Thanks to CajunBear73 and Skrillwriter for their reviews and input.

=O=

Chapter 20: Spectacular Show of Force

With most of the exercise staff gone, the ADC command center was back to its usual, quiet self.

General Drago Bludvist gazed upon the vast map of the world on the far wall, with its blinking lights, wavy lines, and theater borders, a scowl on his face.

The exercise had not quite gone according to plan. Stoick Haddock had stolen precious exercise time from him, and his supersonic bombers had fared surprisingly poorly against ADC's Blackbirds.

Drago shook his head. Now was no time to dwell on petty failures. He had achieved most of his training goals. Precious data had been collected with which tactics against air defense systems equipped with supersonic interceptors could be devised. Clearly, procedures and tactics regarding evasive routing and threat evasion needed a substantial overhaul. Further afield, assigning Blackbird fighters to attack targets and escort his bombers would greatly increase attack effectiveness. and the new AWACS battle management aircraft, if used offensively, could potentially give his bombers as good a picture of enemy dispositions as the defender (that, however, required the slowpoke AWACS bird to be in place before the supersonic bombers came screaming in – doable over the Mainland, but harder over the North Pole unless as part of a well-coordinated first strike).

Drago smiled a little smile. Given time, Stoick would get his comeuppance. Getting rid of the man would not be difficult.

But getting his hands on those aircraft was another matter. Getting his allies in Portland to make sure that the Blackbirds had been built as multirole fighters instead of interceptors had been a stroke of genius – giving him plenty of hooks with which to pull ADC apart. For without interceptors, what point was there to an Aerospace Defense Command? All it did was fly multirole fighter planes that were exactly the same as all other fighter planes. But just how could he transfer ADC's idle, overpriced fleet of Blackbirds and AWACS aircraft to Strategic Air Command?

Drago rubbed his chin in thought as he scanned the command center.

Suddenly, an alarm began to ring, and a flashing light appeared on the big screen. Drago stood.

"We have a missile launch! Eastern hemisphere… east India!"

His jaw dropped.

"How many?"

"One plume! It's on DSP 3 only. DSP 4… it's on DSP 4 too now."

With their big infrared telescopes, the Defense Support Program Satellites could spot a hot rocket motor anywhere on the planet, allowing them to detect and localize missile launches with reasonable accuracy.

"Get my bombers in the air!" Drago bellowed.

The ADC commander ignored him. "Alert Portland and SAC. Alert the radars." He took a deep breath. "PAR-2 should be seeing them over the horizon any minute."

PAR-2 was one of the new Bell Labs missile defence radars, designed as a part of the Sentinel ballistic missile defence system currently under development. The Administration had seen fit to expedite funding for PAR-2, and it was now fully operational even as the rest of the system continued its long slog through development and testing. From its hardened tombstone-like concrete housing deep in Qinghai Province, the huge, ten-storey-tall phased array radar could spot, discriminate and track a thousand baseball-sized objects over Sri Lanka, three thousand kilometres away – as long as those targets were above the horizon, that is to say, in outer space a thousand or more kilometers above the ground.

"They're not on PAR-2 yet. They should be on PAR-2 by now." The technician swallowed. "Maybe it's a false alarm."

Drago tensed. He knew the enemy would never start a nuclear war with a single missile – what would be the point? – but one could never be sure.

"Not a peep from the other sats. No other launches so far."

The seconds ticked by. One of Drago's staffers whispered in his ear. "Sir, SAC is going airborne. We can stay in touch with Looking Glass from here." Drago gave a stiff nod.

His bombers might be going to war, and he was stuck in this cave instead of leading the charge.

"Portland wants confirmation!"

"It's on PAR-2!"

"Shit! We have confirmation!"

"Tracking… tracked! Launch point is Assam, India. Computed impact point is… Middle of nowhere. Southern Indian Ocean. A thousand kilometers south of the Cocos Islands."

The entire room seemed to sigh with relief. "It's just a test."

Drago furrowed his brow. "India… doesn't have ballistic missiles."

The commander shrugged. "They do now."

The warhead separated from the booster over East Pakistan, and reached apogee a thousand miles over the equator. The room's interest in the missile seemed to fall as the missile did, right into the middle of the most isolated stretch of ocean on the planet.

"Sir! Navy wants a position fix on point of impact for the booster and warhead!"

The damned glory-hounds in the Navy were already looking forward to dredging chunks of Indian missile from the seafloor.

The missile fell off the scope. "And… that's the last we'll see of it."

Drago smiled. "Well, until the Navy parades the pieces in front of Congress come budget time." They shared a laugh.

The alarm rang again. "What now! Another launch?"

"Nuclear detonation! A big one, high altitude! Bangometer is off the charts!"

In addition to picking up missile launches, satellite-mounted infrared cameras (and also neutron and gamma ray detectors) were also great for picking up nuclear explosions.

"Detonation point… southern Indian Ocean. Two megatons." The technician gulped.

"Detonation altitude?" Drago's mind raced through the possibilities.

"Between eight and twelve hundred kilometers, sir!"

"Get me an effects analyst! What kind of damage are we looking at here? Someone call Perth and tell 'em to shut down their power lines, just in case!" The ADC commander clutched his head. "Get Space Traffic Control and SAC HEO. God, I hope we didn't have any space stations in the prompt effects zone." A staffer ran down the hall.

The ADC commander groaned. Nuclear detonations in orbit injected high-energy charged particles into the earth's radiation belts, damaging satellites, spacecraft, and astronauts alike. Even if the Van Allen high voltage orbital tethers worked as advertised, and drained the belts quickly, spacewalks would still have to be curtailed for over a week. And astronauts would probably have to spend the coming hours in radiation shelters…

"Sir, STC reports that a Storm Warning is out. HEO nuclear command post is bunkering down as we speak."

Drago gritted his teeth as pandemonium engulfed the room. "Looks like the Navy isn't going to get their trophy after all."

He turned to his staff officer. "Recall the bombers."

=O=

Two thousand kilometers above the surface of the Earth, a blunted, olive-green cone of epoxy and metal arced soundlessly across the heavens.

Below it stretched the black, empty expanse of the Indian Ocean. To its east, the lights of Perth and Darwin glittered, tracing an outline of Western Australia in a featureless ocean of night. To the west, beyond a line where night met day, beckoned the beaches of Africa, basking in the glow of the sun for a few more hours before the rotation of the Earth swallowed them, too, in darkness.

The cone fell south, its great forward speed carrying it to distant lands even as gravity inexorably pulled it back to earth. Bound only by gravity as it travelled through the empty void, its path was as predictable as that of the celestial bodies with which it shared the heavens. Dispassionate. Immutable. Ballistic.

One thousand kilometers above the Indian Ocean, a timer in the cone fell to zero, setting the intricate machinery of the warhead in motion.

Like all thermonuclear warheads, the cone consisted of three parts. In the nose, a spherical fission bomb "primary". In the tail, a cylindrical fusion device, a "secondary". Together, they were enclosed in a single large egg-shaped "radiation case" of dense uranium, to contain the intense energies of the atomic explosion just long enough for the device to work.

Deep within the cone, the primary sprang to life. A hollow sphere of chemical explosives detonated, crushing the core of weapons-grade uranium in its grasp.

Fueled by the sudden emergence of a dense sea of fissile uranium nuclei, neutrons in the core ran wild, blasting nuclei apart and releasing more neutrons, which blasted more nuclei apart, which released more neutrons in a runaway feeding frenzy of nuclear chain reactions. Vast energies were unlocked and released, and, for a moment, the compressed core, now a ball of plasma, shone as hot as the core of the sun, shining upon the rest of the cone-shaped chamber, its light – hotter than blue, hotter than ultraviolet - the color of x-ray. Ghosting through the plastic packing of the device as if it did not exist, the x-rays reflected from the cheap, natural uranium walls of the radiation case (for x-rays cannot penetrate metal with ease), flooded the egg-shaped chamber…

…and converged on the cylinder of the secondary at the other end of the cone. Under the harsh x-ray light of the core, the uranium sheath (the "tamper") of the cylinder vaporized, crushing the cylinder within it in its grasp as the uranium tamper expanded into a superheated gob of plasma.

The cylinder within the tamper was filled with lithium deuteride. Crushed by the expanding plasma cylinder like a man in an overinflated lifejacket, it reached magnificent densities – fit for the core of a sun. A smaller lump of uranium, buried deep within the lithium deuteride, crushed by the plasma, flared to life at just the right moment…

…igniting the lithium deuteride in a thermonuclear inferno. In an instant, the lithium disintegrated into tritium, which fused with the deuterium, releasing vast gobs of energy and an immense flood of fast neutrons.

Nuclear fusion, driven by the power of fission.

The cheap natural uranium tamper and the cheap natural uranium radiation case had not fissioned under the hail of neutrons from the initial initiation of the primary core. Like damp wood around a fireplace, they had been inert. But now they all burned, split, and transmuted as they were engulfed by a thermonuclear inferno of fast neutrons, adding their energies to the flames.

The fission-fusion-fission inferno was all over in a few millionths of a second, well before the puny energies of the chemical explosives could even begin to contemplate disassembling the device.

In a few millionths of a second, energies equivalent to two million tonnes of TNT were unlocked and unleashed within the diminutive warhead – barely the size of a small car. From such a tiny space, these energies could only be expressed as a spectacular explosion of x-rays.

As the immense blast of x-rays heated the sparse molecules littering the vacuum of space to incandescence, night turned to day over the moonlit waters of the Indian Ocean, as a brilliant ball of light shone briefly upon the sleeping millions of Western Australia and Indonesia before fading from view.

An electromagnetic pulse swept the empty skies and lonely waters of the southern Indian Ocean, as electrons were knocked from their atoms by gamma rays – a tiny but important minority among the products of the intiation. A few ships in transit suffered varying degrees of damage to onboard electronics.

But the work of the warhead was not done.

Electrons now filled the sky over the Indian Ocean. The vast cloud of electrons began clawing its way out of Earth's gravity well, only to be caught in the vast loops of the terrestrial magnetic field – invisible lines of magnetic flux that spring from the ground, arc high over the Earth, and return to the ground at a point on the opposite side of the magnetic equator.

The cloud split in two, following the magnetic field lines north and south.

The cloud travelling southwards was sucked downward towards the surface of the Earth almost immediately, hitting the atmosphere directly under the blast. The cloud travelling northwards arced high over the surface of the Earth, plunging into the atmosphere over East Asia, smothering the sky in shimmering curtains of red and green as charged ions were neutralized by the vast bulk of the atmosphere.

More electrons, caught in the vast terrestrial magnetic field, diffused around and over the blue marble, bathing the vast emptiness of near-earth space in an ever-thinning sea of high-energy particles. Electrons slammed into into spacecraft, satellites and space factories, damaging delicate solid-state circuitry, degrading solar panels, and giving astronauts scurrying for radiation shelters uncomfortably high doses of radiation.

Far below the aurorae, six hundred million Pacificans, enjoying the picnics, carnivals, and other attractions of the Mid-Autumn festival, turned their eyes skyward, mouths agape in awe.

=O=

The Secretary, still dressed in his pajamas, rubbed his aching head as he walked into the Big Office. On his day off too. His wife was going to kill him for sure. And his daughters had spent so much effort preparing for the picnic tonight too…

"Someone get me the Soviet Ambassador! We want an explanation on what the hell this was, whether the missile was under Indian or Soviet control, whether this was a simple test, a demonstration or a preface to an ultimatum, and we want it now!" The Secretary gratefully accepted a glass of water from an aide, and downed it with a gulp.

At least traffic had been light this morning.

The press coordinator walked up to him. "How do we want to spin this? Should we try to bury this, footnote it?"

The Secretary grimaced. "The fun thing about their little stunt… the reason that we're dealing with a national emergency… is that, courtesy of the Earth's magnetic field, half the Eastern Hemisphere saw them set that nuke off. Auroral effects." He chuckled. "And we have no idea whether the damned Soviets wanted that either, because their embassy still hasn't made a goddamned statement on the incident!"

The press coordinator chewed his lip. "So… what do you want us to say?"

The Secretary hesitated, and clutched his head as his mind raced through the possibilities.

"Sir, press reports are already coming in from Sichuan and Yunnan talking about a Soviet nuclear attack underway. We need to make a statement, and we need to make it now!"

The Secretary nodded. "Keep it short, and keep it factual. Emphasize that the aurorae are harmless. Get out there now."

"No. I'll make the statement myself."

An unassuming middle-aged man had just walked into the room. Between the gentle expression on his face, greying hair and sensible suit, he could've been mistaken for someone's kindly uncle, out for a spot of dim sum, or a manager of a small firm.

"Mr. President."

The President spoke at a slow, measured pace. "Richard. I know you think we should have answers before we make a definitive statement. But right now, the people need reassurance more than they need answers."

He stroked his chin. "But they will get answers. Because there's no way in hell we're letting the Soviets get away with this."

=O=

Author's note:

KABOOM! Readers are advised to look up pictures of Starfish Prime, a US high altitude nuclear test, to see what nuclear auroral phenomena look like.

The only ever "all up" ballistic missile test with a live warhead conducted by the USA was shot Frigate Bird, a test of a Polaris submarine-launched ballistic missile, conducted as part of Operation Dominic in 1962. So there is some precedent for this mode of weapons testing - but never in such a provocative manner.