, or in the event of further military operations upon the territory of the German Democratic Republic, the Polish People's Republic, the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, the Hungarian People's Republic, or any of the other allied states of the Soviet Union, the Soviet leadership shall be compelled to consider the employment of measures of which the Soviet armed forces have not, in the conflict so far, made use. The Soviet Union possesses, as is well known, the means of defending its allies and itself by every category of weapon developed by modern science. The Soviet Union has not employed these means. It does not wish to employ them. It shall, however, employ them, if compelled by the further advance of foreign armies upon the soil of socialist nations, with the gravest consequences for all participants.

"The Soviet leadership trusts that the Western governments shall, upon reflection, recognize that an honorable ceasefire is preferable to the alternatives. The Soviet leadership shall await the reply of the Western governments until 12 noon Moscow time on the 30th of June. Thank you for your attention. Long live the Soviet Union. Long live peace among the peoples."

Mr. Kryuchkov did not appear to take questions. The Soviet television broadcast that immediately followed his address consisted of selected footage from previous Soviet nuclear weapons tests at Semipalatinsk in the late 1960s, accompanied by patriotic music, broadcast for approximately fourteen minutes before the channel returned to its scheduled programming.

In Washington, the White House issued within the hour a one-sentence statement: "The proposals of Mr. Kryuchkov are under examination by the Government of the United States and its allies." No further comment was offered.

In London, in Bonn, in Paris, in Brussels, and in Rome, governments declined comment pending consultation. Gen. Galvin, at SHAPE, asked by a correspondent whether the threats contained in Mr. Kryuchkov's address would alter the orders he had earlier in the evening issued for the pursuit of withdrawing Soviet forces, replied: "Those orders stand. They are operational orders. They shall be executed."

In a parallel and related development of unconfirmed but substantial significance, Western intelligence sources reported in the late evening, citing communications intercepts and reports from sources within the Soviet Defense Ministry, that Marshal of the Soviet Union Sergei F. Akhromeyev — the personal military adviser to President Gorbachev, who had on June 26 addressed the Stavka in remarks deeply critical of the present war and who had subsequently been escorted from the meeting room by personal security of Mr. Kryuchkov — had been shot by firing squad upon the orders of a special tribunal convened at Lefortovo Prison in Moscow on the morning of June 28. The sentence was reported to have been carried out at approximately 11 a.m. Moscow time. Marshal Akhromeyev was 66 years of age. He had served in the Soviet armed forces for 49 years, beginning as a marine infantryman in the defense of Leningrad in 1941. The Soviet Defense Ministry made no announcement.

The same sources reported that the Foreign Minister Bessmertnykh — whose appearance in London the previous afternoon Mr. Kryuchkov did not, in his address, mention — had been tried in absentia by the same tribunal and condemned to death; that the former premier Nikolai Ryzhkov had been arrested at his Moscow apartment in the early hours of this morning and his whereabouts since not disclosed; that the Politburo member Aleksandr Yakovlev, the architect of glasnost and a known intimate of President Gorbachev, had been arrested at his dacha at Zhukovka and removed to Lefortovo; and that a list of names had been transmitted from the Lubyanka to provincial K.G.B. directorates in the course of the day, the contents of the list undisclosed but its existence reported by multiple sources.

The chairman of the so-called Emergency Committee, Anatoly Lukyanov, was reported once again to be "indisposed." He has not been seen in public since June 24.

A senior Western intelligence analyst, asked late tonight whether the analyst regarded the nuclear threat in Mr. Kryuchkov's address as a serious operational possibility, replied: "I regard it as a man, who has lost a war on the German central front in less than a single day, who has lost a foreign minister in the past forty-eight hours, who has shot a marshal of the Soviet Union this morning, and who has tonight been compelled to read in his own voice a text he did not wish to read. Such a man is not in a position to start a nuclear war. He is in a position to threaten one. Whether he is also in a position to be obeyed by the men who would actually have to launch the missiles is the question. We do not know the answer to that question. I pray we never find out."

POLAND COLLAPSES INTO CHAOS AS POLES FIGHT SOVIET OCCUPYING FORCES; QUIET GERMAN PROTESTS IN BERLIN CONTINUE UNDER SOVIET WATCH

VIENNA — The territory of the Polish People's Republic, which entered upon this week as the seat of a constitutional crisis between an elected government and a military council, and which entered upon yesterday as the line of communication of a Soviet army of invasion upon the soil of Germany, entered upon today as the principal theater of armed resistance to Soviet authority anywhere in the territories of the Warsaw Pact.

The Soviet 5th Guards Tank Army, which the previous evening had entered Warsaw with its forward elements, undertook in the course of the night and the morning the systematic occupation of the Polish capital and of the principal cities of the Polish western and southern voivodeships, in operations whose conduct, by the testimony of the journalists who were able to reach Vienna by road from Krakow before the western Polish frontier was sealed at midday, "did not resemble the entry of an allied army into a fraternal state and resembled instead an action of a kind for which the proper precedents must be sought not in the postwar period but in the years preceding it."

The fighting in Warsaw, which had begun on June 24 with the seizure of the Old Town by remnants of the lawful Mazowiecki government's military supporters and elements of the Solidarity underground, intensified through the day to encompass, by the assessment of Western journalists in the city, an estimated 30 percent of the urban area. Soviet armored units, supported by detachments of the K.G.B.'s special-purpose units identified by their distinctive equipment as belonging to the Vympel and Alpha groups, undertook the systematic clearance of the Old Town district in operations beginning at 6 a.m. The operations involved the use of tank cannon and rocket-propelled flamethrowers against fortified buildings. The Royal Castle, restored only in 1984 after its destruction by the Wehrmacht in 1944, was reported burning by midmorning. St. John's Cathedral, the principal Catholic cathedral of Warsaw, was reported by a Reuters correspondent to have been entered by Soviet troops at 11 a.m. and to have been the site of fighting between Soviet personnel and an unknown number of armed Polish civilians who had taken refuge there with their families. The Cathedral was reported burning by 1 p.m. The Archbishop of Warsaw, Cardinal Józef Glemp, the Primate of Poland, who had taken refuge at the Cathedral on June 24 and from whose person the resistance had since drawn much of its moral authority, was, at the hour of this dispatch, of unknown fate. The Vatican Secretariat of State, in a statement issued at 6 p.m. Rome time, requested the prayers of the faithful for "all those who at this hour stand witness in the city of Warsaw."

Comparable operations were reported in Krakow, where Soviet forces undertook to clear the Wawel Hill and the Old Town from elements of the 6th Pomeranian Airborne Brigade — the Polish formation that had on the 24th declined to deploy against Solidarity demonstrators and had since become the operational nucleus of armed resistance in southern Poland; in Gdansk, where the Lenin Shipyard, the spiritual center of Solidarity since 1980, was reported by midmorning to have been the scene of intense fighting; in Wroclaw; in Poznan; in Lublin. The Polish Catholic Church, by every report reaching the West, opened its sanctuaries to the population and was, in nearly every diocese, the only remaining functional civil authority. By evening, accounts had reached Vienna of Soviet operations against parish churches in numbers it was not yet possible to credit.

The 5th Guards Tank Army, in the course of these operations, was reported by Western intelligence sources to have suffered casualties on a scale that no Soviet formation employed in a constabulary role within an allied state had previously suffered. Polish armed resistance, by every account, was conducted not by the Polish armed forces in any organized sense — the Polish armed forces having, by Lech Walesa's address of June 26 and by their own choice, ceased to function as instruments of the Military Council — but by individual Polish soldiers acting upon their own initiative, by reactivated Solidarity underground networks of the 1981-86 period, by veterans of the wartime Home Army now in their sixties and seventies who had concealed weapons since the late 1940s for the use of grandchildren they had not, in their own youth, expected to have, and by ordinary Polish citizens taking up the small arms abandoned by Polish Army units that had refused to serve. The character of the resistance, by every account, was such that the Soviet command, in the course of the day, requested and received from Moscow the diversion to Poland of an additional motor rifle division previously slated for the Iranian theater.

In the German Democratic Republic, by extraordinary contrast, the situation in the urban centers — and most particularly in East Berlin, in Leipzig, in Dresden, in Magdeburg, and in Rostock — has been throughout the day one of an unbroken and unarmed civic occupation of the public spaces by the population of those cities, conducted in the presence of substantial Soviet troop concentrations covering the withdrawal of GSFG forces eastward, and conducted, by every report reaching West Berlin, without a single shot fired by either side.

In East Berlin, where Soviet forces this morning withdrew the units that had on the 23rd conducted the massacre at Alexanderplatz, and where the Soviet rear-area headquarters at Karlshorst remained the principal Soviet installation in the city, an estimated 800,000 East Berliners gathered through the day at the Brandenburg Gate, at Alexanderplatz itself — now bearing in its center a field of candles burning amid wreaths of flowers — at the Marx-Engels-Platz, and along the Karl-Marx-Allee. They carried no weapons. They sang no songs. They held no signs. They simply stood. Soviet sentries at the Karlshorst perimeter and at intersections along the line of GSFG withdrawal observed them; they observed the Soviet sentries; neither moved. A West German correspondent of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, granted access through the Friedrichstrasse crossing in the late afternoon, described "a city in which a hundred thousand persons stand at any one moment in any one square, and say nothing, and ask nothing, and demand nothing, and merely wait, and the soldiers of the largest army on earth move quietly through them as if not to disturb them, because they have understood that what they are walking through is no longer their city."

In Leipzig, the demonstrations took place at the Nikolaikirche and the surrounding streets, where they had begun in their organized form in the months preceding the present crisis under the direction of Pastor Christian Fuehrer. By 8 p.m. an estimated 250,000 persons were in attendance. Pastor Fuehrer, addressing the crowd from the steps of the church, said only: "We are still here. We have always been here. We shall be here tomorrow." The crowd, by the testimony of one Western correspondent, did not respond. It listened. It dispersed at 10 p.m. in silence, and reformed in the same place this morning, also in silence.

The contrast between the conduct of the Soviet 5th Guards Tank Army in Poland and the conduct of the withdrawing Group of Soviet Forces, Germany, in East Germany, was the subject of analysis among Western diplomats and journalists through the day. The most parsimonious explanation offered, by a West German diplomat reached in Vienna in the evening, was the following: "The Soviet command has assessed, correctly, that the Germans cannot be fought because they will not fight. The Soviet command has further assessed, less correctly but understandably, that the Poles can be fought because they will fight. The Soviet command, having lost in twenty-four hours an army upon the Elbe, is unwilling to lose in seventy-two hours another army upon the Vistula. Therefore the Soviet command has elected to be merciful to the Germans, who do not require mercy, and to be merciless to the Poles, who shall, in the verdict of every century in which I am competent to render judgment, never forget it."

SADDAM HUSSEIN SPOTTED IN RIYADH MEETING WITH SAUDI LEADERS AS IRAQI ARMY MOVES TO IRAN BORDER

RIYADH — President Saddam Hussein of Iraq, who has not been seen outside the territory of his country in the eleven months since the conclusion of his eight-year war with Iran, who has not made any public statement of any character since the Soviet invasion of Iran on June 19, and whose movements through the past ten days have been the subject of intense and frustrated speculation in every chancellery from Cairo to Islamabad, arrived this morning shortly after 6 a.m. at King Khalid International Airport here aboard an unmarked Iraqi government aircraft, was met upon the tarmac by Crown Prince Abdullah bin Abdulaziz, was driven directly to the royal palace at Maazar, and is, at the hour of this dispatch, in continuous private session with King Fahd bin Abdulaziz Al Saud and the senior leadership of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, in a meeting whose existence the Saudi government did not confirm until 4 p.m. local time and whose substance the Saudi government has, at this hour, declined to disclose.

The visit, the first of any Iraqi head of state to the Kingdom in the modern history of either country, and the first occasion on which Mr. Hussein has set foot upon Saudi soil since his pilgrimage to Mecca as a young man in 1978, was preceded over the course of the past 72 hours by a series of preparatory communications conducted at the level of foreign ministers and senior royal counselors, through channels that included — sources within the Egyptian Foreign Ministry confirmed — the personal mediation of President Mubarak, who was reported to have spoken with Mr. Hussein by telephone on no fewer than seven occasions in the previous five days. The Foreign Minister of Kuwait, Sheikh Sabah al-Ahmad al-Jaber al-Sabah, arrived in Riyadh at midmorning today, having traveled overland through the Eastern Province after a private meeting with Mr. Hussein in Baghdad on the previous evening — itself the first such meeting in two years, and the second since the conclusion of the Iran-Iraq war in August 1988.

Concurrently with Mr. Hussein's arrival in Riyadh, the Iraqi armed forces — which throughout the previous ten days had remained, by every account available to Western intelligence, in their peacetime garrisons — undertook in the course of the night a co-ordinated movement of an order that had not been observed in the country since the early phases of the war with Iran. Six Iraqi divisions, including the Republican Guard armored divisions Hammurabi, Tawakalna, and Medina; the regular army's 3rd Armored Division; and the 5th and 10th Mechanized Divisions, were reported by the U.S. Central Command and by Western satellite reconnaissance to have departed their garrisons in the area of Baghdad and Basra in the early hours of the morning and to be moving, at significant rates of advance, eastward toward the Iranian frontier — toward the Khuzestan border in the south, where the front lines of the Iran-Iraq war had run from 1980 to 1988, and toward the Mehran-Dehloran sector in the central frontier zone, where the Iraqi army had achieved its deepest penetrations of Iranian territory in 1980 and had been driven out by 1982.

The movements were not of a character compatible with garrison redeployment, with summer maneuvers, or with the rotation of forces. They were of a character compatible with operational concentration for offensive operations.

In the course of the day, Western intelligence services received and circulated a single document, of unverified provenance but of consistent internal detail, purporting to be a Iraqi General Staff operational directive issued at 11 p.m. Baghdad time on June 27. The directive, addressed to the commanders of the deploying formations, instructed those commanders to advance, upon receipt of an unspecified signal, into the territory of Iran along three axes: in the south, toward the city of Ahvaz and the oil installations of Khuzestan, presently held by Soviet forces of the 4th Combined Arms Army; in the center, toward Kermanshah and Hamadan; in the north, toward the Iraqi Kurdish frontier and the Iranian city of Sanandaj. The directive specified, in language whose presence in such a document Western analysts described as without precedent, that the operations were to be conducted "in co-ordination with the armed forces of the United States of America and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia," that "no engagement is to be initiated against forces identifying themselves as American or as belonging to other states of the Atlantic alliance," and that "the operational objective is the liberation of Iranian territory from Soviet occupation and the restoration of the Iranian people to the conduct of their own affairs."

The Saudi government this evening, in a brief statement read at 8 p.m. by the Minister of Information, Sheikh Ali al-Shaer, confirmed that "His Majesty King Fahd has this day received His Excellency the President of the Republic of Iraq, in the company of the Crown Prince of Kuwait and senior representatives of the United Arab Emirates, of the State of Bahrain, of the Sultanate of Oman, and of the State of Qatar, for consultations of fraternal character upon the situation in the region." The statement made no reference to the Iraqi troop movements. It made no reference to Iran. It made no reference to the Soviet Union. It made no reference to the United States. It announced that "further communications shall follow, as occasion permits."

In Washington, the State Department spokeswoman, Margaret Tutwiler, asked at her evening briefing whether the United States had been informed of the Iraqi movements in advance, replied: "The United States has been in continuous diplomatic contact with the Government of Iraq through channels of long standing and in the company of friends and allies in the region, and the Government of the United States is well aware of the dispositions of the armed forces of Iraq at this time."

Asked whether the United States had requested or had been offered Iraqi participation in operations against Soviet forces in Iran, Mrs. Tutwiler replied: "The Government of Iraq is a sovereign government and shall make its own determinations regarding its own armed forces in light of its own assessment of its own interests."

Asked whether the United States approved of those determinations, Mrs. Tutwiler replied: "We are observing them with attention."

A senior Western diplomat in Riyadh, reached for comment in the late evening, offered the following observation. "Mr. Hussein has spent eleven days saying nothing, in a region that is normally not silent. He has spent the eleven days, by every indication, conducting consultations of which the substance is now becoming visible. He has elected, in the end, to come down on the side of the Atlantic alliance against the Soviet Union, in concert with the conservative Arab monarchies whose money he requires and whose political endorsement his future requires equally. He shall be paid for this. He shall be paid in money, of which he requires a great deal; and he shall be paid in political legitimacy, of which he has acquired today more than he has acquired in the previous ten years. He has chosen, in the end, the right side. The fact that there shall be a price to be paid in due course, by him or by us, for his having taken so long to choose, is a calculation for next month. Tonight he is a friend, and tonight he has six divisions on the road, and tonight that is what is required."

In Tehran, the Soviet command made no statement.

In the headquarters of the United States Central Command at Riyadh, where Gen. Schwarzkopf and his staff have been since 6 a.m. this morning in continuous session with Iraqi general officers whose names the United States Defense Department this evening declined to release, lights were reported burning past midnight.

July 29, 1989

BUSH ADMINISTRATION REPORTEDLY AT ODDS WITH GALVIN ABOUT SCOPE OF ADVANCE; "EVENTS ARE RACING TOO FAR TOO FAST"; WEST GERMAN, BRITISH AND US TROOPS ENTER EAST GERMANY IN FORCE, 50 KM FROM BERLIN; SOVIETS IN DISARRAY AS NATO RULES THE SKIES

WASHINGTON — A breach of public significance opened today between the Bush Administration and the Supreme Allied Commander Europe, Gen. John R. Galvin, over the scope and the pace of the alliance's pursuit of withdrawing Soviet forces eastward across the territory of the German Democratic Republic, with senior White House officials, speaking on terms of unusual frankness to correspondents in the briefing rooms of the West Wing through the day, expressing what one official characterized as "very serious concern that events are racing too far too fast, in advance of decisions that the political leadership of the alliance has not yet had time to take."

The breach, the existence of which the White House did not on the record acknowledge but the substance of which the President's senior advisers were variously prepared to describe at length on background, came in the wake of military developments through the day that, by the assessment of correspondents at SHAPE in Casteau, in the headquarters of the United States Army Europe at Heidelberg, and in the field with the advancing NATO forces themselves, had outrun every operational plan the alliance had previously contemplated.

Lead elements of the United States 1st Armored Division, attached to the United States V Corps for the pursuit phase, were reported by Pentagon spokesmen at the close of business to have reached the East German town of Eisenach in the morning, the Thuringian capital of Erfurt in the early afternoon, and the Wartburg fortress overlooking the Werra valley by 5 p.m. The British 1st Armoured Division, advancing on the northern axis with the British I Corps, was reported in the late evening to have entered Magdeburg without resistance and to have established forward elements on the western bank of the Elbe. The West German III Corps, advancing in the center along an axis directed unambiguously toward East Berlin, was reported by a Bundeswehr spokesman in Bonn at 9 p.m. to have reached the town of Genthin, fifty kilometers west of the East German capital, with leading reconnaissance elements in contact with no Soviet forces of organized character through the day.

Above this advance the airspace of the German Democratic Republic was reported by Allied Air Forces Central Europe, in a midnight situation report distributed at SHAPE, to be "uncontested and effectively under the operational control of NATO airpower." The Soviet 16th Air Army, the principal Soviet tactical air formation in the GDR, was reported to have ceased coherent operations in the course of the day. Soviet airfields at Wittstock, Damgarten, Werneuchen, Allstedt, Köthen, Welzow, Finsterwalde, and Brand-Briesen were reported overrun, abandoned, surrendered, or under direct NATO air attack. The principal GSFG headquarters at Wünsdorf, occupied at noon by elements of the West German III Corps, was reported by the Bundeswehr to have been abandoned by Soviet personnel in the early morning hours, with documents found burning in the courtyard and a single Soviet major, identified by his unit insignia as a member of the operations directorate of GSFG, found dead in his office of a self-inflicted wound. Wünsdorf had been the seat of Soviet military authority in central Europe since the 8th of May, 1945. NATO held it before sundown on the 29th of June, 1989.

The civil population of the German Democratic Republic, by every account reaching the West, received the advancing NATO forces in conditions ranging from quiet hospitality in the rural districts of Mecklenburg and Brandenburg to the scenes in the Thuringian and Saxon cities of which one West German correspondent embedded with the U.S. 3rd Armored Division in Erfurt cabled to Hamburg the following: "There is a sound that the Federal Republic has not heard in any place in forty-four years. It is the sound of an entire German city in the streets, weeping. They are weeping at the sight of soldiers bearing the Federal eagle, and the Stars and Stripes, and the Union Jack, and the tricolor of France, and the flag of the Netherlands, and they are weeping not from grief and not from fear and not from anything that I am able in my profession to name, and I shall sit in this hotel tonight and I shall try to find for the editor of this newspaper the words for what I have seen today, and the editor of this newspaper shall, I expect, decline to print them, because there are no such words, and the things for which there are no words are not generally to be set down in the newspapers."

It was against this background that the public differences within the American government emerged.

The President, returning to the White House at 4 p.m. from Camp David, where he had spent the morning in consultation with National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft, Secretary of State Baker, Secretary of Defense Cheney, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Adm. William J. Crowe Jr., and his personal foreign policy counsel — and from where, by the account of three senior officials, he had been in continuous and at moments difficult communication with the Prime Ministers of the United Kingdom and Canada, the Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany, and the President of France — convened immediately upon his return a meeting of the National Security Council that was reported by White House officials to have continued, with brief recesses, until shortly before 11 p.m.

The substance of the meeting, according to officials present and willing in the hours following to characterize its proceedings, concerned three matters in increasing order of difficulty: the response of the alliance to the ultimatum issued by Mr. Kryuchkov on the previous evening, expiring at noon Moscow time tomorrow; the question of whether NATO ground forces should cross from the territory of the German Democratic Republic into the territory of the Polish People's Republic, where the Soviet 5th Guards Tank Army had through the present day continued operations against Polish armed resistance of a character to which the principal organs of European public opinion had begun to apply the word "atrocity"; and the question of the operational tempo of the present advance, which Gen. Galvin had announced the previous evening inside what can now be revealed to be East German territory and which had, in the course of the present day, exceeded every estimate the alliance's military authorities had themselves previously entertained.

A senior White House official, speaking on background after midnight, characterized the President's position thus: "The President is fully in support of Gen. Galvin's mission. The President wishes the Soviet armed forces removed from every inch of NATO's territory and every inch of the GDR's territory and every inch of the territory of every state that has been compelled to host them. The President's concern is not with the direction of Gen. Galvin's policy. The President's concern is with the velocity of it. We are, today, looking at lead American armored elements within fifty kilometers of East Berlin, having advanced one hundred and twenty kilometers in eighteen hours against an army that twenty-four hours ago we had assessed as the most formidable in the world. We are looking at the prospect of NATO forces upon the Oder-Neisse line within seventy-two hours, at the prospect of armed engagement with Soviet forces on the territory of the Polish People's Republic against a Soviet army that is, in Poland, not in retreat but in the conduct of operations that resemble those of the Wehrmacht in the same country in 1944, and we are looking at all of this in the context of an ultimatum from Moscow whose nuclear character expires at five o'clock Eastern time tomorrow morning. The President's question is not whether we should be doing what we are doing. The President's question is whether we are in a position to manage what we are doing. The events are racing too far too fast. The President believes that. The President has said so."

The official added: "The President has the very greatest respect for Gen. Galvin. The President is not at war with Gen. Galvin. The President is in dialogue with Gen. Galvin, as the political authority of the alliance is in dialogue with the military authority of the alliance, in the manner contemplated by the constitutions of every member nation. The dialogue is, in the present circumstances, vigorous. It will continue."

Gen. Galvin himself, reached in the late evening for response, declined to comment on the reported differences. He referred reporters to a single sentence of his briefing of the previous evening: "These orders stand. They are operational orders. They shall be executed."

A senior officer of his staff, asked whether the SACEUR had received from the political authorities of the alliance any direction modifying the orders he had issued on the evening of June 28, replied — speaking on terms of strictest anonymity, and turning briefly to face his questioner with an expression that the questioner reported in his cable as "weary, and not without amusement, and not without something else, which one might call resolution and one might call something rather harder than that" — the following: "Sir, the SACEUR has received no such direction. The SACEUR has received much advice. The SACEUR is, this evening, considering the advice. Good night, sir."

In Bonn, Chancellor Kohl spent much of the day in private consultation with the leaders of the Bundestag's parties — a meeting at which the Chancellor was reported to have committed himself to a position aligned, in essential particulars, with that of Gen. Galvin. In Paris, President Mitterrand was reported to have communicated to the White House in the late evening a position aligned with that of the West German Chancellor. In London, Prime Minister Thatcher, in a statement to the House of Commons at 4 p.m., used the phrase "we shall not falter, we shall not fail, we shall see this through to the end that has been begun." In Ottawa, Prime Minister Mulroney was reported to have communicated to the White House his "complete support for the operational decisions of Gen. Galvin, and his hope that the political consultations within the alliance shall be conducted with the rapidity that the situation requires."

The President was reported by White House officials, at the close of the National Security Council meeting near midnight, to have authorized "the continuation of present operations under the existing rules of engagement, pending further consultation with allied governments tomorrow morning."

Gen. Galvin, the same officials confirmed, had been so informed.

IRAQI TROOPS ENTER SOUTHERN IRAN, MEET NO RESISTANCE; SOVIET FORCES REPORTED WITHDRAWING TO POSITIONS IN NORTHERN IRAN

ABOARD U.S.S. INDEPENDENCE — The armed forces of the Republic of Iraq crossed the international frontier with the Islamic Republic of Iran in the early hours of this morning, on three axes corresponding closely to the operational directive whose existence had been reported the previous evening by Western intelligence services, and by midnight tonight had advanced in some places more than two hundred kilometers into Iranian territory without significant engagement and without — in any sector of the Iranian theater available to the observation of the United States Central Command — encountering the forces of the Soviet 4th Combined Arms Army, which had through the day been reported in withdrawal toward the north.

The principal Iraqi advance, conducted by the Republican Guard armored divisions Hammurabi and Medina supported by the regular army's 3rd Armored Division, crossed the Shatt al-Arab waterway and the southern frontier in the area of Khorramshahr at 4 a.m. local time, advanced through the largely undefended terrain of southern Khuzestan against an Iranian opposition consisting almost exclusively of fragmentary remnants of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps unable or unwilling to offer organized resistance, and reached the outskirts of the oil city of Ahvaz by midmorning. Ahvaz, the principal city of Khuzestan and the capital of the Iranian oil industry, was reported by an Iraqi military spokesman in Baghdad to have been entered without resistance shortly after 1 p.m., the population having gathered at the principal squares to observe the entry of Iraqi forces in conditions that one Iraqi correspondent of the Al-Thawra newspaper described as "neither hostile nor enthusiastic, but watchful, and disposed to wait." The same Iraqi correspondent reported that the senior Iranian civilian official remaining in the city, the deputy governor of Khuzestan province, met the Iraqi commander at the provincial headquarters and inquired only whether the city's water supply, fuel supply, and electrical generation would be maintained. He was assured that they would be.

The central axis, conducted by the Tawakalna armored division of the Republican Guard supported by the 5th Mechanized Division, crossed the frontier in the Mehran-Dehloran sector and advanced eastward through terrain that had been the most heavily contested of the Iran-Iraq war and that bore, in the testimony of every correspondent traveling with the column, the marks of that contest in unburied form. The advance reached the western approaches to Kermanshah by sundown, against no opposition from any organized military force, and halted there pending consolidation. The northern axis, conducted by the 10th Mechanized Division reinforced by elements of the Iraqi 1st Mechanized Division and operating in a sector politically sensitive on account of its proximity to Iraqi Kurdish territory, advanced more cautiously through difficult country toward the Iranian city of Sanandaj.

Concurrently with the Iraqi advance, the Soviet 4th Combined Arms Army, which had through the previous three days remained in static positions along the line Yazd-Hamadan-Ahvaz, was reported by the United States Central Command to have commenced overnight a co-ordinated withdrawal northward, abandoning its forward positions and consolidating along a defensive line extending from the Caspian coast at Rasht through the Alborz mountain passes north of Tehran to the Zagros foothills near Saqqez. Soviet forces in Tehran itself, the airborne and air-assault formations that had occupied the city on June 21, were reported to be withdrawing northward through the Karaj corridor in the direction of Qazvin and the Caspian. Soviet armored vehicles, fuel trucks, and engineering equipment were reported abandoned in considerable numbers along the line of withdrawal, in patterns consistent with the precipitate rather than the orderly evacuation of positions.

By the assessment of the Central Command intelligence directorate, communicated to correspondents aboard this carrier in the late evening, the Soviet command in Iran was undertaking the consolidation of its remaining combat power in the four northern provinces of the country — East Azerbaijan, West Azerbaijan, Gilan, and Mazandaran — for the purpose of defending the line of communication back into the Soviet Union itself, against the contingency that the United States, the Iraqi forces, or remnants of the Iranian armed forces should undertake operations to interdict that line. The Soviet 4th Combined Arms Army, the assessment continued, was no longer in any meaningful sense an army of invasion. It was an army of evacuation. The question that remained, at the close of business in the Iranian theater this evening, was whether the army of evacuation would be permitted to evacuate.

Gen. Schwarzkopf, in a press conference held aboard this ship at 6 p.m., addressed the question directly. "It is the policy of the United States Central Command, communicated to me as the commander of that command by the political authorities to whom I report, that Soviet forces presently within the territory of the Islamic Republic of Iran shall be permitted to withdraw to Soviet territory without engagement by the forces of this command, provided that withdrawal is conducted in good order, that no acts of destruction are committed against the civilian infrastructure of the Iranian state in the course of that withdrawal, that the prisoners of war held by the Soviet armed forces — and I include in particular Lt. Cmdr. Robert Pennington of the United States Navy and Lt. Michael Watson of the United States Navy, missing since June 23 — are returned to American custody at the moment of the Soviet departure, and that the Soviet armed forces depart Iran in the entirety of their formations and equipment, leaving behind in Iran no garrison, no enclave, no client government, no proxy force, and no claim. If these conditions are met, Soviet forces shall not be engaged. If these conditions are not met, Soviet forces shall be engaged. I have so informed the senior Soviet liaison officer designated by Marshal Rodionov for communication with this command. I expect a reply by sundown tomorrow."

A correspondent of the New York Times asked the General whether the Iraqi advance had been co-ordinated with the United States Central Command in advance of the present day's operations. The General replied: "It has been the subject of detailed and continuous consultation between the United States Central Command and the Iraqi General Staff, beginning ninety-six hours ago and continuing as of this evening. The objectives of the Iraqi forces, the routes of their advance, the rules of engagement under which they operate, and the political conditions under which they shall withdraw upon the conclusion of operations have been the subject of full understanding between the two governments. I shall not be more specific than that."

A second correspondent asked whether the Iraqi forces would withdraw from Iranian territory upon the conclusion of operations.

The General paused. He replied: "That is a matter that lies beyond the operational responsibilities of this command and within the political responsibilities of the United States Government and the Government of Iraq, in consultation with the lawful authorities of the Iranian state, when those authorities are in a position to be consulted. I shall observe only that the Government of Iraq has communicated to the Government of the United States, in writing, in language whose substance has been provided to the Government of Saudi Arabia and to the governments of the cooperating Arab states, an undertaking that the present operations are conducted for the purpose of liberating Iranian territory from Soviet occupation, that they are not conducted for the purpose of acquiring Iranian territory for the Iraqi state, and that Iraqi forces shall withdraw from Iranian soil at such time as the political authorities of a restored Iranian state, in consultation with the cooperating powers, shall request that they do so. I take that undertaking at its word. I expect that the Government of the United States, and the cooperating governments, shall hold the Government of Iraq to its word. Beyond that I cannot at this hour say."

In Tehran, the Tudeh Party "provisional revolutionary government" was reported in the late evening to have ceased to exist. Its principal officials, including those installed in the chamber of the Majlis on the previous Monday, were reported by Western intelligence sources to have been evacuated by Soviet aircraft from Mehrabad airport in the course of the afternoon, in the direction of the Soviet city of Baku. The chamber of the Majlis was reported empty at sundown. The American Embassy compound, occupied by Soviet forces on June 21, was reported abandoned by them at midmorning, the Soviet flag lowered without ceremony and the buildings left in a condition of disorder but, by Soviet account, "without further damage." The Iranian Revolutionary Guard headquarters on Pasdaran Avenue, abandoned and partially burned on June 18 in circumstances never satisfactorily explained, remained abandoned and partially burned. The Speaker of Parliament Hashemi Rafsanjani, whose whereabouts had been the subject of contradictory reports for ten days, was reported by the BBC Persian Service late tonight to have arrived in the holy city of Qom from an undisclosed location in the south, and to be in consultation with the senior surviving clerics of the city regarding "the matters that confront the Iranian people."

PEACE PROTESTS IN LONDON AND LOS ANGELES AS NUCLEAR SABRE RATTLED IN MOSCOW

LONDON — Protests of substantial size, in some quarters described as the largest political demonstrations seen in either city since the protests against the Vietnam War of the late 1960s and early 1970s, took place today in the centers of London and Los Angeles, drawing crowds estimated by the Metropolitan Police in London at upwards of 250,000 persons and by the Los Angeles Police Department at upwards of 180,000, and centered upon a single demand: that the governments of the United States and the United Kingdom accept the ceasefire proposal advanced by Mr. Kryuchkov on the evening of June 28, that NATO ground forces halt at the inner-German frontier, and that the alliance enter into negotiations with the so-called Emergency Committee for the avoidance of nuclear war.

The London demonstration, organized within twenty-four hours by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament under its general secretary, Meg Beresford, in concert with the Society of Friends, the British Council of Churches, and a coalition of Labour Members of Parliament who declined to associate the parliamentary party with the protest, gathered in Hyde Park at noon and proceeded down Park Lane and along the Embankment to a final rally at Trafalgar Square, where the principal speakers addressed the crowd from beneath Nelson's Column. The speakers included the historian E. P. Thompson, who has emerged from semi-retirement for the occasion; the Rt. Rev. Robert Runcie, the Archbishop of Canterbury, who spoke briefly and in the carefully constructed terms of pastoral concern that have characterized the public interventions of his primacy; the actress Vanessa Redgrave; the Labour M.P. Tony Benn; and Bruce Kent, the former general secretary of CND. The crowd was overwhelmingly orderly. Police arrests numbered fewer than thirty, none for offenses of violence.

Mr. Thompson, in remarks lasting eighteen minutes, said: "I have spent forty years arguing that the nuclear weapon makes the great power confrontation an unsuitable instrument of human politics. I have argued it from the bombing of Hiroshima to the cruise missile deployments of the early 1980s, and I shall argue it tonight in Trafalgar Square as the alliance to which my country belongs prepares, by the assessment of those most familiar with its operations, to drive its armies across Europe in the direction of a Soviet government that has on the previous evening offered ceasefire and threatened nuclear war in alternation, and that may in either case be the kind of Soviet government against which the use of conventional military force is the worst, the most dangerous, the most blindingly proud course of action available to a Western statesman. I do not say that the men in the Kremlin tonight have any claim upon the patience of the Western public. I say only that the use of nuclear weapons against civilian populations would, in the assessment of every honest soul present in this square, be a worse outcome than any present configuration of forces upon the German central front, and that any policy that increases the probability of such a use, however marginally, is a policy that the public of this country has a right to question, and that I shall continue to question, in such time as remains to me, in the conviction that the question is the most important that any man may put to the politics of his time."

Archbishop Runcie, addressing the crowd in his capacity as the senior cleric of the established church and in terms approved that morning by the General Synod's emergency standing committee, said: "I have prayed today, as the Holy Father has prayed in Rome on the previous Sunday, for peace and for justice. I find no contradiction between them. I find that they are exacting of those who hold them, and exacting in a particular fashion of those who hold them in the present hour. I ask the Government of Her Majesty to seek peace where peace may be sought without the abandonment of justice; to seek justice where justice may be sought without the destruction of peace; and to remember, in the conduct of policy through the next forty-eight hours, that the Christian conscience does not permit the rendering of either as a hostage to the other."

In Los Angeles, the demonstration assembled at MacArthur Park at 10 a.m. and proceeded along Wilshire Boulevard to a rally at the Federal Building in Westwood, where the principal speakers addressed the crowd. The speakers included Tom Hayden, the California State Assembly member; the singer Jackson Browne; the actor Martin Sheen; the activist and former Roman Catholic priest Daniel Berrigan, who had traveled from New York for the occasion; and Helen Caldicott, the Australian-born physician who had through the early 1980s emerged as the most widely heard public advocate of nuclear abolition in the English-speaking world. Dr. Caldicott, in remarks of some duration and considerable emotion, addressed her remarks specifically to the question of the Kryuchkov ultimatum.

"The man in Moscow," Dr. Caldicott said, "is a tyrant. He has murdered Boris Yeltsin. He has murdered the citizens of Vilnius and of Berlin. He has invaded Iran, and Germany, and made of Poland a graveyard. He is by any honest measure a worse man than Brezhnev or Andropov in their times, and there are among us those who shall say that no government formed by such a man may be the subject of negotiation by the civilized world. I do not disagree. I say only that he has, by his own statement upon the television of his country, threatened the use of weapons that, if used, shall not distinguish between the citizens of his country and the citizens of ours; that shall not distinguish between the soldiers of the alliance and the children of the West German towns through which the alliance is at this hour passing; that shall not distinguish between the Russian babushka in her village near Smolensk and the man at the desk in the Lubyanka who is by the assessment of the night's news no longer entirely the master of the keys to the things he claims to control. I say that the use of such weapons would be a catastrophe of which the human race may not recover. I say that any policy that brings the use of such weapons closer is a policy that the citizens of the West are entitled to question, and to oppose, and to demand, in the language of the streets which is the only language that the politicians of any country reliably hear, that they reconsider. We are here in this square, in the city of Los Angeles, in the United States of America, on this Thursday afternoon, to ask the President of the United States to reconsider. He may, if he chooses, decline. He may not, if he chooses, decline to hear us."

Smaller protests of similar character were reported through the day in San Francisco, in Seattle, in Boston, in Chicago, in Madison, Wisconsin, and in New York, where a candlelight vigil at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in Manhattan was attended by approximately 12,000 persons and led by the dean of the cathedral, the Very Rev. James Parks Morton. In Europe, demonstrations of various sizes were reported in Amsterdam, where the crowd in Dam Square was estimated at 60,000; in Stockholm; and in Copenhagen.

Conspicuously absent from any city of consequence was a demonstration in West Germany. The West German peace movement, which through the early 1980s had brought into the streets of the Federal Republic crowds of unprecedented size against the deployment of American intermediate-range missiles, was reported by its surviving organizers, in interviews with West German television, to have suspended all such activity for the duration of the present conflict, on the explicit grounds that the Federal Republic of Germany was, this week, the country at whose continued existence the Soviet government had this Tuesday morning struck. In any event, Germans were occcupying themselves with caring for refugees from the front line, both East and West.

In Washington, the President's press secretary, Marlin Fitzwater, asked at the close of the day's regular briefing whether the President had a response to the demonstrations in London and Los Angeles, replied: "The President has the response of every President of the United States to the lawful exercise of the right of public assembly by the citizens of this country and of friendly countries. The President is grateful to live in a system of government in which such exercise is permitted. The President shall, in the hours immediately ahead, act, when he acts, with the gravity that the moment requires. He has nothing further at this hour and is going to bed."

June 30, 1989

NATO TROOPS ENTER BERLIN TO SCENES OF WILD JUBILATION; FIRST US TROOPS CROSS INTO POLAND; SOVIET FORCES IN TOTAL ROUT; KALININGRAD REPORTED UNDER ATTACK BY NATO BOMBERS

BONN — Lead elements of the Bundeswehr's 7th Panzer Division entered the city of Berlin from the west at 9:14 this morning, passing the eastern boundary of the British sector at the Brandenburg Gate against no resistance from any organized force, and were received in the streets of the eastern half of the city by crowds whose size the city authorities at the close of business declined to estimate beyond "a number of human beings sufficient to render the question of the number obsolete," in scenes of public emotion that the international correspondents present were uniformly unable to describe in language they themselves regarded as adequate, and that the Reuters correspondent of forty years' standing in this country, in his evening cable to London, declined to attempt.

The 7th Panzer Division was followed within the hour by leading elements of the United States 3rd Armored Division, advancing from the south through the suburb of Zossen, and by elements of the British 4th Armoured Brigade advancing from the southwest. Soviet forces in the city, consisting principally of the rear-echelon administrative and signals personnel of the Group of Soviet Forces, Germany, who had not been evacuated in the previous forty-eight hours, surrendered en masse at the Karlshorst headquarters at 11 a.m. The Soviet flag was lowered from the headquarters compound at 11:23 a.m. by a non-commissioned officer of the United States 1st Battalion, 36th Infantry Regiment, who was photographed by a correspondent of the Washington Post in the act of folding the flag, with care, and presenting it to a Soviet captain who stood at attention to receive it. The captain, asked by the correspondent through an interpreter what he intended to do with the flag, replied: "I shall send it home. It is, after all, our flag. It is not the flag of those who have lately employed it. It shall return to its country, and so shall I."

The eastern boundary of the city was crossed at 1 p.m. by elements of the Bundeswehr advancing toward the Oder. The Brandenburg Gate, throughout the day, was the subject of continuous traffic between the two halves of the city by the population of both. At 6 p.m., the Governing Mayor of West Berlin, Walter Momper, and the Lord Mayor of East Berlin, Erhard Krack — who had since the previous Sunday remained in his office, having declined to flee with the East German leadership and having presided through the past five days over the orderly maintenance of the city's basic services in the absence of any functioning central authority — met at the Gate in the presence of an estimated one and a half million Berliners and of a number of correspondents whose dispatches consist, in the principal, of paragraph-length silences. Mayor Momper, embracing Mayor Krack, said: "Brother, you have held the city. We are home."

Mayor Krack, in a statement issued shortly afterward through the Berlin city hall on Alexanderplatz, declined the office that the population of the city had thrust upon him over the previous week. He announced instead the convocation, for July 4 — the choice of date, his statement noted, was "in homage to a republic whose example we may yet, in some measure, emulate" — of a constituent assembly of representatives elected by the districts of the city, "to determine, by the methods proper to a free people, the arrangements under which the city of Berlin and the German Democratic Republic shall be reconstituted, dissolved, or otherwise resolved into a German political order whose final form shall be the choice of the German people themselves and of no other."

In Bonn, Chancellor Kohl, in a statement issued at 9 p.m., declared the freedom of movement between the two halves of Germany "complete, as of this hour, and not subject to revision," and announced the immediate dispatch to East Germany of West German civil administrators, currency officials, and humanitarian relief, "in such measure as the Federal Republic possesses, and may be quickly summoned, against the necessities of the German people in those provinces in which the necessities have been longest deferred."

Into Poland

The crossing of the Oder-Neisse line by NATO ground forces, the question that had on the previous day been the subject of the principal disagreement within the Bush Administration and between the Administration and the Supreme Allied Commander, was decided in the early hours of this morning by what officials at SHAPE described as "a development of operational facts that overtook the deliberations of the political authorities, in conditions to which the conventional categories of operational discipline are imperfectly suited."

The 5th Guards Tank Army, which had through the previous three days conducted operations against Polish armed resistance in the principal cities of western Poland, withdrew in the course of the previous night from the cities of Wroclaw, Poznan, and Szczecin, and consolidated in defensive positions along the eastern bank of the Vistula in the area of Warsaw. The Polish armed resistance, in coordination with elements of the Polish armed forces that had over the preceding seventy-two hours emerged from the strategy of inactivity counseled by Mr. Walesa's broadcast of June 26 to assume an active role in the liberation of Polish territory, occupied during the morning the cities so abandoned and announced through the underground broadcasting facilities of Radio Solidarność the formation, in Poznan, of a "Provisional Government of National Restoration" headed by Mr. Walesa as President pro tempore, by Mr. Mazowiecki — whose freedom from custody had been secured by means upon which Mr. Walesa's announcement did not elaborate — as Prime Minister, and by a council of ministers drawn from the constitutional government of June 19 and from the political and intellectual leadership of the previous decade.

The Provisional Government of National Restoration, in its first communication, formally invited "the armed forces of the Atlantic alliance, in such numbers and with such dispatch as their commanders shall determine, to enter the territory of the Polish state for the purpose of completing the expulsion of foreign armed forces from that territory and of assisting the lawful authorities of the Polish state in the preservation of order and the protection of the population." The communication was transmitted at 6 a.m. local time to the headquarters of NATO at Casteau, to the headquarters of the United States Army Europe at Heidelberg, and to the offices of the Federal Chancellor in Bonn.

Lead elements of the United States 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment, advancing on the northern axis from the area of Magdeburg, crossed the Oder-Neisse line in the area of Frankfurt-an-der-Oder at 11 a.m. and were met on the eastern bank by Polish irregular forces flying the Polish national colors. Lead elements of the West German III Corps crossed at Slubice at 1 p.m. By the close of business, NATO ground forces were reported in Poznan, in Wroclaw, and at the southern outskirts of Szczecin. Polish crowds of considerable size were reported gathered at every major town through which the columns passed.

The Soviet 5th Guards Tank Army, having consolidated along the Vistula, did not on this day engage NATO forces. It was reported by Western intelligence in the late evening to have received orders from Moscow whose substance was not yet known but whose effect, by the assessment of those intelligence services, was a continued pause in operations of any character.

The Air War, and Kaliningrad

In the air, NATO operations through the day extended for the first time to targets within the territory of the Soviet Union itself, in operations whose authorization at the political level required, by the account of Pentagon officials, "a final tier of consultation among the Atlantic governments" that was conducted by telephone in the small hours of the morning Washington time. The principal targets were the airfields, port facilities, and command-and-control installations of the Soviet Kaliningrad oblast — the exclave on the Baltic coast that constituted the principal forward Soviet basing area for both the Baltic Fleet and the air assets supporting operations in northern Poland and the Baltic states.

Strikes against Kaliningrad and its associated military facilities were conducted in the course of the day by F-117A Nighthawk aircraft, by F-15E Strike Eagle aircraft of the United States Air Force, by Tornado GR.1 aircraft of the Royal Air Force operating from Marham and from Brüggen, and by ship-launched Tomahawk cruise missiles from the U.S.S. Iowa and the U.S.S. Wisconsin in the North Sea. The principal targets included the Soviet Naval Air Force base at Donskoye, the Baltic Fleet headquarters and shipyard at Baltiysk, the strategic communications facility at Bagrationovsk, and the air defense radar network covering the western approaches to the Soviet Union along the Baltic coast. NATO aircraft losses through the day were reported as one Tornado GR.1 (crew killed) and one F-15E (crew ejected, recovered by combat search and rescue from the Baltic at sunset). Soviet aircraft losses on the ground at Donskoye were reported by NATO reconnaissance to be substantial; aircraft losses in the air, against negligible NATO air defense penetration, were minimal.

The strikes were the first NATO operations of the war to take place upon territory administered by the Soviet Union as Soviet territory rather than as occupied or allied territory. The political character of the action was, accordingly, the subject of an extraordinary statement issued at 4 p.m. by Gen. Galvin at SHAPE in Casteau, in language plainly drafted in close consultation with the political authorities of the alliance, and reading in its operative paragraph as follows:

"The military operations conducted this day by forces of the Atlantic alliance against military installations within the Kaliningrad oblast of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic are conducted for the sole purpose of the suppression of military forces engaged in active operations against the Atlantic alliance and its allies. They are not directed against the territory, the sovereignty, the population, or the legitimate institutions of the Soviet Union or of the Russian Federation. The alliance does not seek the territory of the Soviet Union, in Kaliningrad or elsewhere. The alliance shall, upon the achievement of the operational and political objectives that the alliance has, in this conflict, repeatedly stated, withdraw to the borders from which it commenced operations on the morning of the 28th of June 1989. The alliance has no quarrel with the Russian people. The alliance shall not be drawn, by the conduct of an unconstitutional government in Moscow, into a war against the Russian people. The alliance shall be drawn into the suppression of the military forces of that unconstitutional government, wherever those forces are engaged in operations against the alliance, and shall continue to suppress them until those forces cease such operations or until that unconstitutional government ceases to exist. The alliance hopes for the latter outcome. The alliance prepares for the former."

SOVIET TELEVISION ANNOUNCES CIVIL DEFENSE EVACUATIONS OF ALL MAJOR SOVIET CITIES; "THREAT LEVEL AT MAXIMUM"; ANPILOV QUOTED ON SOVIET TV, "OF WHAT USE IS A WORLD WITHOUT THE SOVIET UNION?"

MOSCOW (via Helsinki) — At 1 p.m. Moscow time today, sixty minutes after the expiration of the ceasefire ultimatum issued by Mr. Kryuchkov on the evening of June 28, the principal television channel of the Soviet Union interrupted its scheduled programming for an announcement that, in the assessment of every Western government to which the broadcast was made available within the ensuing hour, constituted the most serious civil-defense communication issued by any nuclear power to its own population since the establishment of nuclear arsenals on either side of the Cold War, and that has, since its issuance, prompted in every capital of the Atlantic alliance a series of consultations whose outcome will be known only in the hours immediately ahead, and upon which the lives of an unknown but potentially enormous number of human beings, in territories spanning two continents, may now depend.

The announcement, read by an unidentified male announcer in conditions of evident strain and accompanied by the appearance on screen of the seal of the Civil Defense Forces of the U.S.S.R. (the Voyska Grazhdanskoy Oborony) — an organization of approximately 150,000 personnel constituted in 1971 for the precise purpose of conducting the evacuation and shelter of the Soviet civil population in the event of nuclear attack, and never previously activated in the historical experience of any Western intelligence service — was as follows.

"Citizens of the Soviet Union. The State Committee for the State of Emergency in the U.S.S.R., upon the recommendation of the General Staff of the Soviet Armed Forces and of the Civil Defense Forces of the U.S.S.R., and in light of the continuing aggressive military operations conducted by the armed forces of the United States of America and its allies against the territories of friendly socialist states and, on this day, against the territory of the Soviet Union itself, has determined to raise the civil defense threat level of the Soviet Union to the maximum level provided by the doctrine of civil protection. Citizens of Moscow, of Leningrad, of Kyiv, of Kharkov, of Odesa, of Minsk, of Riga, of Vilnius, of Tallinn, of Gorky, of Sverdlovsk, of Chelyabinsk, of Novosibirsk, of Volgograd, of Kuybyshev, of Perm, of Ufa, of Kazan, of Voronezh, of Saratov, of Krasnodar, of Rostov-on-Don, of Tbilisi, of Yerevan, of Baku, of Tashkent, of Alma-Ata, of Frunze, of Ashgabat, of Dushanbe, of Murmansk, of Arkhangelsk, of Vladivostok, of Khabarovsk, of Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, and of all cities of the Soviet Union of population in excess of one hundred thousand persons, are instructed to proceed in an orderly fashion, in accordance with the civil defense plans previously promulgated and in coordination with the local civil defense authorities, to the dispersal points and shelter locations designated for their place of residence and place of employment. Children, the elderly, and pregnant women shall be given precedence in transportation. Workers in essential industries and in the armed forces shall remain at their posts. The state shall provide. The state shall protect. The state shall prevail."

The announcement was repeated three times. It was followed at 1:15 p.m. by an address from Anatoly Lukyanov, the chairman of the Emergency Committee, who appeared on Soviet television for the first time since the day after the coup, in conditions of visible deterioration that several Western analysts familiar with his appearance described as "consistent with the heavy use of medication," and read for approximately seven minutes a statement urging the Soviet population to "demonstrate the steadfastness of the Soviet people in the face of imperialist aggression of unprecedented gravity."

It was followed at 1:30 p.m. by a statement from Mr. Kryuchkov, in which the Chairman of the Committee for State Security announced that "the Soviet armed forces are this hour at the highest state of combat readiness contemplated by the doctrine of the Soviet state," that "the Strategic Rocket Forces of the U.S.S.R. have been authorized the full range of preparatory measures consistent with the present level of threat," and that "any further military operations conducted by the Atlantic alliance upon the soil of the Polish People's Republic, the German Democratic Republic, the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, or upon the soil of the Soviet Union or of any of its constituent republics, shall be met by the Soviet armed forces with the entirety of the means at the disposal of those armed forces."

It was followed at 2 p.m., to the astonishment of every foreign observer of Soviet broadcasting, by a live appearance of approximately fourteen minutes' duration by Mr. Viktor Anpilov, the Communist journalist of nationalist tendency who had appeared briefly on Soviet television in early June denouncing the proposed cuts to the Soviet defense budget and who had not, in the intervening period, been associated in any visible capacity with the Emergency Committee. Mr. Anpilov, identified on screen by the chyron "Member of the Pamyat Movement," delivered an address of escalating intensity in which he condemned the "perfidy of the imperialists, the cowardice of the German bourgeoisie, the venality of the Polish lackeys, and the treason of those Russians who have, in this hour, sided with the foreigner against the Motherland," and called upon the Soviet armed forces to "execute, with whatever instruments are required, the duty for which the Soviet armed forces have been equipped at such cost over the entirety of the postwar period." He concluded with a sentence that, by the close of business this evening, had been broadcast in translation in every Western capital and printed in the late-edition headlines of every newspaper of consequence in the Atlantic alliance: "And if the choice that confronts the Soviet Union in this hour is the choice between the survival of the world and the survival of the Soviet Union, then I say to the men in the Kremlin, and I say to the men of the Strategic Rocket Forces, and I say to every honest Russian: of what use is a world without the Soviet Union?"

Mr. Anpilov was not interrupted, contradicted, or qualified in his remarks by any other Soviet broadcasting personality, by any official commentator, or by any official statement following the broadcast. The broadcast was rebroadcast, in its entirety, on the Vremya evening news at 9 p.m.

The civil defense evacuation, ordered at 1 p.m., was reported in the principal cities of the Soviet Union to have proceeded through the day in conditions of considerable chaos. In Moscow, the Metro system was reported by Western correspondents at the embassies on the Garden Ring to have been operating to capacity through the afternoon, with the deeper stations of the system — the Kirovskaya, the Mayakovskaya, the Park Kultury, the Taganskaya — designated by long-standing civil defense plans as principal shelter locations and reported to have admitted in the course of the day perhaps two million Muscovites. The principal rail stations of the city — the Belorussky, the Kursky, the Kazansky, the Yaroslavsky — were reported overwhelmed by citizens attempting to evacuate the city to the countryside, in numbers and in conditions that the city authorities, by the late evening, were no longer in a position to manage. Reports of crushing injuries, of episodes of panic, of incidents in which armed militia personnel were reported to have fired warning shots over the heads of crowds, reached Western correspondents through the day in numbers and in detail that the correspondents themselves declined, by the conventions of their profession in such circumstances, to credit beyond the level of pattern.

In Leningrad, in Kyiv, in Minsk, the situation was reported similar. In Kyiv, the situation was reported further complicated by the refusal of Ukrainian municipal authorities, in coordination with the People's Movement of Ukraine for Restructuring, to acknowledge the legitimacy of the Moscow civil defense order and to conduct its own civil protection arrangements upon the basis of an Ukrainian, rather than a Soviet, framework. The First Secretary of the Communist Party of Ukraine, Mr. Ivashko, was reported by sources within the Central Committee of the C.P.U. to have addressed an extraordinary plenum of the Central Committee in the late afternoon and to have stated, in language unprecedented in the postwar history of his party, that "the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic shall not be the locus of nuclear weapons employed in the defense of a government in Moscow that has, by the testimony of its own conduct over the past thirteen days, ceased to act on behalf of the Soviet peoples it claims to represent."

The Tudeh Party "provisional revolutionary government" of Iran, which had on the previous evening been evacuated to Baku, was reported in the late evening, in dispatches reaching Ankara through the Turkish Foreign Ministry, to have ceased to issue any communications.

In the city of Murmansk — where Mr. Gorbachev was reported, by every account that has reached the Western governments through the past two weeks, to be detained at a naval medical facility — the situation was reported by sources within the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, citing Soviet citizens reaching the Norwegian frontier in the afternoon, to be of "an exceptionally fluid character." Soviet naval personnel of the Northern Fleet were reported in considerable numbers in the streets of the city. The Northern Fleet commander, Adm. Felix N. Gromov, was reported not to have appeared at fleet headquarters since the previous evening. The naval medical facility at which Mr. Gorbachev was reportedly detained was reported in the late evening to be "the subject of arrangements of which the substance is not, at the present hour, susceptible of communication," in the careful phrasing of one Norwegian official whose own evident excitement his careful phrasing did not disguise.

In Washington, the President convened the National Security Council at 6 a.m. and remained in continuous session with his senior advisers through the day. The White House, in a single-sentence statement issued at 8 p.m., declared: "The United States of America does not respond to ultimatums. The United States of America responds to facts. The President of the United States is, this hour, attending to the facts."

Gen. Galvin, asked at SHAPE late this evening whether the orders he had issued the previous night for the continued advance of NATO forces remained in effect, replied — and this is the entire substance of his reply, in which he did not elaborate, in which he took no questions, and from which he turned and departed the briefing room: "They do."

Strategic Air Command, sources within the Pentagon's National Military Command Center confirmed in the late evening, raised its alert posture at 5 p.m. Eastern time to DEFCON 1 — the highest level of strategic readiness contemplated by the system of Defense Conditions, and a level not previously achieved by the United States in the history of that system. The Pentagon declined comment.

In Rome, the Holy Father was reported to have entered the chapel of the Apostolic Palace at 7 p.m. local time and to have remained in prayer through the evening. The doors of the basilica of St. Peter's were thrown open, and have remained open through the night, and the candles upon every altar of the basilica are lit, and shall be tended through the hours that remain.

July 1, 1989

NUCLEAR STRIKES HIT LONDON, PARIS, WASHINGTON, MUNICH AND NEW YORK; MASSIVE LOSS OF LIFE REPORTED; US RESPONSE AT THIS HOUR UNKNOWN

ATLANTA — Five nuclear weapons of unidentified yield, launched in a coordinated salvo by submarines of the Soviet Northern Fleet operating in the Barents Sea, detonated within a window of approximately fourteen minutes between 4:30 and 4:44 Coordinated Universal Time this morning over the cities of London, Paris, Munich, Washington, and New York, in the first use of nuclear weapons in armed conflict since the bombing of Nagasaki on the 9th of August 1945, and the first use of nuclear weapons against the territory of the Atlantic alliance and against the territory of the United States in the history of those nations.

The strikes have, in the eight hours since their occurrence, produced confirmed and presumptive deaths whose number cannot at this hour be reliably estimated, that fall almost entirely upon the civilian populations of the targeted cities, and that, in the assessment of every authority capable of forming one, will when finally tabulated stand as the largest single-day loss of human life in any event of any character in the recorded history of the human species. The Federal Emergency Management Agency of the United States, in a statement issued at noon Eastern time from a location it declined to specify, gave preliminary estimates of immediate American fatalities at "in excess of two million persons, with substantial uncertainty in the upper bound." Comparable preliminary estimates for the European cities were not, at the hour of this dispatch, available. The total of immediate fatalities across the five cities will not, by the assessment of every authority that has been willing to give one, fall below three million. It may approach, or exceed, twice that figure. Subsequent fatalities from injury, from radiation exposure, from the collapse of medical infrastructure, and from causes yet to be identified will, by every estimate, multiply the immediate figure by a factor that the authorities have declined, this morning, to specify.

The President of the United States, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, the President of the French Republic, and the Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany were confirmed alive, at locations and in arrangements upon which the governments of those nations have declined elaboration, by statements issued through their respective national broadcasting authorities in the four hours following the strikes. The United States Strategic Air Command, the Strategic Rocket Forces of France, the strategic forces of the United Kingdom, and the conventional forces of the Atlantic alliance in Europe and the Atlantic theaters were reported by the Pentagon, in a statement issued at 10 a.m. Eastern from the National Military Command Center alternate facility at Site R, to remain "intact, in communication, and in the readiness postures contemplated by the orders previously issued." The launch authorities of the Atlantic nuclear powers were confirmed, in the same statement, to "reside, as they have at every hour of the present conflict, in the constitutional offices of the political authorities of those powers." No further statement regarding the response of the United States to the events of the morning was issued by any organ of the United States Government in the course of the day.

The Strikes

The strikes were detected in their boost phase by the United States Defense Support Program satellites in geostationary orbit at 04:24 UTC, with the first warning issued by the North American Aerospace Defense Command at Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado, at 04:25 UTC. The launches were identified within ninety seconds as submarine-launched ballistic missiles originating from a position in the Barents Sea consistent with a single Delta-class strategic submarine of the Soviet Northern Fleet, designated by NATO surveillance as having departed its base at Yagelnaya in the Kola Peninsula on the previous afternoon. The flight times to the European targets were approximately fifteen minutes; to the North American targets, approximately twenty-eight minutes. The flight profiles of the warheads, after separation from their launch buses, conformed to the patterns of the Soviet RSM-50 (NATO designation SS-N-18) reentry vehicles, of which a Delta-III submarine could carry twenty-one in seven missiles of three warheads each. Five warheads were fired. Sixteen warheads were not.

The character of the strike — five weapons, one per city, all directed against population centers, none directed against military installations, none directed against the strategic forces or command-and-control infrastructure of the United States or its allies — was assessed by every American and allied military authority within the first hour as a deliberate demonstrative employment, intended to coerce a political outcome rather than to commence the general nuclear exchange contemplated by the strategic doctrines of either side. The decision by the Soviet command to use a single submarine, to fire fewer than its full salvo, and to direct the strike entirely against civilian targets was assessed as evidence that the strike represented the operational choice of a faction within the Soviet command structure rather than the execution of the Soviet strategic war plan. The identity of that faction, the nature of its authority, and the extent to which the residue of the Soviet strategic forces — the silo-based intercontinental ballistic missiles of the Strategic Rocket Forces, the road-mobile and rail-mobile missiles, the Long-Range Aviation bomber forces, and the remaining ballistic missile submarines of the Northern and Pacific Fleets — were under its operational control were the subject of intense analysis through the morning. The conclusions of that analysis were not made public.

Each city is, this morning, its own subject. Each subject is one upon which the writing of our generation will be forever inadequate. May God have mercy on us all.

London

The warhead detonated over central London at 04:32 Coordinated Universal Time — 05:32 British Summer Time — with ground zero confirmed by satellite reconnaissance as approximately Trafalgar Square. The yield, assessed from blast and seismic signatures by the United States Air Force Technical Applications Center at Patrick Air Force Base, Florida, was estimated at 500 kilotons. The detonation was an airburst at approximately 1,200 meters, the configuration that maximizes blast damage against urban targets. The Palace of Westminster, the principal buildings of Whitehall, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, the Treasury, the Ministry of Defence, the Admiralty, Buckingham Palace, the principal stations of British Rail at Charing Cross and Victoria, and the financial district of the City of London were all within the radius of total destruction. The London Underground, in the lines closest to ground zero, was reported by Transport for London — operating from the Surrey emergency control facility — to have suffered catastrophic structural compromise. The deeper stations of the Northern, Bakerloo, and Piccadilly lines, into which substantial numbers of central London residents had descended in the preceding twenty-four hours under unofficial instruction, were reported by surface assessment teams to have, in some cases, held against the blast.

The Royal Family was confirmed at Balmoral, in Aberdeenshire, where Her Majesty had been since the previous Wednesday. The Prime Minister, Mrs. Thatcher, was confirmed at the central government war headquarters at the underground complex known as PINDAR — its full designation, Protected Information Network for Defence Activities and Resources, having entered the public vocabulary in the course of the morning's broadcasts — together with the principal members of her Cabinet. The Leader of the Opposition, Mr. Kinnock, was confirmed at a regional government bunker in the West Midlands. The Speaker of the House of Commons, the Lord Chancellor, the Archbishop of Canterbury — at Lambeth Palace at the hour of the strike — and an unknown but substantial number of Members of Parliament present at the night sitting of the House had not been confirmed alive at the hour of this dispatch.

The Prime Minister, in a recorded statement broadcast at 9 a.m. London time by the BBC from its wartime broadcasting facility at Wood Norton in Worcestershire, said: "An hour and a half ago, an unconstitutional government in Moscow detonated a nuclear weapon over the city of London. I am told that I shall not, in this statement, be permitted to give the casualty figures yet known to me. I shall give them, in due course, when they are complete, to the House of Commons, in whatever form the House of Commons shall by that hour take. I shall say only this, this morning. The men who have done this thing have not, by this thing, won. They have lost. They have lost in the only sense in which it is possible, in a contest of this character, for them to lose. They have placed themselves, by their own hand, beyond the reach of any consideration that any government of any civilized nation may henceforth extend to them. There shall be, from the United Kingdom, no negotiation. There shall be, from the United Kingdom, no acceptance of any condition that any party associated with this morning's act may wish to advance. There shall be, from the United Kingdom, the response that the United Kingdom is, in the present hour, in consultation with her allies determining. The response shall be made known when it has been made. Until that hour, I ask of the British people what the British people have, in every comparable hour of their history, given without my asking. May God have mercy upon the dead. May He give to the living the strength that is required."

Paris

The warhead detonated over Paris at 04:33 UTC — 06:33 Central European Summer Time — at an airburst altitude of approximately 1,000 meters above the Île de la Cité. The yield was assessed at approximately 500 kilotons. Notre-Dame de Paris, the Conciergerie, the Sainte-Chapelle, the Palais de Justice, the Hôtel de Ville, the Préfecture de Police, the Louvre, the Tuileries, the Place de la Concorde, the National Assembly, the Élysée Palace, the Senate at the Luxembourg Palace, the principal stations of the Gare du Nord and Gare de l'Est, and the historic 1st through 8th arrondissements were within the radius of total destruction. The Paris Métro, in the central network, was reported by the Régie Autonome des Transports Parisiens — operating from a regional facility at Bobigny — to have, like its London counterpart, suffered catastrophic damage in the central tunnels and to have, in the deeper stations, held in places against the blast.

President Mitterrand was confirmed at the strategic command facility at Taverny, in Val-d'Oise, where he had been since the previous afternoon. The Prime Minister, Mr. Rocard, was confirmed at the alternate command facility at Mont Verdun, in the Rhône. The Speaker of the National Assembly and the Speaker of the Senate, both reported in Paris at the hour of the strike, had not been confirmed alive at the hour of this dispatch.

The President, in a statement broadcast at 9 a.m. Paris time over Radio France from a facility designated only as "the Center," addressed the French people in a register that the senior correspondents of the French press, in the years to come, will study. He said in part: "This morning, the city of Paris was struck by a weapon whose use was contemplated by the architects of the strategic order under which my generation has lived its entire adult life, and contemplated by them with the conviction that it should never be employed. It has been employed. It has been employed against my city. Against the city in which I learned to read. Against the city in which the Republic has been four times proclaimed and to which the Republic, in the testimony of its history, has four times returned. La République a connu de tels matins. Elle saura connaître les soirs qui suivront. The Republic has known such mornings. She shall know how to know the evenings that shall follow."

Washington and New York

The warhead intended for Washington detonated at 04:42 UTC — 12:42 Eastern Daylight Time — at an airburst altitude of approximately 1,100 meters. Ground zero was assessed as approximately the southern bank of the Tidal Basin, equidistant from the Capitol, the White House, the Pentagon, and the Lincoln Memorial. The yield was assessed at approximately 500 kilotons. The principal monuments of the National Mall, the United States Capitol, the White House, the Old Executive Office Building, the principal departments of the federal government at Foggy Bottom and along Constitution Avenue, the headquarters of the United States Department of Defense at the Pentagon, and the residential and commercial districts of the District of Columbia within a radius of approximately five kilometers of ground zero were within the radius of total or near-total destruction. The Federal Emergency Management Agency, operating from Mount Weather in Bluemont, Virginia, declined at this hour to provide a preliminary fatality estimate for the District of Columbia.

The President was confirmed aloft aboard the National Emergency Airborne Command Post — the militarily designated E-4B aircraft, presently stationed in continuous airborne alert orbit in the central United States — together with the Secretary of Defense, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the National Security Adviser, and the small staff that the laws governing the continuity of the American government provide for the support of the President in such circumstances. The Vice President was confirmed at the underground complex at Site R near Blue Ridge Summit, Pennsylvania. The Speaker of the House of Representatives, Mr. Foley, was confirmed at the congressional emergency facility at the Greenbrier in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, together with an unspecified but substantial number of Members of Congress who had on the previous evening, by orders issued under the authority of the Speaker and the Senate Majority Leader, departed Washington for the facility. The Senate Majority Leader, Mr. Mitchell, was confirmed in their company. The Senate Minority Leader, Mr. Dole, was confirmed in their company. The Chief Justice of the United States, Mr. Rehnquist, was confirmed at an undisclosed location.

The warhead detonated over New York at 04:44 UTC — 12:44 Eastern Daylight Time — at an airburst altitude of approximately 1,200 meters. Ground zero was assessed as approximately the financial district of lower Manhattan, near Wall Street. The yield was assessed at approximately 500 kilotons. Lower Manhattan, the financial district, the World Trade Center, the New York Stock Exchange, the South Street Seaport, much of the Brooklyn Heights district across the East River, much of the Jersey City waterfront across the Hudson, and the deep transportation infrastructure connecting these districts were within the radius of total destruction. The detonation occurred during the early afternoon of a working day. The population of lower Manhattan at that hour, including those evacuating in response to the civil-defense advisories issued in the preceding twenty-four hours and those who had remained at their posts in the financial and governmental institutions of the city, has not been estimated by any authority in a position to do so.

The Mayor of New York, Mr. Koch, was confirmed at the city emergency operations center at an undisclosed Brooklyn location. The Governor of New York, Mr. Cuomo, was confirmed at a state emergency facility in the Adirondacks. The headquarters of the United Nations on the East River, in the United Nations district that lies within the radius of total destruction, was reported destroyed; the Secretary General, Mr. Pérez de Cuéllar, was confirmed alive at the alternate United Nations facility in Geneva, where he had relocated on the previous Monday. The Secretary's principal staff, present in New York at the hour of the strike, had not been accounted for.

Munich

The warhead detonated over Munich at 04:30 UTC — 06:30 Central European Summer Time — at an airburst altitude of approximately 1,000 meters above the central district of the city, with ground zero assessed near the Marienplatz. The yield was assessed at approximately 500 kilotons. The historic central districts of the city, the Bavarian state government buildings, the principal United States European Command rear-area facilities and the Federal Intelligence Service complex at Pullach, the principal stations of the Deutsche Bundesbahn, and the residential districts of central Munich were within the radius of total destruction.

The selection of Munich as the fifth target, rather than Bonn or Brussels or any of the operational headquarters of the Atlantic alliance, was the subject of analysis through the morning by senior Western military authorities. The most logical explanation, offered by an American officer at Site R speaking on background to a CNN correspondent, was the following: "They selected Munich because Munich is a city of importance to the Federal Republic of Germany whose destruction, in the calculus of the men who chose to do this thing, would be insufficient to compel the United States or the United Kingdom or France to respond in kind, but sufficient to demonstrate to the Federal Republic of Germany that the men in Moscow possess weapons that they are willing to use against German cities. They selected Munich for the same reason they selected London, and Paris, and Washington, and New York. They selected the cities they did not need to destroy in order to win. They did not select the cities they would need to destroy in order to win. They left those for tomorrow, in the hope that we shall not, today, give them tomorrow. The hope is rational. It is also a hope. We shall determine, in the hours immediately ahead, whether the hope is to be answered."

The Minister-President of Bavaria, Mr. Streibl, was confirmed at the Bavarian state emergency facility at Pullach. The Federal Defense Minister, Mr. Stoltenberg, was confirmed at the Marienthal command bunker in Rhineland-Palatinate together with the principal members of the West German federal government. Chancellor Kohl was confirmed in their company. The Bundestag, sitting in extraordinary session through the previous evening, had on the previous afternoon been ordered to disperse to a regional facility outside Bonn, and was confirmed by the Federal Press Office to have done so.

The Question

In the hours since the strikes, the National Security Council of the United States, augmented by the senior military commanders of the United States Strategic Air Command and the United States European Command, has remained in continuous session aboard the National Emergency Airborne Command Post and at Site R, in communication through the survivable strategic-communications networks of the United States with the political authorities of the United Kingdom, France, the Federal Republic of Germany, Canada, and the other governments of the Atlantic alliance. The substance of that communication has not, at the hour of this dispatch, been disclosed to any organ of the press of any nation. The decision before the political authorities of the alliance, in the assessment of every commentator capable of articulating it and in the assessment of every citizen of every nation who has, this morning, attempted not to articulate it, is the gravest decision that has been before any government of any nation in the history of the species, and the decision that, by the structure of the strategic order under which the species has for forty-four years organized its affairs, no government had been expected, by those who had constructed that order, ever in fact to face. It is faced this morning. It shall be answered in the hours immediately ahead.

A direct communication was reported by sources within the Pentagon to have been received at the National Military Command Center alternate facility at Site R at 6:14 a.m. Eastern time, transmitted from Moscow over the Direct Communications Link — the so-called "Hot Line" — that has connected the principal command facilities of the United States and the Soviet Union since 1963. The substance of the communication was not disclosed. The fact of its receipt was confirmed.

The Strategic Air Command alert force was reported by sources at Offutt Air Force Base, Nebraska — the headquarters facility having been evacuated to the Looking Glass airborne command post EC-135C, presently in continuous orbit over the central United States — to have, since the moment of the strikes, been at the highest level of operational readiness contemplated by its doctrine. The alert force consists, by published estimates, of approximately 1,800 nuclear warheads on land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles in the silo fields of Wyoming, Montana, North Dakota, Missouri, and South Dakota; approximately 3,200 nuclear warheads aboard the Trident and Poseidon ballistic missile submarines of the United States Navy then at sea; approximately 2,200 nuclear weapons aboard the alert force of the United States Air Force B-52 and B-1B bomber wings then airborne or on ground alert; and an unspecified additional quantity aboard tactical aircraft, surface vessels, and shore installations. None of this force had, at the hour of this dispatch, been employed.

In Geneva, the Holy Father — who had on the previous afternoon traveled from Rome to the city of Geneva at the urgent invitation of the World Council of Churches and the World Health Organization, and who was in residence this morning at the Apostolic Nunciature in that city — entered the Cathedral of Saint-Pierre at 9 a.m. local time, knelt at the altar, and remained at prayer. He has, at the hour of this dispatch, neither risen nor spoken. The President of the World Council of Churches and the General Secretary of the World Health Organization were reported to have entered the cathedral after him, and to have knelt likewise. The bells of the cathedral rang, in the morning hours, in a configuration that the Genevan ecclesiastical authorities described as "the configuration appointed by long custom for the death of nations."

In Atlanta, this morning, the building from which this dispatch is filed is full. The personnel of every American news organization whose principal offices have, in the events of the morning, ceased to function, have, in such numbers as could in the available hours travel to Atlanta, gathered in this building. They are working. They are filing. They are not, in the principal, speaking to one another beyond the immediate requirements of the work. The work continues.

The President of the United States, by the most recent information available to this correspondent, remains aloft. The decision before him remains his to take. He has not, at this hour, taken it.

He shall.

July 2, 1989

US LAUNCHES PROPORTIONAL NUCLEAR RESPONSE; FIVE SOVIET CITIES STRUCK; GORBACHEV FREED IN MURMANSK; KRYUCHKOV REPORTED EXECUTED BY RUSSIAN MILITARY; CEASEFIRE TAKES EFFECT

ATLANTA — At 14:00 Coordinated Universal Time today, twenty-six hours after Soviet submarine-launched ballistic missiles destroyed central districts of London, Paris, Munich, Washington, and New York, the strategic forces of the United States, in a coordinated operation directed personally by the President of the United States from the National Emergency Airborne Command Post and conducted in consultation with the strategic authorities of the United Kingdom and France, struck the cities of Moscow, Leningrad, Kyiv, Minsk, and Novosibirsk with five nuclear weapons of yields and configurations matched, by deliberate choice, to the weapons employed against the cities of the Atlantic alliance on the previous morning.

The strikes, executed in a window of approximately twelve minutes between 14:02 and 14:14 UTC, were assessed by the United States Air Force Technical Applications Center and by allied technical-collection authorities to have produced effects upon the targeted Soviet cities consistent in scale and in character with the effects of the previous day's strikes upon their own targets. Immediate Soviet civilian fatalities, by the preliminary assessment of the United States intelligence community communicated to the President at 18:00 UTC, were estimated to fall in a range whose lower bound exceeded two and one-half million persons and whose upper bound the assessment declined to fix. The political character of the strike, in the words of the National Security Adviser Mr. Scowcroft in a written statement issued at 16:00 UTC, was "the proportional response of the Government of the United States, in consultation with its closest allies, to a use of nuclear weapons against the territory and population of those allies whose scale and character had no precedent and could admit of no other answer consistent with the survival of the strategic order on which the security of all nations, including that of the Soviet Union itself, has for forty-four years depended."

The decision had been taken by the President aboard NEACP between 21:00 UTC the previous evening and 09:00 UTC this morning, in consultation with Prime Minister Thatcher at PINDAR, President Mitterrand at Taverny, Chancellor Kohl at Marienthal, and Prime Minister Mulroney at the Canadian Forces Station Carp facility in Ontario. The Vice President at Site R, the Speaker at the Greenbrier, the Senate Majority Leader and Senate Minority Leader in his company, and the Chief Justice at his undisclosed location were notified prior to execution. The principal members of the United States Joint Chiefs of Staff, embarked aboard NEACP and at the Looking Glass airborne command post, executed the President's order through the strategic-communications networks at 13:50 UTC.

The strike package consisted of five Trident I C-4 submarine-launched ballistic missiles, fired at intervals of approximately ninety seconds from a single Ohio-class ballistic missile submarine of the United States Navy operating at a position in the Norwegian Sea, each missile carrying a single W76 reentry vehicle of approximately 100 kilotons yield reconfigured for the strike profile in the previous twelve hours. The deliberate decision to employ a single submarine, to fire fewer than the boat's full salvo, and to direct the strike entirely against the cities corresponding in political weight to the cities struck on the previous day was, in the assessment of the President's senior advisers communicated to allied governments, "the closest available analog to the operational pattern of the Soviet strike, executed for the purpose of communicating to whatever authority remained in the Soviet command structure that the response had been deliberately matched, deliberately bounded, and deliberately directed at the cities the choice of which the Soviet command itself had on the previous morning made."

The Strikes

Moscow was struck at 17:02 Moscow time. Ground zero was assessed as approximately Red Square. The Kremlin, the principal ministries on Staraya Square and along the Moscow River, the Lubyanka headquarters of the Committee for State Security, the General Staff complex on the Arbat, the principal stations of the Moscow Metro converging on the central district, and the historic central administrative core of the Russian state from the fifteenth century onward were within the radius of total destruction. Vladimir Aleksandrovich Kryuchkov, the chairman of the Committee for State Security and the figure whose authority over the previous fourteen days had directed the Soviet conduct of the war, was, by every account that has reached the West in the hours since the strike, not at the Lubyanka at the moment of detonation but at a command facility outside the city.

Leningrad was struck at 17:04 Moscow time. Ground zero was assessed as the Admiralty, near the central crossing of the Neva. The Hermitage, the Winter Palace, the Peter and Paul Fortress, the principal districts of the historical city laid out by Peter the Great in 1703, and the great squares and embankments through which the city had organized its civic life for nearly three centuries were within the radius of total destruction. The headquarters of the Leningrad Military District, of the Baltic Fleet, and of the Northwestern Group of Forces were within the radius of total or near-total destruction. The Mariinsky Theatre, the Russian Museum, the Kazan Cathedral, and the Cathedral of Our Lady of Kazan on Nevsky Prospect were within the radius of total destruction. The 900-day siege had not destroyed the central city. The strike of the 2nd of July 1989 destroyed the central city in fourteen seconds.

Kyiv was struck at 16:05 Kyiv time. Ground zero was assessed as approximately Independence Square — the Maidan Nezalezhnosti, then known as the Square of the October Revolution. The Cathedral of Saint Sophia, the Cathedral of Saint Michael, the Verkhovna Rada of the Ukrainian SSR, the central administrative buildings of the Ukrainian government, the headquarters of the Communist Party of Ukraine, the buildings in which Mr. Ivashko had on the previous afternoon declined to authorize the use of nuclear weapons in defense of the Moscow regime, and the historical central districts of a city whose foundation tradition reaches to the ninth century were within the radius of total destruction. Mr. Ivashko was confirmed at a Ukrainian regional civil-defense facility outside the city, alive.

Minsk was struck at 17:08 Moscow time. Ground zero was assessed as approximately Lenin Square, in the central district of the city. The principal administrative buildings of the Belorussian SSR, including the buildings of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Belorussia, were within the radius of total destruction.

Novosibirsk, the principal city of Siberia and the city whose selection as the fifth target represented, in the careful phrasing of the Pentagon spokesman in a briefing aboard NEACP, "the closest American analog to the Soviet selection of Munich" — a major city of the targeted nation outside the principal political nucleus, whose destruction would communicate the response without necessitating the further escalation that the destruction of the principal command facilities themselves would have made unavoidable — was struck at 21:11 Novosibirsk time, the strike package having flown the longer trajectory required by the city's eastern position. Ground zero was assessed as approximately the central railway station, near the Ob River. The principal administrative, scientific, and industrial districts of the Siberian capital, including the Akademgorodok scientific center thirty kilometers to the south of the city's ground zero, were variously within the radii of total or partial destruction.

The selection of Kyiv as a target — over the protests, communicated to the National Security Council in the night hours, of allied analysts who argued that the Ukrainian SSR had on the previous afternoon visibly broken with Moscow over precisely the question of nuclear use — was the subject of internal debate within the President's circle that the White House subsequently declined to characterize. The decision to retain Kyiv in the strike package was, by the account of one senior official, "taken on the explicit ground that the Soviet strike of the previous day had likewise included a target whose destruction served no military purpose and reflected only the political logic of demonstrative use, and that the proportional response could not, without departing from proportionality, decline to include such a target on its own side." Mr. Ivashko, alive at the regional facility, has not been heard from since the strike.

The Hot Line and the Murmansk Incident

The communication received at 6:14 a.m. Eastern time on the 1st of July over the Direct Communications Link, the substance of which had not been disclosed in the previous day's dispatches, was confirmed by the White House at 21:00 UTC tonight to have been a message from Marshal Sergei Sokolov, the former Soviet Defense Minister and a long-respected figure within the Soviet General Staff, transmitted from the alternate Stavka command facility at Sharapovo, southwest of Moscow. The message had stated that Marshal Sokolov, in concert with a number of senior officers of the Soviet armed forces whose names the message had specified, repudiated the Emergency Committee, recognized President Gorbachev as the lawful authority of the Soviet state, and was undertaking, by means upon which the message did not elaborate, to restore that authority. The message had requested that the United States and its allies "exercise the maximum restraint consistent with the obligations of those governments to their own citizens" pending the completion of those undertakings.

The message had reached Washington four hours after the receipt of the Soviet ultimatum had become moot through the Soviet strikes themselves, and had reached the Looking Glass and NEACP networks during the hours in which the President was conducting consultations with allied governments regarding the response. The decision of the President to proceed with the response notwithstanding the message had been taken, by the account of the National Security Adviser, "with the gravest consideration of Marshal Sokolov's communication, with full credit extended to the integrity of his position and the courage of his action, and with the conclusion that the response of the alliance to the strikes of the previous day could not, without inviting the repetition of those strikes, await the resolution of arrangements within the Soviet Union the timing of which lay beyond the control of the alliance and the success of which could not be guaranteed."

In Murmansk, in the hours preceding the American strikes, the situation that the Norwegian Foreign Ministry had on the previous evening described as "of an exceptionally fluid character" had resolved. Adm. Felix N. Gromov, the commander of the Northern Fleet, in concert with senior officers of the Northern Fleet's surface, submarine, and air components, had at approximately 04:00 Moscow time on 1 July — half an hour before the Soviet strikes were launched, and from positions independent of those strikes — entered the naval medical facility at Severomorsk in which President Gorbachev had been detained since the night of 17 June, secured the facility against the resistance of the K.G.B. detachment guarding it, taken Mr. Gorbachev into the protective custody of the Northern Fleet, and transferred him by aircraft to the alternate strategic command facility at Plesetsk, in Arkhangelsk Oblast, where he had remained throughout the day of 1 July under the protection of forces loyal to Marshal Sokolov.

Mr. Gorbachev appeared on Soviet television at 23:00 Moscow time today — six hours after the American strikes, from a facility identified only as "the alternate command facility of the Supreme High Command of the Armed Forces of the U.S.S.R." — in his first public appearance in the fifteen days since his removal from office. He was visibly thinner, visibly aged, and dressed in a sweater entirely unsuitable for the Archangelsk climate. He spoke for eleven minutes. He addressed himself, he said, to the Soviet people; to the peoples of the Atlantic alliance; and to the world.

He confirmed, in the first portion of his remarks, his restoration to the offices of President of the U.S.S.R. and General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, by what he described as "the lawful action of officers of the Soviet armed forces in defense of the constitutional order of the state."

He confirmed, in the second portion, the immediate and unconditional cessation of all hostilities between the armed forces of the Soviet Union and the armed forces of the Atlantic alliance, effective at the hour of his broadcast.

He confirmed, in the third portion, "the immediate withdrawal of all Soviet armed forces from the territory of the Islamic Republic of Iran, of the Polish People's Republic, of the German Democratic Republic, of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, and of every other state in which Soviet armed forces are presently deployed in the conduct of the operations commenced on the 19th of June 1989, such withdrawal to be conducted under the supervision of the United Nations and to be completed within thirty days."

He confirmed, in the fourth portion, the immediate dissolution of the so-called State Committee for the State of Emergency in the U.S.S.R. and the arrest, upon charges of high treason against the Soviet state, of every member of that committee in the custody of the lawful Soviet authorities.

He addressed himself, in the fifth portion, to the American strikes of the afternoon. He said: "The cities of my country struck this afternoon by the weapons of the United States have been destroyed in consequence of the actions of a criminal faction of my own state, by the use of weapons whose use my country had on the previous morning itself initiated. I do not — I cannot — claim, on behalf of the Soviet people who have this afternoon perished, that they have been the victims of an injustice that the Soviet people did not first commit. The dead of London, of Paris, of Munich, of Washington, and of New York were the prior dead. They were dead at the hand of officers of my state, acting upon authority that my state had in the previous fortnight surrendered to them. The dead of Moscow, of Leningrad, of Kyiv, of Minsk, and of Novosibirsk are the answering dead. They lie in the same earth. They are owed the same mourning. They shall, by the action of every government that survives this day, receive it. To this, I can only ask history; what more can we do? What more can I do?"

Visibly struggling to control his emotions, Gorbachev paused for a long while before continuing.

"I shall close with this. The men who have brought my country and the world to this hour shall answer to the tribunals of the Soviet state and to the tribunals of history. The Soviet Union shall, in such time as remains to it, conduct the proceedings to which they shall be entitled and from which they shall not escape. Mr. Vladimir Aleksandrovich Kryuchkov was, at 19:00 Moscow time this evening, taken into custody by officers of the Special Forces of the Main Intelligence Directorate at the alternate command facility at Sharapovo. He was, at 20:30 Moscow time this evening, tried by a military tribunal convened under the authority restored to me at 22:00 last night. He was, at 21:00 Moscow time this evening, executed by firing squad. The members of the Emergency Committee remaining at large at the hour of this broadcast — Marshal Yazov, Mr. Pugo, Mr. Pavlov, Mr. Yanayev, Mr. Lukyanov, Mr. Baklanov, Mr. Tizyakov, and Mr. Starodubtsev — are the subject of warrants for their arrest, and shall be detained, alive or otherwise, in the hours immediately ahead. They shall be tried. They shall be sentenced. The Soviet Union has had, this fortnight, sufficient experience of summary justice. Whatever they receive from the tribunals of the lawful state shall be received under the law.

"To the Russian people, to the Ukrainian people, to the Belorussian people, to the Lithuanian, the Latvian, the Estonian, the Georgian, the Armenian, the Azerbaijani, the Kazakh, the Uzbek, the Turkmen, the Kirgiz, the Tajik, and the Moldavian peoples, and to the peoples of the Soviet Far East: I say that the country to which we shall awaken tomorrow morning shall not be the country we knew on the morning of 17 June. It shall be a country, of that I shall give my word. What kind of country it shall be lies in your hands, and in mine, and in the hands of those who shall, in the months and in the years to come, do the work of building it. Spasibo. Doviraysya, no proveryay. Trust, but verify. Mr. Reagan once gave me that proverb. I return it now to him, and to his successor, and to all who shall, in the years to come, build with us the world that may, by our work, yet be built. Good night."

The President, aboard NEACP at the moment of Mr. Gorbachev's broadcast, was reported by White House officials to have watched the broadcast in full, in the company of his senior advisers, and to have, at its close, said only: "Land us. We have things to do." NEACP was reported to have landed at Andrews Air Force Base — the runway and approaches having sustained significant but not disabling damage in the previous day's strike, and having been certified for emergency use in the intervening hours — at 06:00 Eastern time on 3 July. The President, descending the aircraft's stairs, was met by the Vice President. Photographs subsequently distributed by White House staff showed the two men embracing without speaking on the tarmac, in the early light of the day.

Strategic Air Command stood down from DEFCON 1 at 02:00 UTC on 3 July. The Soviet Strategic Rocket Forces stood down at 02:30 UTC, by communication transmitted directly from Mr. Gorbachev to the President over the restored Hot Line. NATO ground forces in Germany, in Poland, in the Czechoslovak frontier, halted in place at 02:00 UTC.

The dead of the previous forty-eight hours had not, at the hour of this dispatch, been counted. They shall be counted in the years to come. The number, when it is known, shall not be a small number.

The war is over.

July 4, 2029

FORTY YEARS AFTER: THE WORLD THAT REMAINS

THE ATLANTA NEWS-COURIER, lead story

Forty years ago this morning, the editor of this newspaper closed the office of the previous evening and walked across an Atlanta whose air still carried, in the wind from the north, the residue of fires whose origins he and the readers of this paper would in subsequent years come to understand. He was thirty-one years old. He had been on the telephone for thirty-six hours. The number he had been calling, the offices of his employer at the headquarters in Manhattan, had not been answering since 12:44 Eastern time on the 1st of July. He had walked home that morning expecting to learn, in the radio bulletins to which the population of every city of the Western world had at that hour been listening, that the world had ended. The world had not ended. He had filed a story about it. The story had been published in a paper whose offices in New York, in Washington, in London, in Paris had been destroyed, in editions composed in cities whose printing facilities had been pressed into emergency continental-scale service, and read by readers who had, in the days immediately following, sought from the survival of newspapers some evidence that the institutions through which they had organized their understanding of the world had themselves survived.

The institutions had, in the principal, survived. They had survived because the choices made by individual men and women — by the President, aboard the National Emergency Airborne Command Post, between 21:00 UTC on the 1st of July and 09:00 UTC on the 2nd; by Marshal Sokolov, in the alternate Stavka facility at Sharapovo, in the small hours of that same morning; by Adm. Gromov, on the streets of Murmansk; by Mr. Gorbachev, in the basement of a naval medical facility in Severomorsk; by an unknown but considerable number of submariners, missile officers, signals personnel, and aircrews on either side of the Atlantic who had, in the eighteen hours after the Soviet strikes of the 1st, declined to take actions that they had been ordered to take, or had taken actions that they had not been ordered to take — had, in the aggregate, been the choices that they had been. The world had not ended because, at the moment at which it had been most accessible to ending, a sufficient number of human beings had declined to end it. The number had not been large. It had not, in the recollection of those who had stood among them, been visible to any observer at the moment. It had been sufficient.

It is not the purpose of this morning's edition to recount, in the narrative form which has, in the years since, been attempted by every serious historian and which is at this hour, in the verdict of the discipline, considered impossible to render adequate, the events of the fortnight from the 17th of June through the 2nd of July 1989. It is not the purpose to count, again, the dead. They have been counted. The figure stands at approximately 9.4 million immediate and proximate fatalities across the ten cities, with subsequent deaths from radiation-induced cancer, environmental displacement, and the cascading systemic failures of the years 1989 to 1993 estimated by the World Health Organization at approximately a further fourteen million. These figures, in the assessment of the demographic literature, are unstable in the upper bound. The lower bound is firm.

It is the purpose of this morning's edition to look, in the company of the readers who have for forty years asked of this and of every paper of seriousness what kind of world had emerged from the fortnight, at the world that emerged. To survey, in such measure as a single edition can, the principal features of that world. To remark — at the close of an interval whose roundness has, by the conventions of human reflection, given the present anniversary the weight that round numbers have always commanded — what those features have been, what they have become, and what they may yet, in the time remaining to the present generation, become further.

The Geography

The Soviet Union ceased to exist on the 31st of December 1990, eighteen months after the war, by the negotiated dissolution of the Treaty of Belovezha and the accompanying Treaty of Almaty. The fifteen successor states that have, in the four decades since, occupied the territory of the former Union have followed paths so divergent that the analytical category itself — the post-Soviet space — has, in the historiography of the present generation, been substantially abandoned. The Russian Federation, under President Gorbachev's continued leadership through 1994, under his elected successor Mr. Yavlinsky from 1994 to 2002, and under the four presidents who have followed, has constructed across forty years a parliamentary democracy of European character whose admission to the European Union in 2018 had, in the period of the war, lain beyond the most extravagant imagination of the most extravagant Russian liberal. Ukraine, having received from the Russian Federation the Crimean peninsula in the negotiated settlement of 1992 in exchange for the renunciation of the Soviet nuclear weapons stationed on its territory at the moment of dissolution, was admitted to the European Union in 2014 and to NATO in 2017. Belarus, the Baltic republics, the Caucasian republics, the Central Asian republics — each has had its own path. Some of those paths have ended in democracies of solid character. Others have ended in dictatorships of a familiar register. The principal political fact of the post-Soviet space is that there is no principal political fact: the fifteen states have become fifteen states, and the analytical convenience of treating them as a single category has yielded, as the convenience of treating Western Europe as a single category yielded in the late nineteenth century, to the historical individuality of each.

Germany was reunified on the 3rd of October 1990, by the Treaty of Hamburg signed by Chancellor Kohl, President Gorbachev, President Bush, Prime Minister Thatcher, President Mitterrand, and Prime Minister Mazowiecki of Poland — whose government, restored by the events of late June 1989, had through the autumn and winter of that year conducted the negotiations on Polish territorial questions whose outcome the Treaty would ratify. The reunified Federal Republic, having absorbed the territory of the former German Democratic Republic and having received the limited territorial adjustments along the Oder-Neisse line that the Polish government negotiated as the price of its assent, has in the four decades since become the principal political and economic state of Europe. The destruction of Munich, the third largest city of the prewar Federal Republic and the cultural capital of Bavaria, has not been repaired in the geographic sense in which Hiroshima or Nagasaki were repaired. The site of the central city remains a memorial precinct of approximately fourteen square kilometers, administered jointly by the Federal Republic, the Free State of Bavaria, and the Holy See, in whose precinct the Frauenkirche, restored from its foundations through the labor of the people of the Federal Republic over the years 1995 to 2007, stands as the central element of the most visited memorial site in Europe. The new city of Munich, constructed eastward of the original site beginning in 1992, has approximately the population of the prewar city. The two are not the same place. They are not understood to be.

Iran, liberated from Soviet occupation by the combined operations of Iraqi, American, and reorganized Iranian forces in the period from late June through August of 1989, has in the four decades since followed a course that the foreign-policy literature of the period had not, on the morning of the 19th of June 1989, anticipated. The Islamic Republic, restored under the constitutional reformulation negotiated at Qom in the autumn of 1989 by Speaker Rafsanjani and the surviving Grand Ayatollahs, has evolved across the four decades into a parliamentary democracy of mixed clerical and electoral character whose accommodation with its neighbors and with the West, while never untroubled, has rendered Iran, by the year 2029, the principal commercial partner of the European Union in southwest Asia and a state at peace with each of its frontier neighbors. The withdrawal of Iraqi forces from Iranian territory, accomplished without combat in the autumn of 1989 under intensive American and Saudi pressure and with the financial inducements that the Gulf monarchies had committed to provide, was the foundation upon which the relationship between the two states has subsequently rested. The Iraqi state, transformed by the oil revenues of the post-war settlement and by the political incorporation of Mr. Hussein into the Western diplomatic framework that his calculations of late June 1989 had earned him, persisted under his rule until his death in 2006 and has subsequently undergone the political evolution toward parliamentary forms that his successors, having weighed the example of the Soviet Union, judged it prudent to undertake.

The Economy and the Climate

The economic effects of the war, in the calculus of the international financial institutions whose principal staff had perished in the destruction of Washington and New York and whose reconstitution in alternative locations through the autumn of 1989 had been one of the central preoccupations of the immediate post-war period, were of two kinds. The first, in the years 1989 to 1993, was the catastrophic global recession produced by the destruction of the principal financial centers of the Western world, by the collapse of the integrated global trading system whose nodes those centers had constituted, and by the cascading effects upon the productive economies of every nation whose accounts had been settled through them. World gross product, by the retrospective estimates of the International Monetary Fund, declined by approximately eighteen percent over the period 1989 to 1992 — the largest peacetime contraction of the global economy in the recorded history of national accounts. The recovery, beginning haltingly in 1993 and proceeding with increasing confidence through the second half of the 1990s, was the product of an unprecedented coordination among the surviving political authorities of the Atlantic and Pacific economies, embodied in the Bretton Woods institutions reconstituted at Geneva in 1990 and in the agreements between the Group of Seven nations conducted in continuous session at Toronto from 1989 to 1996.

The second economic effect, sustained across the entirety of the four decades, has been the expenditure of resources upon the cleanup, the medical care, the displacement support, and the reconstruction whose scale was, in the late 1980s, beyond the contemplation of any economic ministry. The estimated total cost of these activities to the public budgets of the Atlantic and former Soviet states, expressed in the constant currency of the present year, exceeds 12 trillion dollars. The expenditure has not been entirely a deadweight. The technological advances driven by the requirements of medical care for radiation-exposed populations, of environmental remediation of contaminated zones, of reconstruction of urban infrastructure at unprecedented scale and pace, and of the development of energy systems no longer dependent upon hydrocarbon supply chains compromised by the destruction of the principal financial markets in which their pricing had previously been settled, have been considerable. The world of 2029, by the assessment of the principal economic histories of the period, would not have arrived at the technological, medical, and energy systems it presently enjoys without the catastrophe through which it had previously been compelled to pass. This is, in the recollection of every demographic stratum of the present readership, no consolation. It is, in the assessment of the discipline, true.

The climatic effects of the ten detonations were the subject of intense scientific debate in the immediate aftermath of the strikes and have, in the forty years since, been the subject of a literature of unusual size and unusual seriousness. The brief nuclear winter that the most pessimistic scientific projections of the early 1980s had contemplated did not occur in the form anticipated. The total yield of the strikes — approximately 5.5 megatons — fell well below the threshold at which the firestorm-driven stratospheric soot injections required for sustained planetary cooling would have been generated, and the seasonal effects observed in the years 1989 through 1992, while measurable and severe — global mean surface temperatures depressed by approximately 1.4 degrees Celsius across the period, with substantial agricultural disruption in the temperate zones — did not approach the catastrophic outcomes contemplated in the Crutzen and Birks paper of 1982 or in the TTAPS literature that had followed it. The agricultural disruption produced approximately fifteen percent global crop yield reductions over the period and was the principal direct cause of the food-security crises that affected southern Asia and sub-Saharan Africa in the years 1990 to 1993. The reductions had largely abated by 1995. The contribution to subsequent anthropogenic climate change of the fires associated with the strikes was assessed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, in its periodic reports through the present period, as approximately one to two percent of the cumulative warming forcing observed across the four decades — a contribution detectable, attributable, and dwarfed by the continued combustion of fossil fuels. The world warmed. The strikes did not, in the principal, warm it.

The Political Order

The political institutions of the Atlantic alliance survived the war. They emerged from it transformed.

The United Nations, its New York headquarters destroyed and the principal members of its Secretariat killed, was reconstituted at Geneva in the autumn of 1989 under the continued Secretary-Generalship of Mr. Pérez de Cuéllar, who completed the term to which he had been elected in 1986 and was succeeded in 1992 by Mr. Boutros-Ghali. The Security Council, restored to function in October 1989, conducted in 1990 the formal proceedings under which the membership previously held by the Soviet Union passed to the Russian Federation. The reform of the Council, whose composition the events of June and July 1989 had so plainly invalidated, was the subject of negotiation across the entirety of the 1990s and resulted in the Charter Amendments of 2002, under which the Council was expanded to fifteen permanent members, including India, Brazil, Japan, Germany, (expanding after the fall of the genocidal Terre Blanche regime in 2015 to South Africa) and the veto power, while retained, was modified to require concurrence of two permanent members for invocation. The reformed Council has not, since 2002, been the principal locus of decision in any major international crisis. The principal locus has been the periodic Conference of the Survivor States, an institution without formal charter, convened first at Helsinki in 1995 and subsequently at three- to five-year intervals at varying capitals, whose membership consists of the states whose populations sustained direct losses in the war, whose deliberations are not formally binding upon any participant, and whose resolutions have nevertheless been observed, in the four decades since the institution's founding, with a regularity that no other institution of contemporary international politics has attained.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization, having in the period 1989 to 1991 admitted Poland, Hungary, the Czech and Slovak Republics, the Baltic states, Ukraine, and Romania to its membership, has remained the principal security organization of the Atlantic space across the four decades. The European Union, whose deepening in the early 1990s was driven by the requirements of post-war reconstruction in the eastern half of the continent, has reached, by the year 2029, a membership of thirty-four states, a customs and currency union encompassing all but four of those members, and a federal structure whose legitimacy, contested in the early decades, has in the present period been broadly settled. The President of the European Union, an office created by the Treaty of Strasbourg of 2009, is at the present hour Mrs. von der Leyen of the Federal Republic of Germany, whose mother, a resident of central Munich at the hour of its destruction, was confirmed dead in the casualty registers of November 1989, and whose subsequent career is, in the present era's biographies, treated as the working out, across one human life, of the political consequences of the morning of the 1st of July.

The strategic order produced by the war is the order under which the world has subsequently lived. The Treaty of Reykjavik of 1991, signed by President Bush, President Gorbachev, Prime Minister Major, President Mitterrand, Premier Li Peng, and the heads of government of every nuclear-armed state then in existence, established the framework under which the strategic arsenals of the signatory states have, across the subsequent four decades, been progressively reduced. The total number of deployed nuclear warheads in the world today stands at approximately 240, distributed among the United States, the Russian Federation, the United Kingdom, France, the People's Republic of China, India, Pakistan, and Israel. The figure has, since the war, only declined; not in any single year of the past four decades has it risen. The Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty of 1992 has been universally observed. The Fissile Material Cutoff Treaty of 1994 has been universally observed. The Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, whose enforcement provisions were strengthened to the point of binding international authority by the supplementary protocols of 1996, has been violated in the four decades since the war upon precisely two occasions — by the Democratic People's Republic of Korea in 1998 and by the Republic of South Africa in 2014 — and has, in both cases, been restored through diplomatic and economic action without recourse to military force.

The doctrinal innovation of the immediate post-war period, embodied in the Pugwash Declaration of 1990 and incorporated into the strategic doctrines of every nuclear-armed state by the close of the 1990s, was the formal renunciation of the doctrines of countervalue targeting and of mutual assured destruction that had organized the strategic thought of the Cold War. The doctrines were renounced, in the language of the Declaration, "in light of demonstrated experience of the operational consequences of those doctrines under conditions of crisis, and in light of the further demonstrated insufficiency of those doctrines to the protection of the populations on whose protection their proponents had purported to base them." The renunciation was, by the assessment of the strategic studies literature of the present period, the most consequential doctrinal change in the history of nuclear weapons. It was made possible, in the testimony of every analyst of consequence, by the fact that countervalue targeting, having been employed, had been seen.

The Memorials

The memorials are too many to enumerate. The principal sites — the Reflecting Field where the central districts of Washington had stood, dedicated by President Quayle in 1995; the Trafalgar Garden in London, dedicated by Queen Elizabeth II in 1996; the Île Mémoriale in Paris, on the site of the destroyed Île de la Cité, dedicated by President Chirac in 1998; the Lower Manhattan Memorial Precinct, dedicated by Mayor Giuliani in 1999; the Munich Memorial Precinct, dedicated jointly by Chancellor Schröder and Pope John Paul II in 2001; the Red Square Memorial in Moscow, dedicated by President Yavlinsky and Mr. Gorbachev in 2000; the Bronze Horseman Memorial in the new central district of Leningrad — restored to its prewar name of Saint Petersburg by referendum of 1991 — dedicated by President Gorbachev in 1999; the Maidan Memorial in Kyiv; the Lenin Square Memorial in Minsk; the Ob River Memorial in Novosibirsk — have, across the four decades, become the destinations of pilgrimage by the populations of every nation that has retained the institution of pilgrimage. They are visited, by the most recent estimates of the relevant tourism authorities, by approximately 80 million persons annually, in aggregate.

The memorials are not the principal memorials. The principal memorials are the surviving members of the generations of the period — the men and women now in their eighties and nineties who lost, in the course of approximately seventy-six hours in late June and early July 1989, the cities of their childhoods, the families with whom they had organized their lives, the institutions through which they had understood themselves, and the sense, common to the children of the postwar Atlantic order, that the world they had inherited from the previous generation had been a world in which the worst that could be imagined would not, by the operation of the institutions they had entrusted with their security, in fact occur.

The institutions had not prevented it. The institutions had, in the principal, also not failed: the catastrophe had been initiated by the deliberate actions of human beings whose decisions had been made within the institutions that had been provided. The institutions had, after the catastrophe, sufficed to produce the world that has, across forty years, been built. The judgment of the present generation upon those institutions has been the judgment that the discipline of history, given time, in such cases tends to produce: that they were sufficient, by a margin which had been narrower than any of those who had constructed them had imagined, and that the margin had been sufficient. It had been sufficient because the men and women within the institutions, at the moments when the structure had alone been insufficient, had supplied what the structure had lacked.

The Children

The generation that came of age after the war — the cohort born between 1985 and 2000, who have through the present period entered fully into their inheritance and now occupy the principal offices of the surviving states — has organized its public life around a single proposition: that what their parents had almost experienced in 1989 must never occur again. The proposition has produced the four decades of strategic restraint, of institutional reconstruction, of arms reduction, of climatic and economic cooperation, and of memorial culture that have characterized the period. It has not produced a world without conflict; the world has, across forty years, contained its share of the wars and atrocities that have been the constant feature of the human record. It has produced a world in which the strategic arsenals have, in no year, been employed; in which the institutions of international cooperation have, in no year, been dissolved; in which the populations of the great states have, in no year, been instructed by their governments to consider their immediate annihilation a serious possibility; and in which the children of those populations have grown to adulthood in a security that, while imperfect and while contingent, has been the security of the human species rather than the insecurity that their parents and grandparents had been compelled to accept. As China rises to the rank of global superpower, its economy now far outpacing any other on the planet, one can only imagine how such growth would have been met in a world that did not experience 1989.

It is the duty of every generation to bequeath to the next a world in which the catastrophes of the prior generation have, in some measure, been learned from. The generation that survived the events of 1989 — the ordinary populations of the states whose names this morning's memorials carry — has, by every measure that history is capable of applying, discharged that duty. It has not been a duty cheerfully discharged. It has been, in the recollection of every survivor whose testimony has been collected by the present generation's historians, a duty discharged through grief, through guilt, through the inability to sleep through the night that has been the common feature of the post-war biographies, and through the determination — privately formed, never spoken in any public declaration that the discipline has yet identified — that whatever else the survivors had failed to do for the dead, they would not fail to make a world in which the dead would have, in such measure as the world is capable of providing it, a meaning.

The world, this Tuesday morning, contains seven billion human beings. The number is one billion fewer than the demographers of the late 1980s had projected for the year 2029. The shortfall, distributed across the demographic histories of every state and every region, is the principal signature of the war upon the present period. The remaining seven billion live, in such proportion as the present world admits, in the security and the dignity that the institutions of the post-war order, supported by the work of the survivors, have made available. The proportion is not as high as the readers of this paper would wish. It is higher than the proportion that, on the morning of the 2nd of July 1989, the readers of this paper would have been capable of believing.

The bells of every cathedral, every synagogue, every mosque, every temple, and every meeting house in the cities of the Atlantic alliance and the former Soviet Union shall ring, this morning, at 04:30 Coordinated Universal Time. They shall ring for fourteen minutes. They shall ring at 14:00 Coordinated Universal Time again, for twelve minutes. The names of the cities they remember shall, by the custom of forty years, be spoken in the order in which the cities were struck.

This morning's edition has, in the customary practice of the anniversary, been printed in a single color. It is published in honor of the dead.

It is published in the hope of the living.

It is published in the conviction of the surviving institutions of human civilization that what they have, across forty years and at the cost that they have paid, accomplished, shall be preserved.

May God remember the dead.

May God preserve the living.

May God bless the work that remains.

May God save us all.

FIN

JUNE 4, 1989
TROOPS ATTACK AND CRUSH BEIJING PROTEST, THOUSANDS FIGHT BACK, SCORES ARE KILLED

Sakharov Draws Wrath in Stormy Soviet Congress

Poles Begin Voting in First Openly Contested Elections in Soviet Bloc

Khomeini, Imam of Iran and Foe of U.S., is Dead

NICOSIA, Cyprus – Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Iran's spiritual and political leader, died today, 12 days after he underwent surgery for bleeding in his digestive system, the official Iranian news agency IRNA reported.

His hospitalization heightened already intense speculation about who will succeed him as leader of the theocratic state." Iran's main opposition group, the Mujahedeen Khalq, or People's Holy Warriors, said last week that Khomeini had suffered a heart attack on May 27, but this claim could not be independently confirmed.

Khomeini led the 1979 revolution that topped 2,500 years of monarchy and set up the Islamic Republic of Iran, turning the relatively Western-style country ruled by Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlevi into the most hard-line Islamic nation in the world.

He emerged as an implacable foe of both the United States, which had supported the Shah and saw its embassy overrun by Iranian students under his direction, and the Soviet Union, referring to both the superpowers as "The Great Satans", and he led his country in an eight year war against neighboring Iraq.

More recently, political turmoil has gripped the country since Ayatollah Khomeini launched a radical resurgence in February with his death decree against British author Salman Rushdie for allegedly blaspheming against Islam in his novel, ''The Satanic Verses.'' A purge of so-called moderates who apparently favored rebuilding ties with the West followed, and the 10-year-old Islamic regime withdrew into its traditional isolationist stance.

Khomeini in March ousted his designated successor, Ayatollah Hussein Ali Montazeri, 64, who had openly criticized the regime's shortcomings, and then appointed a 20-member committee to review the succession.

But in the absence of a single personality who could match the patriarch's political and revolutionary authority, there was widespread speculation that Iran may be ruled by a collective leadership in the post-Khomeini era.

JUNE 5, 1989
BEIJING DEATH TOLL AT LEAST 300; ARMY TIGHTENS CONTROL OF CITY BUT ANGRY RESISTANCE GOES ON

Need for Money May Slow Ethics Drive in Congress

Big Solidarity Victor Seen in Poland, Some Communists Are Falling Short of a Majority in Vote

WARSAW, Poland – In their first chance to express at the ballot box their feelings about 44 years of Communist rule, Polish voters today appeared to have overwhelmingly voted for candidates endorsed by the Solidarity opposition and to have endangered many unopposed Communists whose election was thought to have been insured by the intricate election rules.

Official results were not expected until later this week but if the results for the Communists and their allies were as poor as the samplings and exit polls indicated, the opposition may have exceeded its expectations to such an extent as to endanger the regime of President Wojciech Jaruzelski.

Jaruzelski, while declining to say how he voted, said he hoped Poland "will get peace from this elections." When asked about the possible actions a new opposition-led government would take, Solidarity spokesman Janusz Onyszkiewicz was quoted simply as saying "after all, Krakow wasn't built in a day".

500 on 2 Trains Reported Killed By Soviet Gas Pipeline Explosion

Soviet KGB Chief Kryuchkov in First Interview Says New Legislature Should Ride Herd on His Agency, Cites U.S. Oversight System as the Model

Iranian Leader Tapped as Possible Successor to Khomeini Shot During Massive Funeral Service

TEHRAN, Iran – The Iranian President, Ali Khameini, was shot and killed today while leading a huge and chaotic memorial service for Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeni, whose death was announced yesterday.

The Presidency in Iran under Khomeini was a ceremonial office, but Khameini was seen as a hard-liner with impeccable religious credentials who had wide support among the various power centers within Iran's ruling leadership and his leading the funeral procession of the fallen leader was seen as a strong signal that he would assume the title of Supreme Leader, a combined civil and religious title previously held by Khomeini.

IRNA, the official Iranian news agency, reported that the assassin, Mohammad Omidvar, was taken into custody immediately as he was attacked by furious onlookers at the service. IRNA further claims that Omidvar is a member of Iran's Tudeh opposition party, which has been believed to have been largely sidelined during the decade of Khomeini's rule.

Before the shooting, the body of Khomeini, in a procession through the streets of Tehran, was surrounded by hundreds of thousands of weeping, chanting mourners. So great was the crush to get close to the Ayatollah's body that at least eight people were trampled to death in a stampede, and more than 500 were injured.

"Sorrow, sorrow is this day", the huge throng chanted. "Khomeini the idol-smasher is with God today."

The streets of the capital were hung with black mourning banners as the death of both Khomeini and Khameini left the nation shaken and its future leadership uncertain. One possible candidate, the commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, General Yahya Rahim Safavi, later appeared on Iranian television calling for calm, advising all citizens to "abstain from just and righteous fury, in the name of the Imam." He continued, addressing the leadership crisis, "We hope temporarily to be able to fill the leadership because the new terms of the Constitution are currently under review."

For the moment, some analysts believe, power here rests in a triumvirate of General Safavi, the Ayatollah's son, Ahmed Khomeini, who had served as his chief aide, and the Speaker of Parliament, Hashemi Rafsanjani.

It was unlikely that anyone would truly be able to replace Ayatollah Khomeini, who became a personification of Iran's revolution, its fierce nationalism, and its resentments. His designated successor, Ali Khameini, was far less well known and will be remembered by history as a transitional figure in the final months of Khomeini's life.

Tudeh is a secular, leftist pro-Soviet party founded in 1941, that has suffered from mass arrests and executions since the founding of the Islamic Republic in 1979. It was believed to have been eliminated as a political force following mass arrests and executions of Iranian political dissidents in 1988, and several leading party figures gave television addresses disavowing their former affiliation and pledging allegiance to "Islam and the great spiritual struggle against Marxism, Zionism, and imperialism".

JUNE 6, 1989
ARMY RIFT REPORTED IN BEIJING; SHOOTING OF CIVILIANS GOES ON; BUSH BARS ARMS SALES TO CHINA

Prime Lending Rate Drops to 11%

New Problem For Afghan Guerrillas: No Russians to Fight

Communists Concede Victory by Solidarity And Call for Coalition

WARSAW – The Communist Party acknowledged tonight that the Solidarity movement had achieved a "decisive majority" of the popular votes in the Polish parliamentary election, and it challenged the victors to join in a coalition government.

Janusz Onyszkiewicz, Solidarity's national spokesman, said at a news conference that initial results showed almost all Solidarity candidates winning. The opposition has captured perhaps as many as 96 seats in the new 100-seat Senate, whose powers will be limited to a veto over legislation.

More significantly, perhaps, the Government was said in unofficial, preliminary results to have fallen short of electing all 35 of its leading members, who had been placed on an unopposed list for the Assembly. Their only requirement for victory was to obtain more than half of the votes cast. Solidarity poll watchers said the Communist list's total vote was averaging 40 to 43 percent. The list includes a majority of the Politburo, among them the Prime Minister, the Interior Minister, and the Defense Minister. Diplomats have expressed doubt that the government could avoid tendering its recognition after such a clear rejection by the voters.

In what was seen by Poles as an ominous reminder of the imposition of martial law in 1981, General Florian Siwicki, the Defense Minister, said in a television statement that the government could not allow a "triumphant mood of adventurism to cause anarchy that would endanger democracy and the social order."

JUNE 7, 1989
ARTILLERY FIRING IN SUBURBS ADDS TO TENSIONS IN BEIJING; MYSTERY ON LEADERS GROWS

Eager Not to Offend, Soviet Congress Criticizes Outside Pressure on China; 'Let Bush Speak for Himself', Gorbachev Says

Solidarity and Warsaw Search For a Way to Govern Poland

Foley Elected House Speaker, But Partisan Warfare Continues

Signing of U. S. and Soviet Pact To Cut Accidental War Risk Postponed at Last Minute, Kremlin Preoccupied With "Internal Drama"

Amid Frenzy And Uncertainty, Iran Buries Ayatollah

TEHRAN, Iran – Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the revolutionary cleric who dominated Iran for a decade, was buried today after hours of frenzied mourning that at one point saw his body torn from its coffin and carried off by a hysterical crowd.

So huge and so emotional were the crowds, estimated at three million, that there was doubt whether the authorities would be able to push through them to bury the Shiite Muslim patriarch. At one point the state television announced that the burial of the Ayatollah, who died on Saturday, would be postponed until Wednesday.

Vast rivers of humanity clad almost entirely in black, the women wrapped in chadors, clogged the city's streets and the highways throughout the day, walking to Behesht-e-Zahara cemetery on the southern outskirts. There, the Ayatollah was buried near the graves of more than a million ''martyrs,'' as the Shiites say, of the revolution and the eight-year war with Iraq.

As the Ayatollah's body, transferred to an army helicopter when the refrigerated truck carrying it was unable to get through the crowds, first arrived at the burial site at about 11 this morning, a shrieking crowd fell on the coffin.

The crowd, much of it made up of Revolutionary Guards detailed to maintain order, pulled the coffin from the helicopter and began parading it around the makeshift compound surrounding the gravesite.

As the excitement grew, the body of the Ayatollah, wrapped in a white burial shroud, fell out of the flimsy wooden coffin, and in a mad scene people in the crowd reached to touch the shroud. The soldiers pushed and wrestled, finally firing warning shots, to get the body back. Ayatollah Khomeini's son, Ahmed, was knocked from his feet.

But even as the soldiers pushed the body back into the helicopter, the crowd swarmed over the craft, dragging it back down as it tried to take off. Others jumped into the hole dug for the Ayatollah's body. The troops drove the crowd back, finally clearing the compound enough to allow the helicopter to take off, its rotors scattering more mourners.

''People love him too much to let him go,'' said a young man in the crowd that had taken the Ayatollah's body.

It was not until more than five hours later that the Ayatollah was buried.

A succession of camouflage-painted helicopters touched down and lifted off from the now-cleared area. Finally, one of the Shah's old American-supplied Huey helicopters, carrying the Speaker of Parliament, Hashemi Rafsanjani, landed, quickly followed by two more. From the first disembarked the leader of the Revolutionary Guard, Gen. Yahya Safavi, and the commander-in-chief of the Iranian Army, Gen. Ali Shahbazi, in a rare show of unity by the two military leaders. Ahmed Khomeini, in his black clerical turban, emerged from the third helicopter, and then the Ayatollah's body, held in a metal box resembling an airline shipping container, was carried out.

There were fewer people now, soldiers and clerics mostly, but it was still another mad scene of pushing and wrestling as the body was moved toward the grave. The tradition here is for burial wrapped only in a shroud with no coffin, and the top was ripped off the metal box as the Ayatollah's body was put into the grave. Later, the box itself was carried off by the crowd and wrenched to pieces.

''O martyr!'' cried the announcer on state television, breaking into tears.

JUNE 8, 1989
FOREBODING GRASPS BEIJING; ARMY UNITS CRISSCROSS CITY; FOREIGNERS HURRY TO LEAVE; CAPITAL PARALYZED

Pope Sees a 'New and Better Era' on the Way

Soviet Premier Says Cutbacks Could Reach 33% for Military

MOSCOW – The Soviet Prime Minister said today that the Government intended to continue steadily cutting the military budget until at least 1995, slashing annual spending by up to one-third. The cuts go substantially beyond those already announced by President Mikhail Gorbachev.

Addressing the Congress of People's Deputies, Nikolai Ryzhkov, who is in effect Mr. Gorbachev's cabinet chief, also disclosed the financial cost of the war in Afghanistan for the first time. The price of the nine-year conflict, 45 billion rubles, the equivalent of $70 billion, drew a gasp from the congress.

Mr. Ryzhkov also said that by 1991 the Government would end subsidies for industries operating at a loss, brandishing the threat of bankruptcy for an estimated 9,000 unprofitable enterprises.

While Mr. Ryzhkov's speech was generally received warmly by the reformist factions within the new Soviet Congress, the nationalist group reacted with outrage. "The Red Army is the foundation of the Soviet state, and this capitalist apologist seeks to demolish it so that we might have more money for his friends in America and Britain? The Soviet people denounce this!", cried Viktor Anpilov, a young hardline Communist and journalist with links to the ultranationalist Pamyat movement.

''It was realistic,'' said Nikolai Shmelev, another economist regarded as a radical reformer. ''From my point of view, not radical enough, but realistic.''

JUNE 9, 1989
CHINA'S PREMIER REAPPEARS; ARMY SEEMS TO TIGHTEN GRIP; BUSH BARS NORMAL TIES NOW

Warsaw Accepts Solidarity Sweep And Humiliating Losses by Party

Bush Resists Pressure to Soften Antimissile Policy

Yeltsin, Gorbachev's Wily Goad, Hints of Some Future Ambitions

In Iran, Parliament Chief Arrested as Confusion Over Succession Continues

TEHRAN – The Speaker of Parliament, Hashemi Rafsanjani, was arrested today on multiple charges of corruption in a move widely seen as an attempt to head off a possible leadership bid in the wake of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's death.

Diplomats said that a deal had been worked out between the Ayatollah and contending clerical factions to make Rafsanjani the president, with increased powers, while assuring a smooth transition by naming a potential rival, Ali Khameini, as Ayatollah Khomeini's successor as supreme religious guide.

But with Khameini now dead and Rafsanjani under arrest, that deal appears to be in tatters. T-72 main battle tanks belonging to the 1st Iranian Armored Division were seen on the streets of Tehran in what was widely believed to be a show of power by the Army's leader, Gen. Ali Shahbazi. A veteran of the Iran-Iraq war, he is seen as more moderate than his rival, the Revolutionary Guards Corps leader Gen. Yahya Safavi.

''Now Shahbazi has the power,'' a Middle Eastern diplomat steeped in the ways of the region said Wednesday, before the announcement of Rafsanjani's arrest. ''Everybody says so. He is to win the election for President in August.'' He quickly added: ''But this is Iran. Nobody really knows. It can all change suddenly.''

JUNE 9, 1989
DENG APPEARS ON CHINESE TV; SURROUNDED BY HARD-LINERS; SHANGHAI PROTESTERS RALLY

Don't Join With Communists, Walesa Is Urging, Advises Newly Elected Solidarity Legislators to Form Independent Government

U.S. Vetoes a U.N. Resolution Condemning Israel, Washington Out-Voted in Security Council

Soviet Congress Ends With One Last Spat

MOSCOW – The National Congress of People's Deputies ended its marathon 13-day debut tonight with Andrei Sakharov raging at the restless assembly that they had failed in their main task, to wrest control from the Communist Party elite.

As the crowd tried to shout him down and an irritated President Mikhail Gorbachev fingered the time-limit buzzer, the human-rights advocate labored defiantly on through his indictment of the newborn congress until Mr. Gorbachev switched off the microphone and tried to salvage an upbeat adjournment.

''If you float downstream singing lullabies to yourselves in the hope of changes for the better in the foreseeable future, the growing tension may explode in our society, bringing about the most dramatic consequences,'' Dr. Sakharov warned before he was silenced.

The closing vignette neatly summed up the televised drama of the last two weeks, in which the freedom to speak was unparalleled, but the ultimate power to decide rested with Mr. Gorbachev and his compliant majority.

The Russian writer Valentin Rasputin told the congress earlier this week that a power struggle was under way in the leadership, and asked Mr. Gorbachev to discuss the danger of a coup. Mr. Gorbachev declared in response that despite rumors about the threat of his overthrow, ''there is no danger of coups.''

''According to rumors, I have been killed no less than seven times and my entire family no less than three times,'' the Soviet leader said. ''It is especially unacceptable when deputies have a hand in such empty rumors."

The congress is the first since 1918 in which most of the deputies were chosen in competitive elections.

JUNE 12, 1989

China Seeks Arrest of Top Dissident, Now Living at U.S. Embassy

Moral Majority to Dissolve; "Mission Accomplished", Fallwell Says

West Germany Eager as Gorbachev Visit Begins Today

JUNE 13, 1989

Gorbachev, in Bonn, Sees Postwar Hostility Ending

Arriving for his first state visit to West Germany, a nation that has come to hold him in unusually high esteem, President Mikhail Gorbachev declared today that ''we are drawing the line under the postwar period.''

In his dinner remarks, the Soviet leader issued his first response to the recent Polish elections, which appear set to remove the Communist government from power, an event which in the past has provoked Soviet invasions, of Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968.

"There is a growing understanding that the time has come to reverse the process that has made Europe the most militarized region in the world, oversaturated with arms and armed forces. This is a part of our history that we must all move beyond. We, of course, recognize that, in Poland's case, political structures must be decided by the people who live there. I believe Frank Sinatra had a song, I Did It My Way. So every country must decide on its own which road to take."

Wags in the German press have already termed Gorbachev's statement the "Sinatra Doctrine", referring to its predecessor the Brezhnev Doctrine which proclaimed that any threat to "socialist rule" in any state of the Soviet Bloc was a threat to all of them and therefore justified the intervention of fellow socialist states.

The state visit has added significance because it follows by less than two weeks a brief and successful visit by President Bush. The back-to-back trips here by leaders of the superpowers seem to confirm the pivotal role for West Germany in East-West relations at a time when the nation has become more conscious of its wealth and more assertive of its interests.

Iran Now Free to Pursue a Less Militant Line, Diplomats Say

TEHRAN, Iran – The death of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini could leave a new Iranian leadership free to chart a more moderate, pragmatic course, including a reconciliation with the West, diplomats and many Iranians maintain.

Speculation has centered on the emergence of what appeared to be a leadership bid by the leader of the Iranian Army, General Ali Shahbazi, who is seen as a moderate willing to work with Western nations.

Several diplomats have suggested that Iranian relations with the United States could be restored, and a Western envoy said he expected an American diplomatic presence in Teheran in 18 months.

JUNE 14, 1989

Moderates Appear on Beijing TV, Easing Fears of Wholesale Purge

Gorbachev Urges Greater Trade And Much Closer Ties With Bonn

Najibullah Refuses To Depart as a Step To Afghan Accord

JUNE 15, 1989

HOUSE DEMOCRATS CHOOSE GEPHARDT AND GRAY TO LEAD

China Expels Two U.S. Journalists, Including One From the Voice of America

In Stuttgart, Gorbachev Welcomed with Enthusiasm

JUNE 16, 1989

3 CHINESE WORKERS SENTENCED TO DIE FOR PROTEST ROLE

Court Upholds Use of Rights Law But Limits How It Can Be Applied

A Gorbachev Hint for Berlin Wall

FRANKFURT, West Germany – Wrapping up a triumphant visit to West Germany, President Mikhail S. Gorbachev said today that the Berlin wall was not necessarily permanent, but would be taken down only when conditions that created it fell away.

Though Mr. Gorbachev's visit produced no concessions on Berlin's status, his willingness to address the emotionally charged issue in practical terms was taken by West Germans as evidence of the ''new chapter'' that the Soviet leader proclaimed in Soviet-West German relations.

''The wall was raised in a concrete situation and was not dictated only by evil intentions,'' he said at his concluding news conference. East Germany ''decided this as its sovereign right, and the wall can disappear when those conditions that created it fall away,'' he continued. ''I don't see a major problem here.''

He did not elaborate, and the reference to ''conditions'' had an echo of the hard-line stand taken by Erich Honecker, the 76-year-old leader of East Germany. But in the past, any talk of the wall was either stonily ignored by the Russians or assailed as ''revanchism.'' Discussions on Berlin

Hans Klein, the West German Government spokesman, called Mr. Gorbachev's comment on the wall ''extremely positive,'' reflecting a consis-tent effort by the Germans to frame all facets of the visit in the best possible light. Mr. Klein said Berlin had been discussed at some length in the three meetings between Mr. Gorbachev and Chancellor Helmut Kohl, but he declined to give any details.

Mr. Gorbachev also did not rule out a resolution of the division of Germany, though he spoke only in broad terms. ''Time itself must determine this,'' he said. ''The current situation in Europe was created at a specific time by specific realities, and we are bound by this situation. But we hope that time will resolve this.''

JUNE 17, 1989

GORBACHEV IS PLACED UNDER ARREST UPON ARRIVAL IN MOSCOW, OUSTED IN AN APPARENT COUP BY SOVIET ARMED FORCES AND HARD-LINERS: ACCUSED OF STEERING INTO A 'BLIND ALLEY'

MOSCOW – Mikhail S. Gorbachev was apparently ousted from power today by military and K.G.B. authorities upon his return from his recent trip to West Germany today.

The announcement by "the Soviet leadership" this morning stunned the nation and left it groping for information as Kremlin officials declarted a state of emergency.

Coup Had Been Predicted

The apparent removal of Mr. Gorbachev, four years into his "perestroika" reform program, came just over a week after multiple speakers in the Soviet Congress of People's Deputies, led by physicist Andrei Sakharov, warned of a coming coup d'etat.

The Soviet news agency Tass cited Mr. Gorbachev's "voluntary resignation" upon arrival in Moscow.

Vice President Anatoly Lukyanov was assuming leadership powers under a new entity called a State Committee for the State of Emergency. Its members include Vladimir A. Kryuchkov, chief of the K.G.B., and Dmitri T. Yazov, the Defense Minister.

'A Mortal Danger'

The shocking announcement said the committee, in assuming powers, had found that "a mortal danger had come to loom large" in the nation and that Mr. Gorbachev's reform program has gone into a "blind alley."

The committee contended the reforms had caused "extremist forces" to threaten the nation and leave it "just a step from mass manifestations of spontaneous discontent."

The scene on the streets of Moscow was calm at the hour of 6 A.M. when the announcement was made. Later in the morning, as the city approached a new work week, Muscovites heading downtown could see 10 armored personnel carriers moving a few miles north of Red Square toward the Kremlin. But there were no crowds or other signs of public reaction.

'Grave, Critical Hour': A Soviet Message

Following is the text of the message to the Soviet people made public here today by Tass, the Soviet press agency:

Compatriots, citizens of the Soviet Union, we are addressing you at the grave, critical hour for the destinies of Motherland and our peoples. A mortal danger has come to loom large over our great Motherland.

The policy of reforms, launched at Mikhail S. Gorbachev's initiative and designed as a means to insure the country's dynamic development and the democratization of social life has entered for several reasons a blind alley.

Lack of faith, apathy and despair have replaced the original enthusiasm and hopes. Authorities at all levels have lost the population's trust. Politicking has replaced in public life concern for the fate of Motherland and the citizen.

Malicious outrage against all state institutes is being imposed. The country has in fact become ungovernable.

Having taken advantage of the granted liberties and encroaching upon the first sprouts of democracy, there have emerged extremist forces that have embarked on the course toward liquidating the Soviet Union, ruining the state and seizing power at any cost.

It is high time people were told the truth: If urgent and decisive measures are not adopted to stabilize the economy, hunger and another spiral of impoverishment are imminent in the near future, from which it is just a step from mass manifestations of spontaneous discontent with devastating consequences.

Only irresponsible people can bank on some aid from abroad. No handouts can solve our problems; our rescue is in our own hands.

The increasing destabilization of the political and economic situation in the Soviet Union is undercutting our positions in the world. Revanchist notes are to be heard in some places and demands are being made for a review of our borders. Voices can even be heard speaking of dismembering the Soviet Union and of the possibility of establishing international guardianship over individual facilities and regions of the country.

Such is the bitter reality. Whereas only yesterday a Soviet person finding himself abroad felt himself a worthy citizen of an influential and respected state, now he is often a second-rate foreigner, the attitude to whom is marked by either contempt or sympathy.

The pride and honor of the Soviet people must be restored in full.

The State Committee for the State of Emergency in the U.S.S.R. is fully aware of the depth of the crisis that has afflicted the country, it takes upon itself the responsibility for the fate of the country and is fully determined to take most serious measures to take the state and society out of the crisis as soon as possible.

We intend to restore law and order straight away, end bloodshed, declare a war without mercy to the criminal world, eradicate shameful phenomena discrediting our society and degrading Soviet citizens. We shall clean the streets of our cities from criminal elements and put an end to arbitrariness of the squanderers of the national wealth.

We are a peace-loving country and shall undeviatingly honor all our commitments. We have no claims to make against anybody. We want to live in peace and friendship with all. But we firmly declare that no one will be ever allowed to encroach upon our sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity. All attempts to talk the language of Diktat to our country, no matter where they may come from, will be resolutely suppressed.

We call on all citizens of the Soviet Union to grow aware of their duty before the country and render all possible assistance to the State Committee for the State of Emergency in the U.S.S.R. and efforts to pull the country out of the crisis.

JUNE 18, 1989

KGB-MILITARY RULERS TIGHTEN GRIP: YELTSIN SHOT DEAD WHILE LEADING PROTEST MARCH IN MOSCOW, AT LEAST 40 OTHERS DEAD, HUNDREDS WOUNDED

MOSCOW – The engineers of President Mikhail S. Gorbachev's ouster from power moved quickly today to reimpose hard-line control across the nation. The coup leaders, dominated by the military and the K.G.B., banned protest meetings, closed independent newspapers and flooded the capital with troops and tanks.

Boris N. Yeltsin, President of the Russian federated republic, who has often been at odds with Mr. Gorbachev, today was killed while leading a protest march demanding his return in Gorky Park, in the center of Moscow. Confronting a group of tanks believed to be from the elite "Tamanskaya" division, Yeltsin attempted to climb atop one of the lead tanks to address the crowd, only to be shot by one of the soldiers nearby. The troops then opened fire on the protesters wildly, causing a chaotic stampede as people attempted to flee.

By nightfall, KGB and military forces were in command of all state Russian centers of power, and resistance was, although spirited, sporadic at best. Most Muscovites reportedly were in a state of shock at the suddenness of events and the apparent return of an authoritarian, brutal rule.

Mr. Gorbachev has been increasingly unpopular at home, in large part because of the country's profound economic troubles, and has been sharply criticized even by many of his former supporters. Still, there was general disbelief here in Moscow at the turn of events and support for the coup organizers appeared minimal.

Mr. Gorbachev's exact whereabouts were unknown. There was one report that he had been placed under arrest in a naval hospital in Murmansk, in the far north of the country. Soviet TV has been mostly silent, save for rebroadcasts of musical programs such as the "Swan Lake" ballet and a rebroadcast of the coup leaders' manifesto at the top of each hour.

The group now in charge is dominated by security and military leaders, and some top political figures, all of whom had strong disagreements with Mr. Gorbachev's democratization and economic-reform programs. Gorbachev's stated willingness during his recent European trip to allow Warsaw Pact allies freedom to elect non-Communist governments was also believed to play a role.

The new ruling group calls itself the State Committee for the State of Emergency, or, in Russian, Gosudarstvenny Komitet po Chrezvychainomu Polozheniyu.

ALL SOVIET TROOPS ORDERED TO BARRACKS FOR REDEPLOYMENT; TROOP MOVEMENTS SPOTTED IN GERMANY, POLAND, CAUCASUS

RESTORE GORBACHEV, BUSH WARNS MOSCOW

IRAN STRIFE: Gen. Shahbazi Reported Killed As IRGC Seizes Control Of Government, Disarms Iran Army Units

JUNE 19, 1989

YAZOV AND KRYUCHKOV GIVE PRESS CONFERENCE; SEVERAL REPORTERS ARRESTED AFTER ASKING "INDISCREET" QUESTIONS; YAZOV DEMANDS NATO MOVE FORCES AWAY FROM EAST GERMAN AND CZECHOSLOVAK BORDERS

SOVIET TROOPS REPORTED MOVING INSIDE IRAN AS BOTH COUNTRIES CONSUMED BY LEADERSHIP STRUGGLES, TASS REPORTS "PROVISIONAL GOVERNMENT" ESTABLISHED IN TABRIZ UNDER TUDEH COMMUNIST RULE

ISTANBUL - Details are sparse at this time, but it appears that the Soviet army has entered Iran in support of a previously unknown "provisional government" led by pro-Russian forces. This despite the considerable turmoil within the Soviet Union itself, as only three days prior President Gorbachev was overthrown upon his arrival from a diplomatic mission.

No fighting appears to have broken out between Soviet troops and Iranian forces, as the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps continues to assert its control over Tehran and the Iranian Army, or "Artesh", appears to be sidelined following the death of its commanding officer.

From Tabriz, Ehsan Tabari, the leader of the Communist "Tudeh" Party and previously believed to have been imprisoned, announced the formation of a "broad based revolutionary government" and formally invited Soviet troops to "establish order and security".

JUNE 20, 1989

PRESIDENT BUSH ADDRESSES NATION, ANNOUNCES THAT "THE DARK DAYS OF THE PAST WILL NOT BE ALLOWED TO RETURN", PLEDGES SUPPORT FOR "THE RUSSIAN PEOPLE, AND THE IRANIAN PEOPLE, WHOMEVER THEY CHOOSE TO LEAD THEM", WARNS SOVIETS TO LEAVE IRAN IMMEDIATELY OR "CONSEQUENCES OF THEIR ACTIONS WILL BE MADE CLEAR"

WASHINGTON — President Bush, in a televised address from the Oval Office tonight, declared that the United States would not stand aside as Soviet forces moved against Iran, and warned the leaders of the Moscow coup that "the dark days of the past will not be allowed to return."

"Tonight I speak to you at a moment of grave concern," Bush began, his demeanor unusually grim. "In the space of a few short days, we have seen the overthrow of a duly chosen leader of a great nation, the murder of a courageous man, Boris Yeltsin, who stood unarmed in the path of tanks, and now the unprovoked movement of foreign armies into a sovereign neighbor."

The President said he had spoken in recent hours with Prime Minister Thatcher, Chancellor Kohl, President Mitterrand and Manfred Woerner, the NATO Secretary General, and that "the alliance is united, and it is determined." He added that he had directed Secretary of State James Baker to convene an emergency session of the North Atlantic Council and to seek the urgent attention of the United Nations Security Council.

In what officials described as the most pointed warning to Moscow since the depths of the Cold War, the President declared:

"Let the leaders of the so-called Emergency Committee hear me clearly. The Soviet armies now in Iran must withdraw at once. We pledge our support to the Russian people, and to the Iranian people, whomever they choose to lead them. The dark days of the past will not be allowed to return. If our warning is not heeded, the consequences of their actions will be made clear."

The President did not specify what those consequences might be, and pointedly declined to rule any out. He confirmed, however, that elements of the Sixth Fleet had been ordered into the eastern Mediterranean, that the carrier U.S.S. Independence had been redirected toward the Indian Ocean, and that he had placed a number of Army and Air Force units at "an elevated state of readiness." He declined to comment on reports that elements of the 82d Airborne Division, based at Fort Bragg, N.C., had been alerted for possible deployment.

The address, lasting 14 minutes, was simulcast on the three major networks and the Cable News Network. White House officials said the President had drafted the closing passages himself, in consultation with Brent Scowcroft, the National Security Adviser, after an emergency meeting in the Situation Room earlier in the evening.

From the Capitol, Speaker Thomas S. Foley issued a brief statement of support, saying, "In a moment such as this, the President speaks for all Americans."

SOVIET TROOPS RACING TOWARDS TEHRAN, MEET NO RESISTANCE

ISTANBUL — Soviet armored columns were reported tonight to be racing south along the highway from Tabriz toward the Iranian capital, advancing as much as 200 kilometers in a single day, with no organized resistance from any Iranian military unit.

Western intelligence sources monitoring the situation from Turkey said that at least three motorized rifle divisions, believed to belong to the Soviet Transcaucasus Military District, had crossed the border at Astara on the Caspian coast and at Julfa, opposite the Nakhchivan exclave, beginning the night of June 18, and had now passed through Tabriz, Mianeh and Zanjan in a continuous stream of armor and supply vehicles.

The advance is being led, according to the same sources, by elements of the 75th Motor Rifle Division out of Nakhchivan and what appears to be a tank regiment equipped with T-72 main battle tanks. Helicopter formations, including Mi-8 assault transports and Mi-24 gunships, have been seen forward of the column, scouting the route and securing bridges over the Qizil Uzan and Shahrud rivers.

Strikingly, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, which on Sunday seized control of the government in Tehran following the reported death of the Army Chief of Staff, Gen. Ali Shahbazi, has thus far made no public response to the Soviet advance. The IRGC commander, Gen. Yahya Rahim Safavi, has not been seen in public since Sunday's televised statement, and Tehran Radio has continued to broadcast Koranic recitations and martial music with only brief news bulletins.

"We are watching a country be swallowed without a shot fired," a Western diplomat in Ankara said this evening, asking not to be named. "Whether by design, by paralysis, or by collusion, no one can yet say."

In Tabriz, the so-called provisional government of Ehsan Tabari and the Tudeh Party issued a second proclamation today, declaring martial law in the four northern provinces and calling on "all patriotic Iranians" to assist Soviet forces in "the restoration of order." The Tudeh statement made no reference to the religious authorities in Qom or Mashhad, nor to the Grand Ayatollahs whose silence has been one of the most remarked-upon features of the past three days.

If the Soviet rate of advance is sustained, observers said, the lead elements of the column could reach the outskirts of Qazvin — roughly 150 kilometers from Tehran — by tomorrow evening.

CURFEW ANNOUNCED IN MOSCOW; PROTESTORS FACE TANKS WITH BARE HANDS; PROTEST MARCH IN LITHUANIA DISPERSED WITH "TRULY AWFUL CASUALTIES"

MOSCOW — A round-the-clock curfew was imposed on the Soviet capital tonight by order of Defense Minister Dmitri T. Yazov, one of the principal figures in the Emergency Committee, after a second day of small but defiant protests in the center of Moscow and reports of far more serious unrest in the Baltic republic of Lithuania.

The order, read on Soviet television at 7 p.m. Moscow time by an unidentified announcer, prohibits all assembly of more than three persons, all unauthorized movement of vehicles, and the operation of any printing or duplicating equipment outside state control. Violators, the announcer said, would face "the most severe penalties of revolutionary order."

Despite the order, eyewitnesses in central Moscow reported that small groups of citizens — often no more than a dozen at a time — continued to appear at the approaches to the Manezh and along the Garden Ring, where they confronted tank crews with raised hands, flowers and shouted demands for the return of Mr. Gorbachev. One young man, described by witnesses as a university student, climbed onto the side of a T-80 tank near the Mossovet building before being pulled down and beaten by soldiers. He was reported alive but in critical condition at the Sklifosovsky Institute.

Far worse violence was reported from Vilnius, the Lithuanian capital, where Interior Ministry troops together with units identified as belonging to the Pskov-based 76th Guards Air Assault Division moved against a march organized by the Lithuanian reform movement Sajudis. The march, which had drawn tens of thousands into the streets in support of the deposed Mr. Gorbachev and in defense of Lithuania's declaration of sovereignty of last May, was dispersed with what one Western correspondent reaching Helsinki by telephone described as "truly awful casualties" — at least 60 dead and several hundred wounded, by partial accounts. Some of the dead were said to be schoolchildren who had joined their parents in the procession.

Vytautas Landsbergis, the chairman of Sajudis, was reported to have escaped the initial assault and to have taken refuge with sympathetic clergy at the Cathedral of Vilnius. His whereabouts could not be confirmed late tonight. Algirdas Brazauskas, the First Secretary of the Lithuanian Communist Party, was reported under house arrest after refusing a direct order from Moscow to denounce the Sajudis movement and to call out his republic's militia in support of the Emergency Committee.

Telephone and telex links to all three Baltic republics were severed at approximately 10 p.m. local time, and Aeroflot service to Vilnius, Riga and Tallinn has been suspended until further notice.

In Warsaw, an extraordinary session of the Polish Sejm was called for tomorrow morning. In East Berlin, Erich Honecker was reported to have left the city for an undisclosed location.

JUNE 21, 1989

AMERICAN FORCES LAND IN SOUTHERN IRAN, SECURE MULTIPLE PORTS, MEET LITTLE RESISTANCE

WASHINGTON — In the largest single deployment of American combat forces since the closing months of the Vietnam War, units of the United States Central Command began landing along Iran's southern coast before dawn this morning, seizing the ports of Bandar Abbas and Chah Bahar and securing forward airfields and helicopter operating bases at three additional points across the southeast of the country, in what the Pentagon described as "negligible resistance."

The operation, code-named DESERT EAGLE according to Defense Department officials, has been personally directed by Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, the commander of Central Command, from a forward headquarters established overnight at Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Officials confirmed that Saudi Arabia, Oman, and Bahrain had granted basing and overflight rights within hours of last evening's address by President Bush, and that Pakistan had agreed to permit the use of airspace and emergency divert fields at Pasni and Karachi.

Marine elements of the 7th Marine Expeditionary Brigade, embarked aboard ships of the U.S.S. Independence battle group, came ashore at Bandar Abbas at approximately 4:30 a.m. local time, securing the harbor and the adjoining airfield. Pentagon officials said the senior Iranian naval officer at the port, identified as a Capt. Madani, had surrendered "without an exchange of gunfire" after a brief negotiation conducted partly in English. A squadron of Iranian Air Force F-4 Phantoms based at the field, officials said, did not lift off and was secured intact, including pilots and ground crews.

Elements of the 82d Airborne Division parachuted onto the airfield at Chah Bahar shortly after first light, securing the runway for follow-on C-141 and C-5 transports. By mid-morning, the lead brigade of the 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault) — staging out of Salalah, in southern Oman, and from the U.S.S. Saipan and U.S.S. Nassau in the Gulf of Oman — was inserting by helicopter at points along the highway from Chah Bahar toward Zahedan, with the apparent intention of forming a screening line across the eastern approaches to the country. Pentagon officials said that within twenty-four hours the bulk of the 101st's three brigades, together with their aviation regiments, would be on the ground.

Asked whether the deployment represented effectively the entirety of the rapid-deployment forces of the United States, the Pentagon spokesman, Pete Williams, replied: "It represents whatever the situation requires."

A small number of Western correspondents accompanying the lead elements described a country whose institutions had simply ceased to function. Local police in Bandar Abbas, the correspondents reported, "stood about smoking and watching" as Marine vehicles rolled past the customs house. In one bazaar, a CBS News crew filmed a small crowd applauding a passing column of LAV-25 light armored vehicles. A merchant, asked through an interpreter what he made of the day's events, replied: "Yesterday it was the Russians, today it is the Americans. Tomorrow, God willing, it will be Iranians."

Pentagon planners said the immediate objective of the southern landings was the establishment of a secure logistics base from which to project force northward, and to deny the Soviet army access to the Strait of Hormuz and to the Iranian oilfields of Khuzestan. Whether American forces would be ordered to advance further, and how far, would depend, officials said, "on choices that have not yet been made in Moscow."

BUSH GIVES ULTIMATUM TO SOVIETS; "LEAVE IRAN NOW"

WASHINGTON — President Bush, in a sharply worded statement issued from the South Lawn of the White House this afternoon, demanded the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of all Soviet armed forces from the territory of Iran, and warned that the United States and its allies would, after a period of 48 hours, "take whatever steps are necessary to bring about that withdrawal."

The President declined to take questions following the statement and turned and walked back into the residence as reporters shouted after him. The brevity of the appearance, lasting just under three minutes, and the President's visibly stern manner, were taken by White House correspondents as evidence that diplomatic exchanges with the new Soviet leadership had broken down badly overnight.

"The Soviet government," the President said, "has been advised through every available channel — through our Ambassador in Moscow, through the Soviet Ambassador here, through the United Nations, and through the good offices of Prime Minister Mulroney of Canada — of the gravity with which the United States and its allies regard the present situation. The reply we have received is not satisfactory. It is not even responsive."

"Therefore, on this 21st day of June, 1989," the President continued, "I demand on behalf of the people of the United States, and in concert with our allies, the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of Soviet armed forces from the sovereign territory of Iran. The forces of the so-called Emergency Committee will have a period of 48 hours, beginning at six o'clock this evening Washington time, to commence that withdrawal. If they have not done so, we shall take whatever steps are necessary to bring it about."

State Department officials, briefing reporters on background shortly afterward, said that Secretary Baker had earlier in the day rejected as "frivolous and insulting" a Soviet diplomatic note, signed by Foreign Minister Aleksandr A. Bessmertnykh, asserting that Soviet forces were present in Iran "at the express invitation of the lawful provisional revolutionary government in Tabriz" and warning the United States against "interference in matters internal to the Iranian people."

In Moscow, the response came within the hour. A statement read on Soviet television by an announcer of the Vremya evening news program dismissed the American ultimatum as "a piece of imperial theater, addressed not to history but to the next election," and declared that "the Soviet Union does not receive ultimatums from any quarter, on any subject, at any time."

At the United Nations, the Security Council was scheduled to meet in emergency session at 9 p.m. New York time. Diplomats said it remained uncertain whether the Soviet representative, Aleksandr Belonogov, would attend. The Chinese delegation, observers noted, had been silent throughout the day.

In Bonn, Brussels, Paris, and London, NATO governments issued near-identical statements supporting the President's demand. Only the government of Greece, under Prime Minister Andreas Papandreou, expressed reservations, calling for "a further period of dialogue."

In Jerusalem, Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir convened an emergency session of the cabinet. In Riyadh, King Fahd was reported to be in continuous communication with the White House. In New Delhi, Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi appealed for "the utmost restraint on all sides."

SOVIET TROOPS ENTER TEHRAN, GREETED BY CURIOUS CROWDS, NO RESISTANCE TO BE SEEN

ISTANBUL — Soviet armored and airborne forces entered the Iranian capital today from two directions and within a matter of hours had occupied Mehrabad International Airport, the central radio and television building, the chamber of the Majlis, the Foreign Ministry, and the compound of the United States Embassy — abandoned for nearly a decade and now in Soviet hands without a shot fired.

The first arrivals, witnesses said, were paratroopers of what Western military analysts identified as the 104th Guards Airborne Division, normally based at Kirovabad in Soviet Azerbaijan and well within Il-76 range of the Iranian capital. Beginning shortly after 8 a.m. local time, a stream of Il-76 jet transports descended onto Mehrabad's two runways, disgorging paratroops, BMD airborne combat vehicles, and what one foreign airline pilot present at the field described as "an entire division's worth of fuel trucks." The airport's small Iranian Air Force garrison, the same witness said, formed up in good order, saluted the senior Soviet officer to disembark, and was marched off to a hangar, "where presumably they remain."

The mechanized column from the north, last reported the previous evening at Qazvin, entered the city by way of the Karaj highway shortly after noon and made directly for the central districts. By the late afternoon Soviet T-72s were parked, motors idling, in front of the Majlis, the Foreign Ministry, and the headquarters of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps on Pasdaran Avenue, the latter found, according to a Reuters dispatch reaching Ankara, "open, abandoned, and partially burned from within."

What was almost wholly absent, in the accounts of every Western correspondent able to reach the city, was resistance. The Revolutionary Guard, which only ten days earlier had taken control of the country in the wake of the Khameini assassination and the killing of Gen. Ali Shahbazi, appeared by the morning of the 21st to have ceased to exist as an organized force. Its commander, Gen. Yahya Rahim Safavi, has not been seen in five days. Several Guard bases on the outskirts of the city were reported to have been the scene of internal gun battles overnight, between factions whose loyalties and grievances were not clear, and from which the survivors appear simply to have walked away. The Iranian Army, or Artesh — disarmed and confined to barracks by the Guard on the 18th, after Gen. Shahbazi's killing — did not appear in the city today either to fight or to surrender.

In place of resistance, the Tehranis came out to look. Crowds gathered at the major intersections — at Azadi Square, at Vali-Asr, at Enqelab — and stood in the heat regarding the Soviet columns with a curiosity that several correspondents described as "almost tourist." A few jeered, a few cheered, most simply watched. There were no flowers, but there were also no stones. An elderly man on Vali-Asr, interviewed by an Italian RAI crew, said in fluent French: "We have buried the Shah, we have buried Khomeini. Now we shall see whom we bury next. Today, one watches."

In the foreign diplomatic district, the embassies of the United Kingdom, France, West Germany, and Japan reported that Soviet officers had arrived at their gates within hours of the column's entry to advise the staffs to remain indoors and not to attempt evacuation, and to assure them that the Soviet forces "were not the enemy of any third country." The embassies of Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Iraq reported, by contrast, that Tudeh Party militants — appearing openly in the streets of Tehran for the first time in a decade — had begun to gather in numbers outside their gates, shouting anti-American and anti-Sunni slogans.

Of the senior figures of the Islamic Republic, almost nothing could be confirmed. The former Speaker of Parliament, Hashemi Rafsanjani, previously imprisoned after Khomeini's death, was reported variously to be in Qom, in Mashhad, in the holy city of Najaf in Iraq, and dead. Ahmed Khomeini, the late Ayatollah's son, was said to have been placed under "Soviet protective custody" at a residence in north Tehran. The Grand Ayatollahs of Qom — Golpaygani, Marashi-Najafi, and Araki — issued no statement, and were said by a single source reaching the Pakistani embassy to have left the city.

Western intelligence sources, speaking on condition of anonymity in Ankara and in Washington, were today beginning to give voice to a suspicion that has hardened over the past seventy-two hours: that the late Gen. Shahbazi, killed by his own subordinates on the 18th, had been a long-running asset of the Soviet Committee for State Security, and that the operation now unfolding had been in preparation for considerably longer than the four days it has thus far been visible to the world.

"What we are watching," one Western official said this evening, "is not an improvisation."

JUNE 22, 1989

SOVIET AIRCRAFT SEEN OVER BANDAR ABBAS, AS US/SOVIET DIPLOMACY FALTERS

ABOARD U.S.S. INDEPENDENCE, IN THE GULF OF OMAN — A flight of two Soviet MiG-29 fighters, operating from a captured Iranian airbase at Shiraz, overflew positions held by United States Marines at the port of Bandar Abbas this morning at an altitude of approximately 30,000 feet, in what Pentagon officials described as the first direct military contact between American and Soviet armed forces since the Korean War.

The Soviet aircraft, identified by E-2C Hawkeye early-warning aircraft of Carrier Air Wing Six, were intercepted within four minutes by a section of two F-14A Tomcat fighters of Squadron VF-33, which closed to within visual range and shadowed the Soviet flight for the duration of its passage over the Iranian coast. No weapons were fired by either side. The Soviet aircraft did not respond to repeated radio challenges on international guard frequencies, and turned north at the limit of their fuel radius, returning, according to American electronic surveillance, to the same field at Shiraz from which they had departed.

The Pentagon, in a statement issued by its spokesman, Pete Williams, called the overflight "deliberate, provocative, and dangerously close to the threshold beyond which we have been clear we cannot remain passive." Mr. Williams declined to specify what the threshold was or what response would follow if it were crossed. He confirmed that the rules of engagement of American forces in theater had been reviewed and adjusted within the past 12 hours, and that "the President has given commanders the authority they require."

In Washington, Secretary Baker met for the third time in 24 hours with the Soviet chargé d'affaires, Sergei Chetverikov — the Soviet Ambassador, Yuri Dubinin, having declined to leave his embassy since Tuesday evening — and is reported by State Department officials to have rejected as "absurd" a Soviet proposal for "a mutual standfast and joint consultations on the future of the Iranian nation." Baker is said to have replied that the United States would consult with no one regarding Iran's future save the Iranians themselves, and that the only matter for discussion between Washington and Moscow was the timetable of Soviet withdrawal.

The American ultimatum issued by President Bush on Wednesday evening expires at 6 p.m. Washington time today. There is no indication from any source that Soviet forces intend to comply. To the contrary, dispatches from the front in central Iran suggest the pace of the Soviet advance is, if anything, accelerating.

In a separate development, the U.S.S. Theodore Roosevelt battle group, sortied from Norfolk on Tuesday, was reported to be making 30 knots toward the Mediterranean. The U.S.S. Eisenhower, already in the Mediterranean, has transited the Suez Canal — Egyptian authorities having waived the customary 24-hour notice — and is expected to enter the Red Sea by tomorrow. Six B-52 bombers of the 28th Bombardment Wing, departing Ellsworth Air Force Base in South Dakota yesterday afternoon, are reported to have landed at Diego Garcia, the British Indian Ocean territory leased to the United States, where they have been joined by tanker and reconnaissance aircraft.

GEN. SIWICKI ANNOUNCES "MILITARY COUNCIL OF NATIONAL SALVATION", DECLARES STATE OF WAR; SOLIDARITY GOVERNMENT OVERTHROWN, MAZOWIECKI AND WALESA UNDER ARREST

VIENNA — The seven-week-old experiment in Polish democracy was extinguished before dawn today, when units of the Polish People's Army and Internal Defense Forces, acting under the orders of the Defense Minister, Gen. Florian Siwicki, occupied the Council of Ministers building, the Sejm, the Belweder Palace, and the headquarters of the Solidarity trade union on Mokotowska Street in Warsaw, and arrested the Prime Minister, Tadeusz Mazowiecki, together with most members of his cabinet.

Lech Walesa, the Solidarity chairman, was seized at his home in Gdansk shortly after 4 a.m., according to family members reached by telephone before the lines were cut. Bronislaw Geremek, the Solidarity intellectual and minister without portfolio, was arrested at the Sejm. Adam Michnik, the editor of Gazeta Wyborcza, was reported to have been taken into custody at the newspaper's offices, where the printing presses were said to have been disabled by soldiers wielding sledgehammers.

In a televised statement broadcast at 6 a.m. local time, Gen. Siwicki, in full uniform and visibly fatigued, announced the creation of a "Military Council of National Salvation" — using the same Polish phrase, Wojskowa Rada Ocalenia Narodowego, employed by Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski during the imposition of martial law in December 1981 — and declared a "state of war" throughout the territory of the Polish People's Republic. He cited "irresponsible adventurism" by Solidarity, "open provocation against fraternal allies," and "the imminent danger of foreign intervention" as the grounds for his action.

President Jaruzelski did not appear in the broadcast. His whereabouts were not stated. Czeslaw Kiszczak, the Interior Minister and a longtime ally of Jaruzelski's, stood at Gen. Siwicki's right hand during the announcement.

The Mazowiecki government, sworn in only on June 19 in what was widely understood as a defensive response to the Moscow coup of two days earlier, had governed for less than 72 hours. Solidarity's parliamentary caucus had not yet been seated. The Round Table accords of April, under which the elections of June 4 had been held, were declared by Gen. Siwicki this morning to be "suspended in their entirety, pending review by competent state authorities."

Telephone, telex, and direct-dial international communications from Poland were severed at 3:30 a.m. local time. The borders with Czechoslovakia, East Germany, and the Soviet Union were closed to all traffic save military. The borders with Austria — through Czechoslovakia — and with the Federal Republic of Germany, by way of the GDR, were likewise closed. Polish airspace was shut to civil aviation. LOT Polish Airlines flights inbound to Warsaw were diverted to Frankfurt, Vienna, and Stockholm.

A small number of Solidarity figures appear to have eluded the initial sweep. Zbigniew Bujak, the underground organizer of the Solidarity years 1982-86, was reported to have reached the United States Embassy on Aleje Ujazdowskie in the early hours of the morning and to have been granted refuge there. Similar reports circulated regarding the British, French, and Vatican legations, though none could be confirmed at the hour of this dispatch.

In Rome, the Vatican issued a statement of unprecedented severity. Pope John Paul II, the former Karol Cardinal Wojtyla of Krakow, was said by his spokesman, Joaquin Navarro-Valls, to have been "informed of the events in his homeland in the early morning hours, and to have spent the morning in prayer and in consultation." The statement called the arrests "an outrage against the conscience of Europe" and demanded the immediate release of Mr. Mazowiecki, Mr. Walesa, and "all those whose only offense has been to seek the peaceful self-government of the Polish nation by the methods of the ballot."

In Bonn, Chancellor Kohl summoned the Polish Ambassador and presented him a note demanding the immediate restoration of the Mazowiecki government. In Paris, President Mitterrand canceled a scheduled appearance to convene an emergency meeting of his cabinet. In Washington, the State Department recalled the United States Ambassador, John R. Davis Jr., for consultations.

President Bush, asked by reporters as he crossed the South Lawn whether the Polish events would influence American resolve in the Iranian crisis, replied: "It clarifies it."

SOVIET TROOPS CONTINUE DRIVE SOUTH

ANKARA — Soviet motorized columns, having transited the Iranian capital with no more than a brief halt, resumed their advance southward this morning along two axes — one toward the holy city of Qom, the other along the Tehran-Esfahan highway — even as the deadline of the American ultimatum drew toward expiry, and with no diplomatic indication from Moscow that any halt was contemplated.

Western military observers in Turkey said the lead mechanized elements were now estimated to be approaching the outskirts of Qom by mid-afternoon and to have passed the city of Saveh, 80 miles southwest of Tehran, by midday. A second column, smaller in size and believed to consist of a reinforced motor rifle regiment with attached helicopter assets, was reported on the road from Tehran toward Kashan, with its apparent objective the city of Esfahan and ultimately the Khuzestan oilfields.

A third Soviet movement, separate from the main thrust and originating from the Caspian port of Bandar-e Anzali, was reported by an unnamed Western intelligence official in Ankara to be advancing along the coastal plain toward the city of Rasht and thence southward in the direction of Qazvin and Hamadan, suggesting Soviet planners intended to seize the western Iranian highlands and the approaches to Iraq before American forces could establish positions north of the Zagros range.

Soviet forces have made no contact with the lead reconnaissance elements of the American 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault), which were reported by the Pentagon yesterday to have established forward operating bases at Bam and at Kerman, in the central desert of Iran. The two armies are presently separated by no fewer than 400 miles of road, none of it easily traversable, and by the great salt waste of the Dasht-e Kavir.

The political character of the territory now under Soviet control remained obscure. The Tudeh Party's "provisional revolutionary government," in Tabriz on Sunday, was reported today to have transferred itself to Tehran and to have been installed, under Soviet bayonets, in the chamber of the Majlis. Ehsan Tabari, the elderly Tudeh leader, was reported gravely ill. Real authority, Western diplomats said, plainly resided with Marshal Igor Rodionov, the Soviet commander identified as overseeing the Iranian operation, and through him with the Emergency Committee in Moscow.

In Qom, the seminaries were reported closed and the bazaar shuttered. Of the Grand Ayatollahs, only Ayatollah Hossein-Ali Montazeri — dismissed by Khomeini in March, and held under house arrest since — was confirmed still in the city. The others were variously reported in Mashhad, in Najaf, in Karbala, and in flight.

PEOPLE BEGIN TO FLEE US, EUROPEAN CITIES AS FEAR OF NUCLEAR WAR SPREADS

NEW YORK — A wave of fear without recent precedent on this side of the Atlantic — and on the other — sent hundreds of thousands of Americans and Europeans onto the highways yesterday and through the night, in scenes recalling the worst days of the Cuban missile crisis and, for some older citizens, the air-raid drills of the early 1950s.

In the United States, the heaviest movements were reported on the Interstate routes leading from New York, Washington, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and the Bay Area toward inland and rural destinations. The New York State Thruway was reported by the State Police to be at "holiday-weekend volume" by sundown Wednesday and to have remained so through the night, with the worst congestion at the Tappan Zee and Bear Mountain bridges. The Pennsylvania Turnpike westbound from Valley Forge was reported moving at 15 miles an hour at points. Gasoline stations in Frederick, Md., and Hagerstown were said to have run dry by midnight.

Supermarkets in metropolitan areas reported a buying surge of bottled water, canned goods, batteries, and bottled fuel beginning Wednesday afternoon and intensifying through Thursday morning, with several chains imposing per-customer limits. The American Red Cross, in a statement, urged citizens to "remain calm, remain at home where possible, and refrain from actions that compromise the supply of essential goods to your neighbors." The Federal Emergency Management Agency, asked whether civil defense measures had been activated, replied only that "appropriate prudent steps are under way."

Air travel out of the country, particularly to destinations in the Southern Hemisphere, was reported sold to capacity through the weekend. A Pan American flight from John F. Kennedy to Auckland, by way of Los Angeles, was said by the carrier to be carrying 312 passengers in a 290-seat aircraft, the difference accommodated, in the carrier's phrase, "creatively."

In Western Europe, the scenes were more pronounced still. The autobahns westward from West Berlin and from the inner-German border were reported solid with private cars from late Wednesday evening, in some cases at a standstill. Rail services from Hamburg and Hanover to the Netherlands ran extra trains, all of them filled. The French Ministry of the Interior, in a brief statement, asked residents of the eastern departments to "consider the wisdom of remaining where they are." Swiss authorities reported a sharp uptick in inquiries regarding the country's celebrated network of public fallout shelters, of which it possesses places for the entirety of its population.

In London, the underground stations of the deeper Northern and Piccadilly lines reported informal gatherings of citizens through the night, families with children sleeping on platforms in scenes reminiscent of the Blitz. A Home Office spokesman declined to confirm whether the Government had reissued its 1980 civil defense pamphlet, "Protect and Survive," but several local councils were reported to have begun distributing photocopies of unknown provenance.

In the Soviet Union itself, despite the curfew and the blackout of independent press, the Helsinki bureau of Reuters reported telephone accounts from Leningrad of long lines outside the railway stations and a panic purchase of salt, sugar, and matches. In Moscow, where troops control the streets, the situation was said to be quieter, though one Western correspondent, in a dispatch reaching the Associated Press, reported that "the metro is full at all hours, in all directions, and no one seems quite to know where they are going."

The Director-General of the World Health Organization, Dr. Hiroshi Nakajima, in a statement from Geneva, called for "the maximum exercise of restraint by all parties to the present crisis, in the name of the human family, which has not asked for this and does not deserve it."

In a separate development, the price of gold on the London market closed today at $612 the ounce, an increase of $94 over Wednesday's close, the largest single-day movement since the metal was decoupled from the dollar in 1971.

JUNE 23, 1989

AMERICAN AIRCRAFT SHOT DOWN OVER ESFAHAN

ABOARD U.S.S. INDEPENDENCE — An F-14A Tomcat fighter of Squadron VF-33, on a high-altitude reconnaissance mission over the central Iranian city of Esfahan, was shot down at approximately 9:40 a.m. local time today by what Pentagon officials identified as a Soviet S-300 long-range surface-to-air missile, in the first combat loss suffered by American forces since the United States deployment to Iran began on Wednesday, and the first downing of an American military aircraft by Soviet weapons since the Vietnam War.

The aircraft, carrying a Tactical Airborne Reconnaissance Pod (TARPS) and operating at approximately 32,000 feet, had been tasked with photographing the disposition of Soviet armored forces reported to be entering Esfahan from the north and northwest. According to Navy officials briefing reporters aboard the carrier, the Tomcat was struck while completing a second photographic pass over the city, in what appeared to have been a long-range engagement by an S-300 battery deployed by the Soviets within the perimeter of the captured airbase at Khatami, twenty miles southeast of the city.

The two-man crew was identified as Lt. Cmdr. Robert E. Pennington, 34, of Norfolk, Va., the pilot, and Lt. Michael S. Watson, 28, of Pensacola, Fla., the radar intercept officer. The wingman, a second F-14 from the same squadron flying combat air patrol for the reconnaissance flight, reported "two good chutes" descending into terrain south of Esfahan, but was unable to remain in the area in the face of additional missile launches and was directed by his controller to withdraw. Search-and-rescue resources were not, at the hour of this dispatch, in a position to attempt a recovery, the men's location lying nearly 700 miles from the nearest American forward base.

President Bush was informed of the loss at 1:47 a.m. Washington time, while in the residential quarters of the White House. The President is reported to have made brief telephone calls to Mrs. Pennington at her home in Virginia Beach and to Mrs. Watson in Pensacola before returning to the Situation Room, where he remained through the small hours of the morning. White House officials, in an unusual on-record briefing held shortly after dawn, described the President as "controlled, but profoundly angry."

Marlin Fitzwater, the President's press secretary, in a statement issued at 7 a.m., declared: "The Soviet Union has now fired upon and brought down an American military aircraft conducting lawful operations in defense of a sovereign nation invaded without provocation. This was not an accident. It was not a misidentification. It was a deliberate act of war by the so-called Emergency Committee in Moscow against the United States of America. The President's response will be made known in due course, and at a time of his choosing."

In Moscow, Tass distributed a brief statement from the Soviet Defense Ministry boasting of the destruction of "an American aggressor aircraft violating the peaceful airspace of the lawful Iranian government." The statement made no reference to the fate of the crew, and gave no answer to repeated inquiries by Western correspondents at the Foreign Ministry as to whether the airmen had been captured. The American Ambassador in Moscow, Jack F. Matlock Jr., was reported to have been received by the Soviet Foreign Minister Bessmertnykh shortly after noon Moscow time, and to have emerged from the Foreign Ministry building at Smolenskaya-Sennaya Square without speaking to reporters.

In the United States Senate, Sam Nunn, the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, was reported to have requested through the Majority Leader an immediate joint session of the Congress for a presidential address, "should the President desire one." The leadership of both parties in both chambers was summoned to the White House for an 11 a.m. meeting. Defense Secretary Cheney, asked by a reporter outside the West Wing whether the President would now seek a declaration of war, replied: "The President will seek what the President requires. I would not stand between him and what he requires."

DEMONSTRATION IN EAST BERLIN PUT DOWN BRUTALLY BY SOVIET TROOPS, NO EAST GERMAN TROOPS SEEN

WEST BERLIN — Soviet armored forces of the Group of Soviet Forces, Germany — and they alone — moved against an enormous demonstration in the heart of East Berlin this evening, opening fire with tank cannon and small arms upon a crowd estimated by Western correspondents on the rooftops along Unter den Linden at upwards of 100,000 persons, and leaving the great square at Alexanderplatz, by morning, in the words of one West German radio reporter, "a place that the eye cannot bear and the mind will not."

The demonstration, called for the early evening by an underground network of East Berlin pastors, university students, and reform-minded officials of the East German League of Culture, had grown through the afternoon to fill Alexanderplatz, the Marx-Engels-Platz, the Lustgarten before the Berlin Cathedral, and the length of Unter den Linden as far west as the Brandenburg Gate, where the demonstrators were halted only by the eastern face of the Berlin Wall. The demands of the crowd, conveyed in handwritten banners and in a declaration read repeatedly through bullhorns, were the restoration of Mr. Gorbachev to his offices in Moscow, the lifting of all restrictions on travel between the two German states, and the immediate resignation of those East German authorities who had concealed the recent flight of Erich Honecker and the assumption of his offices by Egon Krenz, the Politburo member previously responsible for security and youth affairs.

For the first three hours of the demonstration, the East German People's Police (Volkspolizei) and the State Security forces (Stasi) were present in numbers but did not act. The National People's Army (Nationale Volksarmee), and in particular the units of the 1st Motorized Rifle Division at Potsdam-Eiche and the 8th Motorized Rifle Division at Schwerin — which under standing arrangements would have been called upon for civil disturbance duties in the capital — never appeared. Western military observers in West Berlin reported, on the basis of signal intercepts of which the substance could not be independently verified, that the Defense Minister of the German Democratic Republic, Gen. Heinz Kessler, had issued a deployment order to both divisions in the late afternoon, and that a number of subordinate NVA commanders, including the chief of staff of the Potsdam-Eiche division, had failed to act upon it. By dusk, the fuel and ammunition stocks of two of the implicated barracks were reported to have been placed under seal by the divisions' own officers, and the road gates secured against entry as well as exit.

What entered Alexanderplatz at approximately 9:20 p.m., as the long midsummer twilight at last began to fade, was a Soviet tank battalion of T-80 main battle tanks and a regiment of motorized infantry of the 6th Guards Motor Rifle Division of GSFG, accompanied by personnel of the Soviet Military Police. They came from the east, by way of the Karl-Marx-Allee, having staged from the Soviet garrison at Karlshorst.

What followed has been recorded, in part, by the cameras of West German ARD and ZDF television crews positioned on the upper floors of the Hotel Stadt Berlin and the Park Inn, and by the still photographers of three Western news agencies. Tank cannon fire was directed against a column of demonstrators on the south side of the Alexanderplatz, demolishing two trolleybuses and the facade of a department store within which an estimated several hundred persons had taken refuge from earlier rifle fire. Coaxial machine-gun fire was directed against the crowd in front of the Marienkirche. Small-arms fire from the Soviet motorized infantry was directed indiscriminately against fleeing civilians in the streets adjoining the square. By the testimony of one West German cameraman, who has requested that his name be withheld, "an action of a kind that we do not have words for, in our language, since 1945."

By midnight, the square had been cleared. Estimates of the dead, in dispatches reaching West Berlin via the few telephone lines still functioning, ranged from "many hundreds" to "more than a thousand." A field hospital established within the East Berlin university clinic at Charite was reported overwhelmed by 11 p.m. The morgue facilities of the city were said to be inadequate to the casualty count, and a refrigerated rail siding at the Lichtenberg freight yards was being prepared for the receipt of the dead.

In West Berlin, the Governing Mayor, Walter Momper, declared a state of "civic emergency" and called the citizens of the western half of the city to remain indoors. Crowds nevertheless gathered in the thousands at the Brandenburg Gate, on the Western side, listening through the night to the sounds of intermittent gunfire and the rumble of armor from the East. By 2 a.m., West Berlin police and the Bundesgrenzschutz had begun to receive Eastern citizens who had managed to scale the Wall, or to climb beneath it through the storm sewer system, in numbers not seen in the twenty-eight years since the Wall was erected. They were given coffee, blankets, and, in many cases, the embraces of strangers.

Chancellor Kohl, in a statement issued at 1 a.m. from the Federal Chancellery in Bonn, called the events at Alexanderplatz "a crime against the German people, against Europe, and against humanity," and confirmed that the Federal Republic had recalled its Ambassador from Moscow. Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher, departing Cologne-Bonn airport for Brussels and an emergency NATO foreign ministers' meeting, was photographed wiping his eyes as he boarded his aircraft. He declined to take questions.

In Moscow, the Soviet government was silent.

US RESERVES BEGIN TO MOVE TO EUROPE

WASHINGTON — President Bush signed an executive order shortly after midnight today authorizing, under Title 10 of the United States Code, the involuntary recall to active duty of as many as 200,000 members of the Selected Reserve and the activation of the Civil Reserve Air Fleet, in what Defense Department officials described as the largest mobilization of American reserve forces since the Korean War.

The first National Guard and Reserve units to receive activation orders, at hours ranging from 2 to 5 a.m. eastern time, included the 48th Infantry Brigade of the Georgia Army National Guard at Macon; the 256th Infantry Brigade of the Louisiana Army National Guard at Lafayette; the 116th Cavalry Brigade of the Idaho Army National Guard at Boise; and the 197th Infantry Brigade at Fort Benning, the active brigade tasked with rounding out the 24th Infantry Division (Mechanized) on its move to Europe. Air National Guard fighter wings in seventeen states received simultaneous activation orders, including the 119th Fighter Interceptor Group at Fargo, N.D., flying the F-4D Phantom; the 174th Tactical Fighter Wing at Syracuse, N.Y., flying the F-16A; and the 188th Tactical Fighter Group at Fort Smith, Ark., flying the F-16A. Naval Reserve aviation squadrons at Willow Grove, Pa., Atlanta, Ga., and Dallas, Tex., were placed on 24-hour notice to deploy. The Marine Corps Reserve was, in the language of the office of the commandant, "directed to anticipate the requirements of the Marine Corps."

The first lift movements began at 6 a.m., as Civil Reserve Air Fleet aircraft — Boeing 747 and Lockheed L-1011 wide-bodies belonging to Pan American World Airways, Trans World Airlines, Northwest Airlines, and United — appeared at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, McGuire AFB in New Jersey, and Travis AFB in California to begin the airlift of the lead elements of the 24th Infantry Division (Mechanized) from Fort Stewart, Ga., and of the III Corps from Fort Hood, Tex. It was the first activation of the Civil Reserve Air Fleet in its 38-year history. Heavy equipment for the deploying formations is to be drawn from the four POMCUS depots in West Germany — at Mönchengladbach, Kaiserslautern, Pirmasens, and Zutendaal in Belgium — where the equipment of as many as six American divisions has been prepositioned since the early 1980s for precisely such a contingency.

Concurrently, the heavy lift of the Military Airlift Command — the C-141B Starlifters of the 437th Military Airlift Wing at Charleston, S.C., the C-5A and C-5B Galaxies of the 60th MAW at Travis and the 436th MAW at Dover — surged to a sortie rate the system has never before sustained. KC-10 and KC-135 tankers of the Strategic Air Command were placed on continuous orbits over the Atlantic to support the bomber and fighter movements. The Pentagon spokesman, Pete Williams, reading from a prepared statement, said that "by midnight tonight, two American mechanized brigades, one airborne brigade combat team, and four tactical fighter wings will have moved or commenced movement to airfields in the Federal Republic of Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and Italy."

The destinations on the European side included, in addition to the principal American bases at Frankfurt, Ramstein, Rhein-Main, Spangdahlem, Lakenheath, and Aviano, several West German civilian airports — Hahn, Hannover, and Stuttgart-Echterdingen — opened to American military traffic by emergency arrangement with the Federal government overnight.

The Defense Production Act of 1950, last invoked at meaningful scale during the Korean War, was activated by the President in a separate executive order, with provisions for the priority allocation of fuel, transport capacity, and certain industrial materials to the requirements of the Department of Defense. American railroads were said by industry sources to have been notified to begin the staging of military equipment trains from Fort Hood, Fort Stewart, Fort Riley, and Fort Carson toward the East Coast ports of Norfolk, Charleston, and Bayonne, where the Ready Reserve Force of the Maritime Administration — a fleet of 96 cargo and roll-on/roll-off vessels held in inactive status against precisely such an emergency — was being raised to operational status, the breakout having begun at midnight.

In Stuttgart, Gen. John R. Galvin, the Supreme Allied Commander Europe, addressed an extraordinary meeting of NATO Military Committee representatives and announced that the Alliance had moved to the second-highest level of military readiness, designated "Simple Alert," for the first time in its forty-year history. The highest level, "General Alert," is, by NATO doctrine, "indistinguishable from the eve of war."

In London, Prime Minister Thatcher, in a statement to the House of Commons, announced the recall of regular reservists of the British Army of the Rhine and the dispatch of additional Royal Air Force squadrons to the Continent. Defense Secretary Tom King confirmed that the V-bomber force of the Royal Air Force had been dispersed to alternate airfields, and that the Royal Navy's Polaris ballistic missile submarines were "in such postures as the Government considers appropriate to the situation." In Paris, President Mitterrand, in a televised address that has no known precedent in the Fifth Republic, announced that France — though long withdrawn from the integrated military command of NATO — would "stand with her Atlantic allies in this hour, fully and without reservation," and confirmed that elements of the Forces Aériennes Stratégiques, including the Mirage IVP bombers carrying the air-to-surface nuclear missile ASMP, had been placed at heightened alert. The exact nature of that alert, in particular as it concerned the French independent nuclear deterrent, was not stated.

In a separate development, the United States Strategic Air Command was reported by aviation observers in the vicinity of Offutt Air Force Base, Neb., to have raised its alert posture to the second-highest of the Pentagon's five Defense Conditions, DEFCON 2 — the level last reached during the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962, and never since.

June 24, 1989

US STRIKES SOVIET ARMOR COLUMN MOVING TOWARDS US UNITS, AIRBASE BELIEVED TO HOST SOVIET AIR FORCE WING

WASHINGTON — In the early hours of this morning, 47 hours after a Soviet S-300 missile brought down an American F-14 over Esfahan, the United States carried out a series of co-ordinated air and missile strikes against the Soviet airbase from which that engagement was directed and against a Soviet armored column advancing in the direction of American positions in the central Iranian desert, in what the Pentagon described as "the opening phase of a co-ordinated American military response to Soviet aggression in Iran."

The principal strike, executed shortly after 2 a.m. local time at Khatami air base southeast of Esfahan, was opened by an aircraft category whose existence the Pentagon publicly acknowledged only in November of last year — the F-117A "Nighthawk," the so-called stealth fighter of the 4450th Tactical Group at Tonopah Test Range Airfield in Nevada. Pentagon officials, in a 7 a.m. briefing, confirmed that six F-117As, deployed by way of an undisclosed forward base, struck the air operations center, the SA-10 missile control bunker, and the hardened aircraft shelters housing what American intelligence had identified as a regiment of Soviet MiG-29 fighters of the 33rd Fighter Aviation Regiment, transferred to Iran from its peacetime base at Wittstock in the German Democratic Republic. The Nighthawks employed laser-guided 2,000-pound bombs against each target. The Pentagon said that "all aircraft expended ordnance, all aircraft returned safely."

The strike on the airbase was preceded, by approximately twelve minutes, by 28 BGM-109 Tomahawk land-attack cruise missiles fired from the destroyer U.S.S. Fife and the cruiser U.S.S. Bunker Hill in the Gulf of Oman. The Tomahawks, in their first combat use, were directed against the radar arrays of the SA-10 site, the runways and taxiways of the airbase, and fuel and ammunition storage at three additional locations. The Pentagon said preliminary battle damage assessment, conducted in the hour after the strike, indicated "extensive damage to the targeted facilities and effective neutralization of the air-defense threat at Esfahan."

Concurrently, a separate strike package consisting of 18 A-6E Intruders and F/A-18C Hornets of Carrier Air Wing Six, flying from the U.S.S. Independence and supported by EA-6B Prowler jamming aircraft, attacked elements of the Soviet 4th Combined Arms Army identified by reconnaissance as the lead regiment of the 75th Motor Rifle Division, then advancing south of the city of Yazd toward the screening positions of the American 101st Airborne Division at Bafq. The Pentagon said the column had been "dispersed and substantially destroyed" by air-delivered cluster munitions and Maverick missiles, with secondary explosions consistent with the destruction of fuel and ammunition vehicles observed at multiple points along a 14-mile stretch of the Yazd-Kerman highway. American aircraft losses in the engagement were given as one A-6E, downed by a shoulder-fired SA-14 missile while egressing the target area at low altitude. The crew, identified as Lt. James L. Carragher and Lt. (j.g.) Daniel P. Boucher, ejected and were recovered within ninety minutes by a Combat Search and Rescue team operating from Bandar Abbas.

A third strike, conducted in the same window by six B-52G bombers of the 28th Bombardment Wing operating from Diego Garcia and refueled by KC-10 tankers of the 22d Air Refueling Wing, dropped conventional ordnance on a Soviet logistics complex established at the captured airfield at Doshan Tappeh in eastern Tehran. The Pentagon described the target as "a major node of the Soviet line of communications into Iran." Damage assessment was incomplete at the hour of the briefing.

In Moscow, the Emergency Committee announced through Tass that Soviet forces had "repulsed an act of barbarous aggression," and claimed the destruction of "a number of American aircraft," a figure given variously in subsequent broadcasts as four, seven, and twelve. No Soviet broadcast acknowledged damage at Khatami or at any other site. A communique read at noon by the Soviet Ministry of Defense did, however, declare that "consequences of the gravest character must now follow," and warned that Soviet armed forces had been authorized "the full range of measures provided to them by Soviet doctrine."

The Pentagon spokesman, Pete Williams, asked at the close of the morning briefing whether the strike represented the limit of the American response or its beginning, replied: "It is what the Soviet government has caused to happen this morning. What happens tomorrow morning is for the Soviet government to determine."

The fate of Lt. Cmdr. Pennington and Lt. Watson, the two-man crew of the F-14 lost on Friday, remained unknown. The Pentagon said it had no information to indicate either officer was in Soviet custody, but neither did it have information to the contrary. A Pentagon official, asked whether Khatami had been chosen for retaliation in part because the airmen were believed to be held there, replied: "We chose Khatami because Khatami fired the missile that brought them down."

BUSH APPEARS BEFORE CONGRESS, MAKES WAR POWERS RESOLUTION DECLARATION

WASHINGTON — President Bush, appearing this evening before a joint session of the Congress in the chamber of the House of Representatives, formally notified the legislative branch under the War Powers Resolution of 1973 that American armed forces had been introduced into hostilities with the armed forces of the Soviet Union, and asked the Congress to enact, by joint resolution, an authorization for the use of United States armed forces "to repel and to defeat the aggression of the so-called Emergency Committee in Moscow against the Iranian nation, against the Polish nation, against the German nation, and against any other nation upon which the said Committee may yet make war."

The address, delivered at 8:34 p.m. and lasting 27 minutes, was met with applause whose duration and unanimity, in the recollection of veteran Capitol observers, had been equalled in this chamber only by the speech of Roosevelt of December 8, 1941. Members of both parties stood as the President entered, and stood again at his departure. Speaker Foley and Vice President Quayle, presiding, sat behind him.

The President began by reading the names of those Americans killed or whose fate was unknown in the four days since the war began: Lt. Cmdr. Robert E. Pennington and Lt. Michael S. Watson, missing over Esfahan; the two airmen of the A-6E recovered alive at Bafq; the names of three Marines killed by Soviet long-range artillery at the perimeter of Bandar Abbas in the early hours of the morning, of whose deaths the President's audience learned for the first time. He spoke each name slowly, and paused after each. The chamber was, in the description of one correspondent in the gallery, "more silent than I have ever heard it."

"My fellow Americans," the President continued, "and members of the Congress: I have not asked you here this evening for a declaration of war. I have considered it. I have weighed it. I have rejected it, and I shall give you my reasons.

"A declaration of war would dignify with the title of government a clique of men in the Kremlin who have seized power by force, who have murdered Boris Yeltsin in the snow of a Moscow park, who have buried we know not how many Lithuanians in the streets of Vilnius, who have shot down the people of Berlin in the square that bears the name of Alexander, who have laid violent hands upon Mikhail Gorbachev, the lawful President of the Soviet Union, with whom I myself sat as a friend not five weeks ago. The men of the so-called Emergency Committee are not a government. They are a junta. The United States does not declare war against juntas. The United States dismantles them.

"I ask therefore, by joint resolution and not by declaration, that this Congress authorize the President of the United States to employ the armed forces of the United States as he shall judge necessary and appropriate to bring about the prompt and unconditional withdrawal of all Soviet forces from the territory of Iran; the prompt and unconditional restoration of the lawful government of the Polish People's Republic, headed by Tadeusz Mazowiecki; the prompt and unconditional release from custody of every Soviet, Polish, German, Czechoslovak, Lithuanian, Latvian, Estonian, and Iranian citizen now detained for the offense of seeking the self-government of his own country; and the prompt and unconditional release of Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev to the offices to which he was lawfully elected by the Congress of People's Deputies of the Soviet Union."

The President went on, in language his aides said had been worked over by his own hand through the late afternoon, to describe the operations conducted by American forces in the previous twelve hours; to confirm that the Strategic Air Command had been raised to DEFCON 2; to confirm that he had today authorized the activation of additional reserve components and the transfer of further regular forces to Europe; and to acknowledge, in a passage that drew the longest single ovation of the evening, "the steadfastness of our allies — of Britain, of France, of the Federal Republic of Germany, of Canada, of Italy, of the Netherlands, of Belgium, of Luxembourg, of Denmark, of Norway, of Iceland, of Portugal, of Greece, and yes, of Turkey, who shares an unhappy frontier with the present source of the trouble in our world."

The President closed:

"We did not seek this hour. We did not desire it. We have not in the lifetime of any of us in this chamber sought a war with the Russian people, nor do we seek one now. The Russian people are not our enemies. They are, today, in this terrible moment, our fellow captives. The men in the Kremlin are the captors of us all. We shall set the captives free, and we shall do it together, and when it is done we shall return to our homes and our families and our peaceful pursuits, knowing that we have once again, by the grace of God and the strength of free men, kept the candle alight.

"Thank you. May God bless the United States of America, and may God bless those, of every nation, who tonight require His protection."

The chamber rose for the third time as the President turned to leave. The standing ovation was timed by a Senate aide at six minutes and forty-one seconds.

Senate Majority Leader George J. Mitchell announced shortly after the President's departure that the Senate would convene at 9 a.m. tomorrow to take up the requested joint resolution, and that Republican and Democratic leaders had agreed upon a single managers' bill, to be debated under a unanimous consent agreement limiting amendments and providing for a final vote not later than midnight Saturday. Speaker Foley announced parallel proceedings in the House. Both leaders predicted passage by overwhelming majorities. Sen. Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia, the President pro tempore, offered to suspend the customary requirement of three readings. Sen. Mitchell, asked by a reporter whether he expected any opposition, replied: "I expect honorable men to vote their consciences. I expect, when they have done so, that the resolution will pass."

PROTESTS TURN INTO RESISTANCE IN POLAND, EAST GERMANY, CZECHOSLOVAKIA

VIENNA — The wave of demonstrations that has swept the capitals of Eastern Europe in the week since the Moscow coup passed today, in three of those capitals, across a threshold that had not been crossed in any of them since the Hungarian rising of 1956: the threshold from protest to organized armed resistance against a Communist state.

In Warsaw, Western embassies on Aleje Ujazdowskie reported continuous small-arms fire through the morning from the direction of the Royal Castle and the Old Town, where a force of unknown size — thought to consist of former officers of the Polish Army loyal to the deposed Mazowiecki government, together with veterans of the Solidarity underground of the 1980s — has reportedly seized and held a number of buildings against attempts at recapture by units of the Internal Defense Forces and the ZOMO motorized police. Polish state radio and television, which since dawn have broadcast nothing but classical music and the daily address of Gen. Siwicki, made no reference to any disturbance in the capital. The British Embassy reported, however, that as many as 2,000 civilians had taken refuge in the parish churches of the Old Town overnight, that food was being distributed to them by the priests, and that Solidarity tricolors had been raised from the towers of St. John's Cathedral and St. Martin's at first light. The whereabouts of Zbigniew Bujak, the legendary underground organizer who reached the United States Embassy on the night of the coup, were said by the embassy to be "no longer here."

The fighting in Warsaw was described by one Western diplomat reaching the Vienna bureau of Reuters by telephone as "neither serious in scale nor decisive in any military sense, but utterly decisive in the political sense, because once again there is shooting in the streets of Warsaw, and once again the Polish People's Army has produced no answer but more shooting." Reports, none of them confirmed, suggested that elements of the 6th Pomeranian Airborne Brigade at Krakow and of the 12th Mechanized Division at Szczecin had refused orders to deploy against the resistance, and had been confined to their barracks by the decision of their own officers. The Defense Ministry in Warsaw made no comment.

In East Berlin, the disintegration of the German Democratic Republic, which began with the refusal of the National People's Army to fire upon its own citizens at Alexanderplatz on Friday evening, today became plain. Soldiers of the NVA Wachregiment "Friedrich Engels" — the ceremonial unit responsible for the changing of the watch at the Neue Wache war memorial on Unter den Linden — marched at noon in formation and in uniform from their barracks at Adlershof to the Brandenburg Gate, where their commanding officer, an Oberstleutnant whose name has not been confirmed, ordered the gates of the Wall opened from the eastern side. The Volkspolizei manning the checkpoint, after a hesitation reported by one West Berlin correspondent as lasting "perhaps fifteen seconds, perhaps a minute, perhaps the length of forty years," stepped aside.

Within an hour, the citizens of East Berlin were passing through the Brandenburg Gate by the thousand, and West Berliners were passing in the other direction with embraces, with tears, with bottles of Sekt, and with the small flags of every Western country and of none. By evening, similar scenes had been reported at Checkpoint Charlie, at Bornholmer Strasse, at Heinrich-Heine-Strasse, and at the pedestrian crossing on Friedrichstrasse, where a Soviet armored unit attempting to redeploy from the Karlshorst garrison toward the Wall was reported to have been blocked by a crowd of perhaps 30,000 East and West Berliners, and to have been compelled, after some hours, to withdraw without firing. Whether the order to withhold fire originated with the unit commander, his division commander, or the headquarters of the Group of Soviet Forces, Germany, was not known.

The whereabouts of Egon Krenz, the East German leader installed in succession to Erich Honecker on the day of the Moscow coup, were not known this evening. The Defense Minister, Gen. Heinz Kessler, was reported to have been taken into protective custody by his own subordinates at Strausberg headquarters, and to be cooperating with what was variously described as "a transitional command" and "a soldiers' council." Markus Wolf, the legendary chief of the Stasi's foreign intelligence directorate, retired in 1986 and a known reformer, was reported to have been seen this afternoon in conversation with a deputy of the West German Foreign Minister Genscher at a private residence in Pankow. Erich Mielke, the 81-year-old chief of the Stasi proper, was reported to have barricaded himself within Stasi headquarters at Normannenstrasse with several hundred loyal officers, and to be destroying files.

In Prague, where demonstrations on Wenceslas Square through the week had grown from thousands to tens of thousands and today, by the estimate of Western correspondents present, to upwards of half a million, the regime of Milos Jakes was reported this evening to have ceased to exercise effective control of the Czechoslovak capital. The Czechoslovak People's Army, the second-largest of the Warsaw Pact armies after the Soviet, did not move against the demonstration. The People's Militia, the armed factory militia that has historically served as the regime's praetorian guard, was reported in three separate Prague factories to have voted in open assembly to refuse orders to deploy. Vaclav Havel, the playwright and Charter 77 signatory released from prison only in May, addressed the crowd from the balcony of the Melantrich publishing house at 6 p.m., flanked by Alexander Dubcek — the deposed reformer of the Prague Spring of 1968, who had not been seen in public in Prague in twenty-one years. Havel told the crowd: "Truth and love must triumph over lies and hatred." Dubcek, weeping, said only: "I am home."

In Bratislava, in Brno, in Plzen, in Ostrava, in Kosice, similar scenes were reported. Sources within the Czechoslovak Foreign Ministry told Western correspondents that Mr. Jakes and several members of the Politburo had this evening departed Prague for an undisclosed location, and that Premier Ladislav Adamec had begun consultations with representatives of Charter 77 and of the Civic Forum movement — founded only this morning in the auditorium of the Cinoherni Klub theater — regarding "an orderly transfer of authority."

In Bucharest, by contrast, President Nicolae Ceausescu, in a speech of unusual length and fury, condemned "the criminal adventures of imperialist agents in fraternal socialist countries" and pledged that "the people of Romania, under the leadership of their Communist Party, shall not waver." In Sofia, the government of Todor Zhivkov maintained silence. In Budapest, where the Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party has been since May moving openly toward multiparty elections, Prime Minister Miklos Nemeth opened the country's borders to all Czechoslovak, Polish, and East German citizens "without formality, without condition, without delay."

In Moscow, the so-called Emergency Committee was reported by sources within the Foreign Ministry to have been in continuous session for more than thirty hours.

IN BAGHDAD, A VERY QUIET SADDAM HUSSEIN HOSTS KUWAITI AMBASSADOR

BAGHDAD — President Saddam Hussein of Iraq, who has not appeared in public or made any public statement since the Soviet invasion of Iran six days ago, received the Ambassador of the State of Kuwait at his guest palace on the Tigris this afternoon for a meeting that was reported by the official Iraqi News Agency to have lasted three hours, that was reported by sources within the Iraqi Foreign Ministry to have lasted closer to five, and concerning the substance of which neither government has been willing to disclose anything.

The Ambassador, accompanied by the Kuwaiti military attaché and a single political officer, arrived at the palace shortly after 2 p.m. He left after dark, reportedly carrying with him a sealed envelope, and proceeded directly to the airport at Al Muthanna, where he departed for Kuwait City aboard an aircraft of the Kuwaiti Air Force, having declined, through his press attaché, to take questions from the small number of Western journalists who had gathered at the perimeter of the field.

The meeting was the third Mr. Hussein has held in 48 hours with senior representatives of the Arab governments of the Persian Gulf. Sources within the Iraqi Ministry of Foreign Affairs, speaking on terms of strict anonymity, indicated that an emissary of King Fahd of Saudi Arabia had been received on Thursday evening, and that the Foreign Minister of the United Arab Emirates had been received yesterday morning. In each case, the Iraqi readout was substantially identical to today's: a meeting of unspecified length, on subjects of "fraternal Arab concern," of which "the substance shall not be disclosed."

The Iraqi armed forces have, since the Soviet invasion of Iran, taken no action of which any indication has reached Western intelligence services. No mobilization has been ordered. No reservists have been called. No Iraqi armored or mechanized formation has departed its peacetime garrison. The Iraqi Air Force has flown its normal training schedule. The four divisions of the Iraqi army deployed along the Iranian frontier — a frontier whose nearer side the Soviet Union now occupies, and whose further side the Soviet Union would seem rapidly to be approaching — remain, by all indications, in routine garrison.

Saddam Hussein himself has been seen by the Iraqi public exactly once since June 18: in a single still photograph, distributed by the official news agency on Wednesday, depicting him at his desk in military uniform, attending to papers. The photograph was undated. Tariq Aziz, the Foreign Minister, has appeared at the Foreign Ministry on each working day but has issued no statement. Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, the Vice Chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council, has not been seen.

Western diplomats in Baghdad were inclined to read the Iraqi posture as one of "deliberate, calibrated, and entirely characteristic ambiguity." A senior European diplomat, speaking on background, observed: "Saddam Hussein has spent eight years fighting Iran, six months trying to extract money from the Saudis and the Kuwaitis, and a lifetime preparing not to be on the losing side of any conflict. He is doing none of those things this week. He is sitting in his palace. He is receiving ambassadors. He is saying nothing. We may take it that he intends, when he is ready, to say something memorable."

In Riyadh, in Cairo, in Damascus, and in Amman, the silence of Baghdad was the most discussed silence in a region of unusual silences. President Mubarak of Egypt was reported to have spoken twice today by telephone with Mr. Hussein, the second of those calls lasting more than an hour. The content of the calls was not disclosed.

JUNE 25, 1989

US AND SOVIET TROOPS CLASH IN SOUTHERN IRAN, NO WORD ON OUTCOME

WASHINGTON — In what the Pentagon described tonight as "a substantial engagement of arms between the regular forces of the United States and of the Soviet Union, the first such engagement of significant scale in the history of either republic," elements of the 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault) clashed with the leading regiment of a Soviet mechanized division in the open desert north of the city of Bafq, in central Iran, beginning shortly after dawn local time today and continuing in scattered actions until past nightfall.

Few details of the engagement, of its outcome, or of the casualties incurred on either side were available at the hour of this dispatch. Pentagon officials, in a midnight briefing of unusual brevity, declined to identify the Soviet formation involved beyond confirming that it was a motor rifle regiment of the 4th Combined Arms Army of the Soviet Transcaucasus Military District, that it was equipped with the T-72 main battle tank and the BMP-2 infantry combat vehicle, and that it had been advancing south on the Yazd-Kerman highway when intercepted. They confirmed the participation, on the American side, of two attack helicopter battalions of the 101st Aviation Brigade flying the AH-64A Apache, of the divisional artillery, and of dismounted infantry of the 1st Brigade Combat Team in screening positions along the road and in defilade among the low ridgelines that flank it.

Maj. Gen. J. H. Binford Peay III, the commanding general of the 101st, was reported to have directed the engagement personally from a forward command post established overnight at a salt flat designated only as "Objective ANVIL," approximately 40 miles south of the contact point. Of the Soviet field commander, no information was offered.

Sketchy accounts of the action reached the wire services over the course of the day from a small pool of correspondents traveling with the division, who were permitted to file under unusually tight constraints. The first Apache engagements were reported to have begun at 5:47 a.m. local time, the helicopters rising from cover in the predawn light to engage the lead Soviet armored elements with AGM-114 Hellfire missiles at ranges of five to seven kilometers. Multiple secondary explosions, consistent with the destruction of T-72 tanks, were reported within the first 15 minutes of the engagement. The pool report, filed at 9 a.m. and cleared by Army public affairs officers shortly before noon, described "a column on the desert floor that no longer moves except as wreckage burns."

The Soviet response, when it came, was reported to have been swift and substantial. Mi-24 attack helicopters of the army's organic aviation regiment, operating in pairs, engaged the American helicopters at low altitude beginning at approximately 6:30 a.m. Soviet artillery — believed to consist of 2S3 self-propelled 152mm howitzers and BM-22 multiple rocket launchers — opened fire on the suspected American positions across a 20-kilometer front, suppressing the dismounted infantry and forcing the Apache battalions to displace to alternate forward arming and refueling points. ZSU-23-4 Shilka antiaircraft guns and SA-13 short-range surface-to-air missiles, integrated with the Soviet column, were reported to have engaged American helicopters at multiple points. The pool report referred, without elaboration, to "the loss of American aviators." The Pentagon, in its midnight briefing, declined to confirm or deny aircraft losses, citing "operations still in execution."

By midafternoon the action had broken into a series of dispersed engagements across an expanse of desert estimated at 600 square kilometers. Apache flights and Soviet helicopter elements maneuvered against each other over open terrain. Soviet motor rifle battalions, dismounting from their BMPs in the face of the antiarmor fire, attempted to close on the American screening positions on foot. Tactical air support, in the form of A-10 Thunderbolt II aircraft of the United States Air Force operating from a forward strip at Bandar Abbas, was reported to have arrived over the battlefield in the late morning and again in the late afternoon. By dusk the firing had largely subsided, the Soviet column was reported by Pentagon sources to have ceased its forward movement, and the American forces had withdrawn approximately 30 kilometers to the south.

In Moscow, the Emergency Committee broadcast claims through Tass of the destruction of "tens of American helicopters" and of "the rout of an American airborne brigade." No accompanying imagery was provided. The Soviet broadcast made no mention of casualties on its own side.

In Washington, the Pentagon spokesman John Kirby was asked at the close of his briefing to characterize the day's outcome. He hesitated for several seconds and then replied: "I am not going to say we won and I am not going to say they won. I am going to say that the Soviet column that started toward Bafq this morning is not going to reach Bafq tomorrow. Beyond that, I will let the American people draw their own conclusions, and I will let the families of the men engaged today learn the names of their loved ones from their own commanders, and not from a podium."

A senior Pentagon official, speaking on background after the briefing, was less reserved. "We hit them harder than they hit us," the official said. "But we hit them with our best, and they hit us with what was on the road. That is something to think about. That is something we are thinking about."

SOVIET MISSILE STRIKE ON DIEGO GARCIA SHOT DOWN BY NEW "PATRIOT" MISSILE BATTERY

DIEGO GARCIA, British Indian Ocean Territory — A salvo of fourteen Soviet long-range air-launched cruise missiles, fired at this remote Anglo-American base in the central Indian Ocean from the cabin doors of Tu-95 strategic bombers operating at the limit of their unrefueled range over the northern Arabian Sea, was engaged and largely destroyed by a battery of MIM-104 Patriot surface-to-air missiles in what is believed to be the first combat employment of the Patriot system, and the first successful interception of a strategic weapon in flight by any defensive system, in the history of warfare.

The strike, which Pentagon officials said had been detected in its earliest phases by an E-3 AWACS aircraft on continuous patrol over the central Indian Ocean and by an over-the-horizon radar facility on the Australian mainland, was launched at approximately 11:20 local time by a flight of six Tu-95MS Bear-H bombers identified by the AWACS as having staged from the Soviet airbase at Mozdok in the northern Caucasus, transited Iranian airspace, refueled in flight from Il-78 tankers operating from Mehrabad, and reached a launch point approximately 1,800 nautical miles north of Diego Garcia before releasing their ordnance and turning north for return.

The fourteen AS-15 Kent cruise missiles released — each carrying a conventional high-explosive warhead, by the Pentagon's later assessment — descended upon launch to low altitude and proceeded toward Diego Garcia at approximately 500 knots, navigating, in the manner of their American Tomahawk counterparts, by reference to internal terrain-comparison and inertial guidance. Their flight time, after release, was approximately three hours and forty minutes. They were tracked through that flight, almost continuously, by the AWACS, by the destroyer U.S.S. Spruance positioned 200 miles north of the atoll on radar picket duty, and in the final phase by the AN/MPQ-53 phased-array radar of Battery A, 2d Battalion, 7th Air Defense Artillery — a Patriot battery transferred from Fort Bliss, Texas, by C-5 transport over the previous 36 hours, and declared operational at Diego Garcia, in what its commander would later describe as "uncomfortably good time," at 6:30 a.m. local on the morning of the strike.

Two F-15C Eagle fighters of the 71st Tactical Fighter Squadron, vectored from Diego Garcia to engage the inbound missiles in their terminal phase, accounted for two of the cruise missiles by AIM-7 Sparrow shot at the eastern edge of the engagement envelope. A third was destroyed by an AIM-9M Sidewinder fired from one of the same aircraft at closer range.

The remaining eleven missiles entered the engagement zone of the Patriot battery shortly before 3 p.m. local time. The battery, commanded by Capt. Margaret S. Holloway, 29, of Hampton, Virginia, engaged each of the inbound missiles with two Patriot interceptors fired in salvo. Pentagon officials, citing preliminary analysis from the battery's automated engagement record, reported that ten of the eleven incoming missiles were destroyed in the air at altitudes between 500 and 8,000 feet, at ranges of between four and twenty-eight kilometers from the battery position. The eleventh missile was reported to have descended to wave-top altitude at the limit of the battery's engagement envelope and to have impacted the lagoon approximately three nautical miles short of the airfield, detonating in shallow water without inflicting material damage.

Diego Garcia's runway, fuel storage, ammunition storage, and the six B-52G bombers of the 28th Bombardment Wing then standing on the airfield were undamaged. No American or British personnel were injured. A single Patriot interceptor failed in flight and fell into the sea ten kilometers from the launcher; the malfunction is under investigation. The Patriot battery expended 22 of its 32 ready missiles in the engagement.

In a Pentagon briefing convened within the hour, the Secretary of Defense, Richard B. Cheney, appeared in person beside the Patriot program manager, Brig. Gen. Charles W. McManus of the United States Army Missile Command, to confirm the result.

"This morning the Soviet government attempted to destroy a base of the United States, manned by Americans and our British allies, with weapons of mass effect launched at trans-oceanic range," Mr. Cheney said. "This afternoon, by the skill of American soldiers and the excellence of American technology, those weapons lie at the bottom of the Indian Ocean. Capt. Holloway and the soldiers of her battery have rendered this nation a service whose magnitude will be more clearly understood tomorrow than today. They have also, by their service, given us a measure of the kind of war the Soviet government has chosen, and a measure of the answer the United States is prepared to give."

In Mozdok, the home base of the Soviet 184th Heavy Bomber Aviation Regiment from which the strike package had originated, three of the six Tu-95s that had returned from the mission were destroyed on the ground at 7:14 p.m. Moscow time by Tomahawk cruise missiles fired from the U.S.S. Mississippi, a nuclear-powered cruiser then in the eastern Mediterranean in what would be the first US strike on Soviet soil. The remaining three aircraft of the strike package, the Pentagon said, had not yet returned from the mission and were considered "unlikely to do so." Pentagon officials, asked whether the Mozdok strike represented retaliation or coincidence, replied that the United States did not engage in coincidences.

IN SOVIET UKRAINE, A RESISTANCE GROWS

LVIV, Ukrainian S.S.R. — Across the western half of this republic of 52 million souls, in cities whose names have figured in the chronicles of Eastern European resistance for half a millennium and in factories and coal mines whose workers had been thought, in the orthodoxy of Communist scholarship, to be the regime's most loyal constituency, an organized resistance to the rule of the so-called Emergency Committee in Moscow has emerged in the eight days since the coup, and has by today reached such a scale that Western diplomats in Moscow described it, in conversations with this correspondent over a circuitous telephone connection through Helsinki, as "the most serious challenge to Soviet authority within the borders of the Russian state since the death of Stalin."

In Lviv, the largest city of western Ukraine and the spiritual capital of the territories annexed to the Soviet Union from Poland in 1939, demonstrations have taken place daily since June 19. The People's Movement of Ukraine for Restructuring, known as Rukh — a federation of writers, scientists, and former political prisoners that until two weeks ago had been operating in semi-tolerated illegality and that today held its founding congress in open defiance of the new Soviet authorities, in the Ivan Franko opera house — has, in the assessment of one Western consular officer in the city, "become in a fortnight the de facto political authority of western Ukraine, while the Communist Party of Ukraine has retreated to its buildings, drawn its blinds, and ceased to receive telephone calls."

The Rukh congress, attended by approximately 1,100 delegates from across the republic, elected the poet Ivan Drach as its chairman and the journalist and former political prisoner Vyacheslav Chornovil as the chairman of its Lviv organization. It adopted by acclamation a program demanding the immediate restoration of Mr. Gorbachev to office in Moscow; the convocation of a sovereign Ukrainian Constituent Assembly; the recognition of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, suppressed since 1946; the prosecution of those responsible for the Famine of 1932-33 and for the disposal of contaminated material from the Chernobyl disaster of 1986; and the unconditional withdrawal of all Soviet armed forces from the territory of Iran. The blue and yellow flag of the short-lived Ukrainian People's Republic of 1918, banned for seventy-one years in this city, flew over the opera house through the proceedings.

In Kyiv, the response of the Communist Party of Ukraine has been markedly different from the response in the streets. The First Secretary, Volodymyr Ivashko, has declined four direct telegrams from Moscow demanding that he authorize the dispatch of internal troops against the demonstrations in the western republics, and is reported by sources within the Central Committee to have addressed a closed plenum yesterday in terms that, while stopping well short of breaking with Moscow, refused unequivocally any role for Ukrainian militia in operations outside the republic. Demonstrations on Kreshchatyk Boulevard, in front of the Verkhovna Rada, have grown each day; an estimated 200,000 persons gathered today in support of Rukh's program, and were neither dispersed nor obstructed by the Kyiv militia.

In the Donbas — the coal basin of eastern Ukraine, whose miners' loyalty has been a foundation stone of Communist legitimacy since the 1920s — wildcat strikes that began on Wednesday at the Yasynuvatska-Hlyboka mine in Makiivka have spread through the week to encompass, by today, an estimated 180 mines and 380,000 miners across the Donetsk and Luhansk regions. The miners' strike committees, organized in defiance both of the official trade unions and of the local party authorities, have issued a six-point program closely paralleling the Rukh program but adding to it specifically economic demands: the right to sell a portion of mine output for hard currency, the right to elect mine directors, and the immediate cessation of subsidies for what the strike committees described as "the army of occupation in Iran." Coal deliveries from the Donbas to the steel mills of Mariupol, Zaporizhzhia, and Kryvyi Rih were reported tonight to have ceased.

In Kharkiv, in Dnipropetrovsk, in Odesa, in Mykolaiv, in Kherson, in Simferopol, demonstrations of varying size and increasing organization have occurred each day. In Sevastopol, the home port of the Soviet Black Sea Fleet, the situation is reported as tense but stable; the Fleet Commander, Adm. Mikhail Khronopulo, was reported to have ordered all crews confined to ships and shore leave indefinitely suspended, and to have refused a demand from Moscow that ships of the Black Sea Fleet be sortied to bombard demonstrations on the Crimean coast.

The Soviet Carpathian Military District, headquartered in Lviv and commanding three armies — the 13th at Rivne, the 38th at Ivano-Frankivsk, and the 8th Tank Army at Zhytomyr — has not moved against the demonstrations. The District commander, Col. Gen. Viktor Skokov, has not been seen in public since June 18. His subordinates, when reached by Western correspondents, have confined themselves to remarks about training schedules and summer maneuvers. A Ukrainian conscript of the 24th Iron Division, encountered by this correspondent at a checkpoint outside Lviv, was asked whether he would obey an order to fire upon Rukh demonstrators. He looked at the question for some moments. He said: "I am not going to fire upon my mother's funeral. I am from Ternopil. My mother is here, in this city, today."

POPE GIVES ADDRESS PRAYING FOR PEACE AND JUSTICE

VATICAN CITY — Pope John Paul II, in an address from the central balcony of St. Peter's Basilica that drew to the square below an estimated 500,000 souls and that was simulcast by the broadcasting authorities of every nation on earth save the Soviet Union, the People's Republic of China, the German Democratic Republic, the Polish People's Republic under its present authorities, North Korea, Mongolia, Iran, Albania, and Romania, prayed today for peace and for justice in the war that has overtaken the Eastern half of his continent, and called upon the men in the Kremlin to surrender the office they had usurped, to release the captives they had taken, and to restore the world to "that fragile and imperfect peace which we, who lived as you and I have lived, dare not call good but dare also not call little."

The Holy Father, who appeared visibly aged by the events of the past eight days and who spoke for forty-one minutes in five languages — Italian, Polish, German, Russian, and English — opened with the words with which he had opened his pontificate eleven years ago: Nie lekajcie sie! "Be not afraid!" The crowd in the square, which had been silent in the heat of the late Roman afternoon, took up the words after him, in Polish, and chanted them for nearly a minute before he could continue.

He read aloud the names of forty-seven persons. Tadeusz Mazowiecki, Lech Walesa, Bronislaw Geremek, Adam Michnik, Jacek Kuron, of Poland. Vytautas Landsbergis, of Lithuania. Boris Yeltsin, who could no longer be released from any captivity but the grave. Andrei Sakharov, whose whereabouts since the coup had not been confirmed. Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev, "the lawful President of the Soviet Union, our brother in the dignity of his office and in the dignity of his suffering." The first thirty-eight names of the dead at Alexanderplatz that the West Berlin authorities had been able to confirm. The names of Lt. Cmdr. Robert Pennington and Lt. Michael Watson of the United States Navy, "whose mothers do not know tonight whether to mourn them or to hope." He prayed for each.

He addressed himself in turn to the constituencies of the war.

To the Polish people, in Polish, he said: "My countrymen. The hour you have known once before, you know again. The lessons of that hour are not abolished. The Church is with you. I am with you. Be not afraid."

To the Russian people, in Russian — a language he had labored to acquire in middle age and that he spoke, by the testimony of those who knew him, with an unembarrassed Slavic accent — he said: "Brothers and sisters of the Russian land, of the land of Sergei of Radonezh and of Andrei Rublev. The men who hold your country in their hands today are not Russia. Russia is the babushka in the church at Sergiev Posad lighting a candle for her grandson at the front. Russia is the soldier in central Iran who has not understood why he is there. Russia is the worker in Magnitogorsk who has not been told the truth about anything in many weeks. To these, our sister, the Russian Church and the universal Church, extends today every consolation and every prayer. The men in the Kremlin are not Russia. They are the captors of Russia, as they are the captors of us all."

To the German people, in German, he said: "The wall between you cannot stand. It has not stood. By the mercy of God which is greater than any wall, it has begun to fall, and at the foot of it, in the square that bears the name of Alexander, there lie tonight in their blood those who have caused it to fall. Pray for them. Pray for those who killed them. Pray for the unity of your nation in justice and in peace."

To the American people, in English, he said: "You who hold in your hand the strength that is now to be employed: I say to you what I have said to all the world. Be not afraid. But I say also: be not unafraid. The strength of arms is given to nations as a trust, not as a possession. Use it as a trust. Use it for that for which it is given, and for nothing else, and not one hour longer than it is required. The God of the prophets sees your hand upon the sword. He will not ask why you took it up. He will ask how you laid it down."

To the men of the so-called Emergency Committee, returning to Russian, he said: "I do not address you as a head of state, for I am not. I do not address you as a soldier, for I am not. I address you as a man and as a priest. I say to you: lay down what you have taken. Restore the lawful government of the Soviet Union. Return your soldiers to their barracks. Open the prisons you have filled. There is yet time. Tomorrow there may not be. As priest I tell you: the door of repentance is, by the mercy of God, never quite closed, but only the foolish man assumes that it shall remain open at his convenience. Do not be foolish men."

He closed in Latin, with the Da pacem Domine of the ancient liturgy, the prayer for peace in our days because there is none other who fights for us but only Thou, our God. The square answered him in Latin. The bells of every church in Rome rang.

In Warsaw, on the underground frequencies of Solidarity, the address was rebroadcast in full, in Polish, three times before midnight. In East Berlin, where the Soviet jamming of Western radio had collapsed with the regime in the previous 24 hours, RIAS broadcast the German passages on continuous loop. In Moscow, on the BBC Russian Service and the Voice of America, the Russian passages were broadcast clear, the jamming of Soviet authorities having, on this evening, also faltered.

The General Secretary of the United Nations, Mr. Pérez de Cuéllar, in a statement issued from New York within the hour, said only: "Today the Holy Father has spoken for the world. Let the world be worthy of having been spoken for."

JUNE 26, 1989

WAR POWERS JOINT RESOLUTION PASSES, 96-4 SENATE 410-18 HOUSE

WASHINGTON — The Congress of the United States today, by majorities not assembled in either chamber upon any question of war and peace within the lifetimes of nearly all of its members, authorized the President of the United States to employ the armed forces of the country against the so-called Emergency Committee in Moscow, and signaled, in the breadth of its assent and the substance of its debate, that the political branch of the American government had committed itself to the present war as fully and as durably as the executive that has led it.

The Senate, convening at 9 a.m. and adjourning shortly after 6 p.m., adopted Senate Joint Resolution 173 by a vote of 96 to 4. The House of Representatives, sitting in continuous session from 10 a.m. through the early evening, passed the identical measure 410 to 18. The President, in the East Room of the White House at 8:45 p.m., signed the bill into law in the presence of the Cabinet, the leadership of both houses, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the family of Lt. Cmdr. Robert E. Pennington, the senior of the two F-14 aviators missing over Esfahan since Friday and confirmed today, by a Pentagon spokesman, to be in Soviet custody.

The four senators voting in the negative — Mark O. Hatfield, Republican of Oregon; Howard M. Metzenbaum, Democrat of Ohio; Tom Harkin, Democrat of Iowa; and Quentin N. Burdick, Democrat of North Dakota — addressed the chamber in turn during the late afternoon. Sen. Hatfield, a Quaker who has voted against every appropriation for hostilities in his quarter-century in the Senate, spoke for fourteen minutes and concluded: "I do not vote against the men of the 101st Airborne Division. I vote against the cup that was offered to them, and that I would have refused to drink myself, and that I cannot bring myself today to bless." Sen. Metzenbaum spoke briefly of his service in the war against Hitler and of his unwillingness to permit even the present provocation to extend the doctrine of presidential war-making "by another inch upon ground watered with American blood."

The eighteen members of the House voting in the negative were all Democrats. They included the longtime peace-caucus chairman Ronald V. Dellums of California, who entered into the record the names of every American killed in Iran since the deployment began; Patricia Schroeder of Colorado, who said she voted against the resolution because she believed the President should have asked for a formal declaration of war; John Conyers Jr. of Michigan; George W. Crockett Jr., also of Michigan; Henry B. Gonzalez of Texas; and Pete Stark of California. Mr. Dellums, in remarks closing for the opposition, said: "I shall be on the wrong side of this vote, and I shall be on the right side of the Constitution. The two are not always the same. Today they are not."

Senate Majority Leader George J. Mitchell, in the closing speech for the resolution, observed that no measure of comparable consequence had been adopted by the Senate without a single absent member since the declaration of war against Imperial Japan on December 8, 1941. Senate Minority Leader Robert Dole of Kansas, the wounded veteran of the 10th Mountain Division and the only senior leader of either party to have suffered combat wounds in the present century, spoke immediately after the Majority Leader. He spoke for less than three minutes. He said: "I would not be standing on this floor today, except for those who served beside me in 1945. They had no resolution. They had a duty. We have today done a small fraction of what they did, and I am not satisfied that we have yet done enough."

Speaker Foley, gaveling the final House vote at 6:14 p.m., did not bring his gavel down hard.

President Bush, signing the bill at 8:45, used a single pen, which he gave to the widow of Lance Cpl. James R. Aldine of Springdale, Arkansas, killed at Bandar Abbas on Saturday morning by Soviet long-range artillery. The President said only: "We will bring him home, ma'am, and the others. Beginning tonight."

Within the hour the President's authority under the resolution was further confirmed in private by an additional set of measures: a National Security Directive raising the readiness of the strategic forces of the United States to a level the Pentagon would not specify; the deployment of the 24th Infantry Division (Mechanized), now closed at the POMCUS sites in West Germany, to forward assembly areas; and the issuance to American forces in theater of new rules of engagement, the substance of which the Pentagon described only as "considerably broadened."

In London, Bonn, Paris, Rome, and Ottawa, allied governments issued statements of approval. In Tokyo, the government of Prime Minister Sosuke Uno announced an emergency Cabinet meeting for the morning. In Moscow, the so-called Emergency Committee made no immediate response. The Tass evening news bulletin, monitored in Helsinki, made no reference to the American congressional action.

SOVIET TROOPS HALT THEIR ADVANCE IN IRAN AS JUNTA CONSIDERS ITS NEXT MOVES, DEALS WITH REPORTED INTERNAL DIVISIONS

ISTANBUL — Soviet armored and motorized forces, which since June 19 had advanced from the Soviet frontier the length of Iran without interruption, came today to a halt. From the salt-flat country south of Yazd to the western highlands above Hamadan to the coastal road approaching the oil city of Ahvaz, the columns of the Soviet 4th Combined Arms Army and of the airborne and air-assault formations operating ahead of them ceased their forward movement, dispersed off the highway shoulders into hasty defensive perimeters, and began the work of resupply, of casualty evacuation, and, by every indication available to Western intelligence services, of waiting.

The halt — coming forty-eight hours after the engagement at Bafq in which the United States 101st Airborne Division inflicted significant losses upon the lead Soviet motor rifle regiment, and twenty-four hours after the destruction by American cruise missiles of three Soviet strategic bombers at Mozdok — was the first such pause since the operation began. Pentagon analysts and Western diplomats in Ankara offered competing interpretations of its significance, dividing roughly between those who believed the Soviet command had halted in order to consolidate logistically before resuming the advance, and those who believed the halt represented a political signal originating in Moscow itself.

A senior Western intelligence official in Ankara, speaking on condition of anonymity, described the operational picture as one of "a great army at the end of a long string." The Soviet line of communication, the official noted, runs from Baku through Astara along a single coastal road, much of it now subject to harassment by what appear to be irregular Iranian elements not previously seen, and from Nakhchivan through Julfa across the difficult country of Iranian Azerbaijan. Soviet fuel and ammunition stocks in the Iranian theater, the official estimated, were sufficient for "another five days of advance, perhaps a week, but not for sustained engagement against a peer adversary." The strikes at Doshan Tappeh on Saturday and at Khatami yesterday, the official added, had eliminated "the larger part of the forward fuel stockpile of the entire operation."

But the second interpretation — that the halt is, at least in part, political — drew increasing weight from a series of unusual reports reaching Western governments through diplomatic channels in the course of the day.

The Foreign Minister of the Soviet Union, Aleksandr Bessmertnykh, who has not been heard from in public since June 21 and who was widely reported to have absented himself from the meetings of the Emergency Committee since June 23, was reported by sources within the British Foreign Office to have made personal contact yesterday evening with the British Ambassador in Moscow, Sir Rodric Braithwaite, by telephone from a private apartment, and to have requested that the British Government convey to the Government of the United States a single sentence: that the situation in Moscow was "more fluid than the appearance of it." Mr. Bessmertnykh declined further communication and did not appear at the Foreign Ministry today.

Marshal Sergei F. Akhromeyev, the personal military adviser to Mr. Gorbachev and a figure of immense personal prestige within the Soviet General Staff, was reported by sources within the Defense Ministry to have addressed a closed meeting of the senior officers of the Stavka — the Supreme High Command, summoned into existence by the Emergency Committee on June 23 — in terms variously described as "anguished," as "fierce," and as "a soldier speaking finally as a soldier." His remarks, of which no reliable text exists, were said by one source to have included the words: "We have been ordered to do what cannot be done, in a country we cannot hold, against an army we cannot defeat, while our own country burns behind us. The men who have given us these orders are not soldiers, and they have no idea what they have asked." The Marshal was reported, at the conclusion of the meeting, to have been escorted from the room by personal security of the Chairman of the K.G.B.

Vladimir A. Kryuchkov, the K.G.B. chairman and the figure increasingly identified by Western analysts as the operational driver of the Emergency Committee, has appeared on Soviet television three times in the past twenty-four hours, twice longer than any other member of the junta. His remarks have grown noticeably sharper. In an evening broadcast he denounced "the cowardice of those who, having entered upon a great work, lose heart at the first sound of distant gunfire," and warned of "stern measures, suitable to the seriousness of the moment, against any quarter from which such cowardice may proceed." He named no names. None were required.

Anatoly Lukyanov, the figurehead chairman of the Emergency Committee, was reported by Tass this evening to have been "indisposed" and to have transferred the conduct of the day's business to Mr. Kryuchkov and to the Defense Minister, Marshal Yazov. The nature of the indisposition was not specified. The Soviet Ambassador in Washington, Yuri Dubinin, was reported by State Department sources to have spent the morning at the residence of the Apostolic Pro-Nuncio in Washington, the Most Reverend Pio Laghi, in conversation of unspecified character.

In the Pentagon, the night-watch officer of the National Military Command Center, in a posture statement issued at 11 p.m. and cleared for limited release, summarized the day in the Iranian theater in a single sentence: "The Soviet Army has stopped. We are watching to see whether it has stopped to think, or stopped to breathe."

SOVIET TROOPS IN GERMANY MOVE TOWARDS BORDER

BONN — In a development which Western military authorities described as the most ominous of a week without precedent, units of the Group of Soviet Forces, Germany — the largest and most powerful Soviet field force outside the borders of the Soviet Union itself, comprising five armies, 19 divisions, 338,000 men, and approximately 4,200 main battle tanks — began this morning a co-ordinated movement out of their peacetime garrisons toward the inner-German frontier, in what the Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe in Casteau, Belgium, designated by mid-afternoon as "the principal threat axis of the present conflict."

The movement was first detected by the West German Federal Border Guard observation post at Helmstedt-Marienborn, which reported at 4:30 a.m. local time the passage westward of an unbroken column of T-80 tanks of the 47th Guards Tank Division, departing its garrison at Hillersleben in the direction of the autobahn approaches to the border. By daylight, similar movements had been confirmed by NATO airborne radar and by West German signals intelligence at all five army headquarters of GSFG: the 1st Guards Tank Army at Dresden, the 2nd Guards Tank Army at Fürstenberg-an-der-Havel, the 3rd Shock Army at Magdeburg, the 8th Guards Army at Weimar-Nohra, and the 20th Guards Army at Eberswalde-Finow. The movement, in its scale and character, corresponded to the doctrinal pattern designated in NATO planning documents as "Stage Three" of a Soviet concentration for offensive operations against the central front of the alliance — a pattern long studied, often gamed, and never before observed.

Of particular concern to NATO planners were the movements of the 8th Guards Army out of its garrisons at Weimar, Erfurt, and Nohra, on an axis directed unambiguously toward the so-called Fulda Gap — the historic invasion route from the Thuringian basin into the Hessian heartland of West Germany, defended on the NATO side by the United States V Corps and by the German III Corps. The 8th Guards Army, the most studied and the most feared of the GSFG armies, contains four divisions of the highest readiness in the Soviet ground forces: the 27th Guards Motor Rifle Division at Halle, the 39th Guards Motor Rifle Division at Ohrdruf, the 79th Guards Tank Division at Jena, and the 57th Guards Motor Rifle Division at Naumburg. By mid-morning today, all four divisions were reported by NATO surveillance to be on the march.

Concurrently, NATO airborne early-warning aircraft of the 552nd Airborne Warning and Control Wing, on continuous patrol since the weekend, reported a marked increase in the number of Soviet tactical aircraft operating from forward air bases in the German Democratic Republic — Wittstock, Damgarten, Werneuchen, Allstedt, Köthen, Welzow, Finsterwalde — and a corresponding reduction in normal training-pattern activity. Soviet jamming of NATO communications frequencies, which had been intermittent through the previous days, became continuous after 11 a.m. local time and remained so through the evening.

Yet the movement, for all its scale and for all its menace, was not without ambiguity. Western military observers in West Germany, and in particular the senior staff of Gen. John R. Galvin at SHAPE, were said to have studied through the day a number of features of the GSFG concentration that did not entirely accord with the doctrine they had so long expected to see executed against them.

The movement was, in the first instance, partial. The two divisions of the GSFG most heavily reinforced from the Soviet interior in the past 72 hours — the 32nd Guards Tank Division at Jüterbog and the 25th Tank Division at Vogelsang — remained in their garrisons. The pre-positioned ammunition stockpiles of GSFG, dispersed at known locations across the GDR, were not, by NATO assessment, being broken out at the rate that doctrine required for offensive operations. Bridge-laying engineer formations, essential to the rapid crossing of the Werra and the Weser in any westward advance, had been observed moving — but moving rearward, away from the frontier, in the direction of the Polish border. The reasons for this movement were the subject of intense analysis at SHAPE through the evening, and were not yet understood.

The political situation in the rear of GSFG, moreover, can hardly have been ignored by its commanders. The German Democratic Republic, by every indication available to Western intelligence, has effectively ceased to exist as a functioning state. The Volkspolizei have stopped reporting. The Stasi headquarters at Normannenstrasse remains in the hands of Erich Mielke and his loyal officers, who continue, by the testimony of refugees, to destroy paper, but exercises authority over nothing beyond its own walls. The National People's Army has not received a coherent order in 72 hours. The civilian population of the country, in numbers reaching the millions, is in motion — toward the Western border, toward the West Berlin sector boundaries, and in some places, toward the GSFG garrisons themselves to inquire of Soviet sergeants the status of brothers and fathers conscripted into NVA units now no longer reporting.

The commander of the Group of Soviet Forces, Germany, Col. Gen. Boris V. Snetkov, has issued, in the past 24 hours, three separate orders of the day to his troops, of which the texts have been recovered by NATO intelligence. The orders enjoin discipline. They forbid fraternization with the local population. They forbid, with unusual emphasis, the discussion of news from the Soviet Union. They do not, in any of their three iterations, mention the prospect of offensive operations against NATO forces.

In Bonn, Chancellor Kohl met through the day with the West German cabinet, with Defense Minister Gerhard Stoltenberg, with Gen. Klaus Naumann of the Bundeswehr, and with the Federal President, Richard von Weizsäcker. In Brussels, the North Atlantic Council met in continuous session. In Washington, the Pentagon would say only that the President had been advised, that the Joint Chiefs were assembled, and that "appropriate measures of every character" had been taken or were under consideration.

A senior NATO officer, asked by a correspondent of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung at the close of business at SHAPE whether the alliance now stood at the brink of war upon its central front, replied: "We have always stood there. Tonight we stand a little closer. Tomorrow, perhaps, we shall stand farther back. The brink, I have learned in this profession, is not a single line. It is an entire country, and we have spent forty years learning to live within it."

WALESA GIVES ADDRESS OVER REBEL RADIO, "YOUR ENEMIES ARE NOT POLES, THEY ARE RUSSIANS"

VIENNA — Lech Walesa, the chairman of the Solidarity trade union, the recipient of the 1983 Nobel Peace Prize, and the prisoner whom the so-called Military Council of National Salvation in Warsaw has held incommunicado at an undisclosed location since the early hours of June 22, was confirmed late tonight to be neither incommunicado nor, by every indication, in the custody of the Council, having delivered at 8 p.m. local time a fifteen-minute address in his unmistakable voice over the underground broadcasting facilities of Radio Solidarność, the clandestine network constructed during the martial law years of 1982-86 and reactivated, by means and through hands not yet publicly known, in the four days since the Council's coup.

The address — picked up on shortwave by monitoring stations in Vienna, in West Berlin, and at the BBC Caversham Park facility in Berkshire, and rebroadcast within the hour by the Polish Service of Radio Free Europe in Munich — represented the first public communication by Mr. Walesa since the night of his arrest, and the first sustained challenge by a figure of his stature to the legitimacy of the Council and to the obedience of the Polish armed forces. It was delivered, by the testimony of the recording, in conditions of considerable simplicity: a single voice, a single microphone, the faint sound of what may have been wind, and once, midway through, the distant barking of a dog.

Mr. Walesa opened with the customary salutation of his union. "Brothers and sisters of Solidarity. Brothers and sisters of Poland. This is Lech, and I am still here, and so are you, and so is Poland."

He spoke at first of his arrest, of his removal from his home in Gdansk in the early hours of Thursday, of his transfer through three locations, of his escape — which he refused to describe, saying only that "those who arranged it have asked me not to thank them publicly, and so I shall not, and let it be remarked that this is the first time in my life I have been asked not to talk, and the first time I have agreed." He spoke of the friends still held: of Mazowiecki, "the gentlest man God ever placed at the head of a government, and ours for seventy-two hours, and he shall be ours again"; of Geremek; of Michnik, "who is, I am told, doing in his cell what he has done in every cell, which is to write, and we shall read what he has written, in due course, in the freedom we shall give him"; of Kuroń.

He turned then to the Polish armed forces, and the substance of his address, the substance for which it will be remembered, began.

"I speak now to the Polish soldier. To the boy in the barracks at Krakow, at Wroclaw, at Szczecin, at Bialystok, at Gdynia, at Lodz. I speak to the officer in his quarters. I speak to the general at his desk. I am a Pole, and you are Poles, and we are all of us, in this hour, what our fathers and grandfathers were in their hours: men under arms in a Polish land, deciding whom we shall serve.

"I shall make it easy for you. I shall tell you whom you shall not serve, and then I shall tell you the rest.

"You shall not serve General Siwicki. He has put on the uniform of the Polish soldier in order to serve another army, in another capital, that has never in its history wished Poland anything but the grave. You shall not serve General Kiszczak. He has spent his life imprisoning Poles on behalf of foreigners, and he is doing it tonight, and he will not stop until you stop him. You shall not serve the man called Jaruzelski, wherever he may be, alive or dead, willing or otherwise; he had his chance to be a Pole among Poles, and he has spent it, and there is none left to him.

"And now, the rest. Your enemies are not Poles, brothers. Your enemies are not Poles. They are Russians. They have always been Russians. In 1772 they were Russians. In 1830 they were Russians. In 1863 they were Russians. In 1920, when by the grace of God and by the genius of Pilsudski we drove them from the gates of Warsaw, they were Russians. In 1939, when they came again with Hitler, they were Russians. In 1944, when they sat on the eastern bank of the Vistula and watched the Home Army die in the streets of Warsaw, they were Russians. In Katyn, where my uncle and yours lie in the same forest, they were Russians. In 1956, in 1968, in 1981, they were Russians. They are tonight, in the Kremlin, in the uniform of soldiers who do not know yet that they are dead men, Russians.

"And the Pole who fights for them is not, in that hour, a Pole. He is something else. He is a thing the Russian has made out of him. He need not remain that thing. The uniform he wears is Polish. The land beneath his boots is Polish. The mother who weeps for him is Polish. The God who watches him decide is the God of the Poles. He may, at any hour of any day, in any barracks of this country, lay down the order he has been given by a foreigner and take up the order he has been given by his country, which is to defend her.

"I do not ask you, brothers, to mutiny. I do not ask you to fire upon your officers. I ask you a simpler thing. I ask you to do nothing. I ask you to remain in your barracks. I ask you to find that your truck has no fuel, that your rifle has no ammunition, that your boots are at the cobbler's, that your orders are not clear. I ask you, the officer, to find that the telephone is out of order, that the dispatch did not arrive, that the company is at gunnery practice and cannot be recalled in time. I ask you, the general, to find that the situation requires further study, and that you shall report your findings in due course, and that in the meantime no Pole shall be ordered to shoot another Pole, and no church shall be entered, and no shipyard shall be cleared, and no priest shall be arrested, and no child shall be left fatherless on your authority. Do this, and you shall be a Polish soldier, and your great-grandchildren shall name their sons after you.

"Do otherwise, and you shall be what the Russians have asked you to be, and the children of the Poles whom you have killed shall come for you in the years that come, as the children of the Poles whom others killed have come for those others, in their hour. And the night shall come when, in your bed, in the dark, you shall remember whom you served, and the memory shall not let you sleep, and you shall envy the men you killed.

"I shall sign off now. I shall say to you what I have said in every hour of my life: that God loves Poland, and that Poland is not yet lost so long as we yet live. Jeszcze Polska nie zginela. God bless you. God bless Poland. Solidarność zwycięży."

The recording ended with the opening bars of Mazurek Dabrowskiego, the Polish national anthem, played on a single piano.

By midnight, sources within the Polish Embassy in Vienna, monitoring transmissions from the Warsaw Pact military communications net, reported a marked increase in the number of Polish Army units reporting equipment failures, training requirements, and other reasons for inability to execute orders received from the Defense Ministry. The 6th Pomeranian Airborne Brigade at Krakow, ordered overnight to deploy a battalion to Warsaw, was reported to have answered that its aircraft were unserviceable and that its parachutes were "in inspection." The 1st Warsaw Mechanized Division at Legionowo, a unit raised from the streets of the capital and named for them, declined an order to enter the Old Town. The cathedral bells of Krakow, of Czestochowa, of Gdansk, of Wroclaw, and of Poznan rang at midnight for an hour, by no order of any state.

In the Vatican, the Holy Father was reported to have stayed up listening.

Next: Part II: The Missiles of July