During the speech to the people, the first rockets had already risen from their scattered launching sites and were soaring at ten, fifteen, twenty miles per second over continents and oceans. The enemy was not unprepared; his immensely complex and expensive systems of warning and defense, radar-eyed, electric-nerved and robot-brained, were fully on. But that defense setup, which laced a whole nation and concentrated bristlingly over the great cities, was designed primarily to detect, deflect and destroy projectiles with atomic warheads, which must approach within a few miles of their targets to do damage. The bombardment rockets of the Diktatura burst quietly high in the stratosphere, before very many of them were met and annihilated by the interceptor barrage. Their cargoes dispersed eart
