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FRANCE: Nuclear Ransom

A chiller about blackmail

Dec. 13. A package containing specifications for the construction of a hydrogen bomb has just been delivered to the White House, together with a cassette-recorded message from Libyan President Muammar Gaddafi. With rising horror, the mansion's current resident, a decent but untested Southerner, listens to the ultimatum on the tape: If the U.S. does not make Israel withdraw from the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem within 36 hours, a nuclear device concealed in New York City will be detonated by satellite command.

The scene, of course, is fiction....

Quotes of the Day »

RAY KELLY, New York City Police Commissioner, on the arrest of a New Jersey man in one of the nation's most baffling missing-children cases, the disappearance more than three decades ago of 6-year-old Etan Patz.
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