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91 come... Like a bitter venom of the gods, from the west it had come.” That the cause of the Evil Wind was the nuclear “up- heaval” back in and near the Sinai peninsula was made clear when the texts asserted that the gods knew its source and cause—a blast, an explosion: An evil blast heralded the baleful storm, An evil blast was its forerunner. Mighty offspring, valiant sons, were the heralds of the pestilence. The authors of the lamentation texts, the gods themselves, left us a vivid record of what had taken place. As soon as the Awesome Weapons were launched from the skies by Ninurta and Nergal, “they spread awesome rays, scorching every- thing like fire.” The resulting storm “in a flash of lightning was created.” A “dense cloud that brings doom’”—a nuclear “mushroom’—then rose to the sky, followed by “rushing wind gusts . . . a tempest that scorches the heavens.” It was a day not to be forgotten: On that day, When heaven was crushed and the Earth was smitten, its face obliterated by the maelstrom— When the skies were darkened and covered as with a shadow— On that day the Evil Wind was born. The various texts kept attributing the venomous maelstrom to the explosion at the “place where the gods ascend and de- scend”—to the obliteration of the spaceport, rather than to the destruction of the “sinning cities.” It was there, “in the midst of the mountains,” that the nuclear mushroom cloud arose in a brilliant flash—and it was from there that the pre- vailing winds, coming from the Mediterranean Sea, carried the poisonous nuclear cloud eastward, toward Sumer, and Gone with the Wind