Goliath

The sudden blast of sirens sends tens of thousands of Iraqis fleeing through the congested streets of the city. Clouds of dust and debris rise above the chaos as human walls of flesh push, shove, and tumble in upon themselves in waves. People are crying, screaming, hiding beneath cars. Some gaze at the sky for the last time, while others duck for cover.

Seventy-five hundred feet above Baghdad’s Presidential Palace, the Trident II reaches its target point … and detonates.

A blinding flare—as quick as a camera flashbulb but a million times brighter—ignites the entire sky. A split second later—the crushing unearthly heat of tortured air, as if a monstrous new sun has magically appeared thirty football fields above Baghdad to blow its lethal kiss upon the desert city. In the few seconds before the shock wave hits, every person, every building, every thing in downtown Baghdad is heated to ignition. A second after the shock, the buoyant rise of all that superheated air inhales like a hurricane wind, sucking everything up into its hellish ascent. The burgeoning firestorm feeds the galeforce winds—so hot, so intense, that the city will burn completely.

For those surviving wretches not far enough outside the city limits, the remaining heartbeats of life become an eternity. Thousands who were foolish enough to look at the sky clutch futilely at their faces, screaming in agony as their hair bursts into flames. The initial blast—ungodly bright—has blinded them, literally melting their eyeballs. The heat is soaring so high that they can actually feel their charred skin peeling away from their bones. Blindly, they hurl themselves into the steaming waters of the Tigris River.

Seconds later, a blast wave—an invisible tidal wave of crushing wind and heat—rolls outward from the center of Baghdad at speeds in excess of two thousand miles an hour. This ring of thunder levels the remains of the ancient city of the Arabian Nights and continues expanding outward across the desert landscape, its dust-filled radioactive forward crest driving the sand like an avalanche.

Farther out, radioactive debris and pulverized dust fall back to earth, poisoning those survivors outside the city limits. For these pitiful souls, the nightmarish existence to follow will bring nothing but misery. Scorched skin will become a torturous blanket of festering blisters. Relief, if one can call it that, will take days to arrive as medical personnel will be hesitant to enter the radiation zone. Aid stations will be underequipped and overwhelmed by the sheer number of victims and the extent of their wounds. Badly burned, their organs laced with radioactive particles, the luckiest of these holocaust victims will drift back and forth into a morphine-induced sleep while they await death, their only salvation.

Mosul Presidential Palace Northern Region, Iraq

In 1991, following the end of the Gulf War, United Nations weapon inspectors in Iraq succeeded in destroying 38,000 chemical weapons, 480,000 liters of chemical weapons agents, 48 missiles, a half-dozen missile launchers, 30 special missile warheads for biological and chemical weapons, and several manufacturing and weapons research facilities. Despite these successes, UNSCOM officials were forced out of Iraq in 1998 having failed to locate more than 31,000 chemical warfare munitions, as well as an extensive supply of VX nerve gas—theoretically enough to wipe out the world’s entire population, if somehow delivered to everybody.

UNSCOM’s failure came as a result of Saddam Hussein’s outright refusal to allow weapon inspectors to visit his Presidential Palaces, nine sprawling complexes featuring hundreds of buildings, occupying more than one hundred square miles.

Seven of them had been located in central Iraq. The 475-kiloton nuclear explosion has reduced the buildings to rubble and collapsed their subterranean infrastructures and most of the bunkers lying beneath them.

Mosul Presidential Palace in Northern Iraq, is located outside the blast zone. The compound, just short of a square mile in size, contains fifty surface structures—and ten subterranean bunkers concealing 23,000 liters of genetically enhanced anthrax spores and botulinum.

Guided by its Global Positioning System, the first of the two eastbound Tomahawk Block III TLAMs soars low over the desert terrain, the WDU-36 warhead’s PBXN-107 explosive having been replaced with a four-kiloton tactical device.

With irresistible impact, the projectile slams through the roof of the palace’s main building, continuing deeper until it punches a hole in the concrete bunker … and detonates.

The nuclear blast vaporizes the entire complex, leaving only a modest crater as a signature.

Basra Palace Southern Desert, Iraq