They thought it was a test. Just a test.
When Kim Jong Un moved the nuclear launchers into position on the craggy and dark northeastern Korean coast, they watched. And waited. And scoffed. And Tweeted. When he assembled the rockets. And armed them. Still they watched.
"It's just a test," The generals and politicians and pundits pontificated. âItâs just a test,â the President twittered. âIt's just a test," the know-nothing news anchors parroted. And we waited. And we watched.
On the day of the launch, the worldâs spy satellites watched the North Korean conscripts fuel the rockets. They watched them arm the rockets. And they watched them flee the rockets, sheltering in crude bunkers while their fearless leader broadcast himself pushing the button to launch the rockets for us all to watch.
The cameras didn't capture the destruction of Tokyo. Or Seoul. Radioactive shockwaves and electro-magnetic pulses ensured that we couldn't watch as nuclear devastation rent asunder the lives and machinations and dreams of millions. The first to perish because the world watched.
At T+12, the Americans responded to the provocation in kind. Alerted by the urgent communiquĂŠs from the White House that the lonely silos had been watching for for 60 years or moreâand the even more urgent Tweets from the Oval Officeâthe missiles launched. Burning forth from hidden submarines and North Dakotan beet fields watched by no one but their hidden masters.
Even before the American retaliatory ICBM's finished their arcs and crashed headlong into Pyongyang, the Russians watched. Despite phone calls and assurances and pronouncements and agreements that the Russians were bystanders, content merely to watch, a computer sitting unwatched since 1967 in the basement of a forgotten bunker watched. Seeing multiple launches, and multiple warnings, it ran multiple calculations. And it opted not to watch.Â
At T+19, slumbering russian silos yawned open, burping a barrage of destiny into the stratosphere, curving in elegant arcs past the watching satellites and toward their unwitting targets haplessly watching the world slip from their fingers.
At T+20, American Air Force operators watched the boosters bloom across the former Soviet Union like Devil's flowers on a spring day, coming to exact a toll no one had foretold. Consulting protocols, they watched as their commanders commanded return fire.
At T+28, American anti-missile batteries watched the skies, scanning for inevitability as it returned to Earth from Heaven. Their interceptors streaking forth as the MIRV's emerged from their atmospheric burn. Some successful, most not, the Russian entry vehicles got what they were watching for.Â
At T+33, America erupted in a sea of fire. A hellacious sight that Russian eyes couldn't watch from the fallout bunkers and the subway shelters and the basements from which they would never emerge.Â
At T+40, a Lieutenant, Junior Grade of the People's Liberation Army in Dongfeng, watching a news report beamed by watching satellite, consulted a manual and turned a key and pressed a button that initiated a barrage of unrequited nuclear-tipped agony hurtling toward the shell-shocked survivors huddled and praying on American shores.Â
And at T+60, only God watched as China accidentally won the Third World War.
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