Bobby Akart - First Strike

Swirling and boiling, glowing purplish with gamma-ionized light, the expanding fireball began to rise, becoming a burning mushroom cloud balanced on a wide, dirty stem with a curtain of water around its base that slowly fell back into the sea.

The wings of the B-36 orbiting fifteen miles from ground zero at forty thousand feet heated to ninety-three degrees almost instantly.

In a minute and a half, the enlarging fireball cloud reached 57,000 feet; in two and a half minutes, when the shock wave arrived at the Estes, the cloud passed 100,000 feet.

The shock wave announced itself with a sharp report followed by a long thunder of broken rumbling.

Nuclear missiles near full operational capability .

The White House said late Friday that a nuclear missile build-up in Cuba is continuing at a rapid pace, “apparently… directed to achieving full operational capability as soon as possible.”

The statement was clearly aimed at warning the Soviets the United States is able to keep watch on their activity in Cuba.

It described the scene at missile sites indicating the Russians had not slowed their attempt to establish ballistic missile launching platforms, despite President Kennedy’s declaration that existence of those sites has brought on the crisis.

India conducted today her first successful test of a powerful nuclear device.

The surprise announcement means that India is the sixth nation to have exploded a nuclear device. The others are the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain, France and China.

A brief Government statement said that India’s Atomic Energy Commission had carried out “a peaceful ‘nuclear explosion’ experiment.” The underground blast took place “at a depth of more than 100 meters,” or about 330 feet, the statement said.

In exploding the device, India was entirely within her rights in international law, Government officials said.

The North Korean nuclear-weapons crisis intensified today as Pyongyang announced it is withdrawing from the 1968 Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.

Under the treaty, North Korea was barred from making nuclear weapons, but said it was pulling out of it today with immediate effect, blaming US aggression for its decision.

North Korea warned the United States against taking retaliatory military action, saying it would "finally lead to the third world war". However, the regime routinely issues such inflammatory comments.

The North Korean government said in a statement carried on KCNA, its official news agency: "We can no longer remain bound to the Nonproliferation Treaty, allowing the country’s security and the dignity of our nation to be infringed upon.”

An Iranian dissident group said Thursday a delegation of North Korean nuclear weapons experts was in Iran in April visiting a heavily guarded secret military site, presumed to be a nuclear weapons development facility.

The National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), which exposed the existence of a key Iranian nuclear weapons facility in 2002 and significant, illicit Iranian nuclear weapons developments since then, said this was the third visit to Iran in 2015 by a North Korean delegation.

Also, citing confidential information from sources inside Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, research and aerospace agencies, said in a statement another group of North Korean nuclear weapons experts is slated to return to Iran in June.

Iran’s hardline government has repeatedly said it is pursuing a nuclear program for peaceful purposes. But the deputy director of NCRI’s Washington-based U.S. office said the group has uncovered what he called a “big, big, red flag”.

During North Korea’s third nuclear weapons test in February 2013, according to NCRI, Iran’s top nuclear experts traveled to Pyongyang to observe the trial.

No war really comes unexpectedly. The drums are beating long before a single shot is fired.

It is an unfortunate fact that we can secure peace only by preparing for war.

If we don’t end war, war will end us.

The survivors of a nuclear holocaust will envy the dead.

Except for fools and madmen, everyone knows that nuclear war would be an unprecedented human catastrophe.

Alea iacta est .

The die has been cast.

Early October

Isfahan, Iran

For more than a decade, he’d been simply referred to as Agent L, short for Lightning . His true identity had exploded along with the Ford Explorer he’d been driving as several pursuit vehicles chased him out of Algeria following the assassination of a Libyan target. Those in pursuit reported seeing the fireball, together with the driver’s side door sailing through the air until it crashed into a storefront forty feet away. The oily black cloud of smoke spewed out of the carcass of the Explorer, the flames hungrily devouring anything flammable.

The pursuers reveled in their victory as they verily confirmed that the famed Mossad agent had been forever dispatched to the Gates of Hell. Israel privately mourned the loss of its prized operative, who’d led a team with no name designation on many operations on behalf of the Jerusalem government. Their own satellite reconnaissance confirmed no one could have survived the blast.