1 – Israel
The atom bomb that destroyed Tel Aviv might have been manufactured in Pakistan or North Korea or Iran. Maybe it was smuggled out of the former Soviet Union. It could even have been made in Israel itself and been the bomb the Jewish state secretly traded to South Africa before the Afrikaner government gave way to black majority rule. When it comes to bombs, especially nuclear ones, it doesn’t matter who makes them or even who delivers them. What mattered was that the bomb caused the death of the State of Israel before its Biblical three score and ten years of existence.
American specialists estimated the bomb was in the one-megaton range, based on satellite images showing a crater 1,200 feet across and nearly two hundred feet deep. The detonation ignited a firestorm fueled by ruptured gas lines, gasoline tanks, and literally every object that could burn within a half mile of ground zero. This firestorm, many times more ferocious than the firestorm caused by the Allied bombing of Dresden, which killed 100,000 Germans, burned every molecule of oxygen within a mile of the blast and caused hurricane force winds as air rushed in to replace the blistering air driven high into the atmosphere. Temperatures in the Tel Aviv neighborhoods through which it flashed roasted people huddling in basements and behind stone walls that had stood since Biblical times.
The first sign of the explosion was the enormous fireball that rose over the center of Israel, creating a glare bright enough to burn out the retinas of people twenty miles away. Half a million people, most of them Jews but also tens of thousands of Palestinians, were killed immediately or died within a few days. Cool Mediterranean breezes spread the radiation cloud inland and north through Israel’s best agricultural region, an area created from desert by generations of Jewish settlers during Israel’s brief life span.
Israel was cut in half by the bomb. Following contingency plans written three dozen years earlier and modified year by year as Israel’s neighbors swayed from sworn enemies to secret ally and back again, the Israeli air force was in the air within minutes of the detonation. Two hours later, their fuel exhausted and no enemy aircraft revealed, the planes landed on scattered desert airfields, waiting for orders that never arrived.
Half the Syrian tank crews that stormed through the Golan Heights died in the furious armored and artillery defense put up by Israel Defense Force units. But with supply lines leading back to a radioactive wasteland, the Israeli forces depleted their fuel and ammunition and were overrun, standing helplessly at their carefully emplaced weapons.
Thousands of the surviving Syrian troops died of radiation poisoning during the next week as their commanders drove them deeper and deeper into Israel, roaring through the worst of the radiation in a race to beat the Egyptians and Jordanians to Jerusalem. Fortunately for the hundreds of thousands of Israelis in towns and farms in the northern half of the country, the Syrians were more excited about liberating Jerusalem than the wholesale slaughter of Jews. There would be time for that later, for those who survived the radiation sickness.
Egyptian humanitarian relief convoys driving across the Sinai carried tons of food supplies, field medical units and tents. Cairo proclaimed its continued allegiance to its friend Israel. It was natural, the government radio said, that such valuable supplies required military protection.
For the first time since 1967, Egyptian troops occupied the Gaza Strip.
Perhaps in a hundred years Jews will memorialize the million who were slaughtered by one army or another. Or the thousands who died fighting to their last bullet rather than give up their homeland. If there are Israelis in a hundred years, however, they will be descendants of those who managed to flee to the port of Haifa, where every craft that could float was crammed with hysterical people old enough to remember the last Holocaust or young enough to fear the next. The eastern Mediterranean swarmed with ships with no destination except “away.”
Doors slammed shut. No nation wanted hundreds of thousands of refugees who had no home to return to, especially as oil-rich countries warned of petroleum reprisals against any nation providing comfort to the Jewish “criminals who stole Palestinian land.”
The State of Israel ceased to be at the close of the second decade of the Twenty-First Century. The only certainty to follow the Tel Aviv bomb was that the wheel of violence would take one more turn and that this bomb would be answered by more yet to come. The nation died and the Jewish terrorist, yet another stereotype for God’s chosen people, returned to the world stage.