Persepolis Palace, Parthia
The Shah scowled at the latest briefing of yet another ban on yet another religion. It was growing to be rather tiresome, and of course, needed to be stopped before it eventually came to a country banning the Zoroastrian religion, something the Shah intended on preventing from ever occurring. A message had to be sent, but how?. He lit a cigarette, before turning to the defense minister seated across from him on the other side of the Shah's malachite desk.
Lord Marshall Ardeshir Nassiri, defense minister of Parthia spoke as the Shah seemed deep in thought. "We can deploy a rapid reaction force, Shahanshah, occupy their country and then run it ourselves. It will not be a substantial deployment..."
The Shah said nothing, instead opening a drawer in his desk while asking only one question of the defense minister, "Do we have at least twenty boomers within range?"
The Defense Minister's eyes widened, "Yes Shahanshah..." The Shah, meanwhile, removed a computer from his desk, placing it in front of him and booting it up. The wall across the Shah's desk was covered by a projection screen, the strategic map showing the position of Parthia's current deployments of ICBMs, satellites, missile subs, nuclear armed vessels, and indeed, large storage depots of tactical weapons.
The Shah smiled as he punched his key into the computer, “Just like Krezren, we'll send a firm message to the world and all who observe our deeds. My authorization code is 8-7-2-2-3-1-6-3-2-4-6. Exterminate them from this planet. ”
The Defense Minister swallowed, but said nothing. Six hundred and twenty two million people were now the target of the Shahanshah's reply.
In orbit above the Earth, Parthia's first, unseen punch would smash hard into San Franutsco. Quick, efficent, and deadly, Parthia's nuclear weaponry had become increasingly
Satellites passing over San Franutsco would offer the first strike, offloading dozens of large reentry vehicles as they passed their targets. As they vehicles reentered the atmosphere, they in turn released their payload coming in the forms of a 'swarm' of small 5 kiloton reentry vehicles launched from Parthian satellite systems. Ground mapping radar had in the last 24 hours, picked up the location of San Franutscan Missile silos across the country, and then individually targeted hundreds of these small reentry vehicles to them, taking away retaliatory capability. All in all, these would take less than 30 seconds from their orbital launch to the time they impacted the ground, offering virtually no warning, certainly not enough to go through launch authorization procedures, their silos would be peppered by thousands of nuclear warhead equipped reentry vehicles striking a mere 30 seconds after the Shahanshah gave his authorization.
Other satellites joined in on the initial punch. The “meteor” satellites of the Shahdom posed as nuclear powered communications satellites, but a fair number in fact contained an exceptionally large nuclear warhead. Ten of these behemoths were targeted across San Franutsco, breaking up in the atmosphere and releasing a combination of 10 1 megaton and one 100 megaton nuclear weapons per re-entering satellite, designed to cover most of the land surface of San Franutsco with nuclear fireballs and annihilate all life in the ten largest cities of San Franutsco in a single bright flash of plasma, burning everything from less than 50 meters underground up into the atmosphere.
As the orbital weaponry launched, Parthia's submarines received their own authorization.
The Parthian SSBNs began to start the process of coming closer to the surface, releasing ballast tanks and bringing themselves up to 150 feet, the optimal depth for what they intended to do…
The second wave of destruction came from the 10 SSBNs closest to San Franutsco. Each carried 24 Mithra-II SLBMs, unleashed in a single massive wave of missiles pouring out of the ocean towards major military bases and airfields in San Franutsco... 240 Mithra-IIs carrying 5 MIRVs each, 1200 inbound towards San Franutsco. These would fly in low and fast, reaching their targets in less than five minutes and offloading a total of 350 kilotons of nuclear explosive per MIRV.
The third wave followed soon after the first SLBM wave. While the first was designed to devastate military infrastructure with a grand total of 1200 MIRVs containing 420,000 kilotons of explosive power, the second was more concentrated, designed to target major population centers not already hit by the massive orbital reentry vehicles. A further 240 SLBMs, containing a further 1200 nuclear-equipped MIRVs were targeted upon San Franutscan population centers, with the capital receiving no fewer than 10 nuclear missiles- containing 50 MIRVs, or 17,500 kilotons of nuclear explosive power. These would devastate the government’s ability to respond effectively, hitting within seven minutes of the Shah's authorization.
At this point, 2000 megatons of nuclear explosive had been delivered… and it would only be the beginning. Retaliation, if it came, would likely be focused on nations that had previously declared their hostile intentions. The Shahdom of Parthia had launched a bolt out of the blue, and of course, never gave an iota of warning or any real evidence it had been the Parthians behind the attack. If they still had retaliatory capacity, they'd likely use it against their declared enemies, not the Shahdom who had stayed entirely quiet...
Despite the fact that the initial bombardment was estimated by planners to be capable of killing around 90% of San Franutsco's 622 million people, Parthian military planners wanted to ensure total annihilation of the country from the face of the Earth, obliterating both the country and any remaing chance of retaliation.
The fourth wave would be the one that would make Parthia culpable, though only to outside observers as the Shahdom had undoubtedly destroyed San Franutscan search radars in the initial waves of nuclear strikes. Consisting of 350 Zurvan ICBMs, these silo based monstrosities fired from bases in mountain regions of Northern Parthia and carried no fewer than 10 MIRVs each, with each and every MIRV holding roughly 1 megaton of explosive potential. They would take 25 minutes to reach their targets, raining down a further 3500 MIRVs on San Franutsco, containing a total of 3500 megatons of nuclear weaponry.
The fifth wave fired only a few minutes after the previous one. A wholly unecessary, yet utterly devestating finale to the chaos of the hour that Parthia had unleashed on San Franutsco consisted of 20 ICBMs fired from other points in Parthia. These lacked multiple reentry vehicles, instead, each carried only a single 500 megaton warhead, designed to utterly cover the land surface of San Franustsco in massive nuclear fireballs extending out 120 km in diameter, cooking the very earth down to 100 meters underground and roasting anyone who had up to this point survived absolute nuclear annihilation.
By the time the ICBMs actually would arrive, there would probably be very little to hit. Parthia had unleashed almost 6 gigatons of nuclear weaponry on San Franutsco in less than 1 hour in four waves, and 10 further gigatons in the last wave, more than enough to completely melt the surface into glass and render it utterly uninhabitable and irradiated for decades. It was probable that almost nothing in San Franutsco was left alive once the last MIRVs fell, everything would be wiped out in a single, traumatic hour of hell.
Banning religion, when the Shahdom of Parthia wanted to stop it, would now hold it's own cost, 622 million people evaporated in plasma clouds of nuclear fireballs.
