We came to Canungra as most soldiers do, fully trained and fully fit. After ten weeks of recruit training in which the niceties of civilian life were belted out of us, three months of Corps training in which we learned how to be infantrymen and what appalling creatures officers were and three months playing war games with the British and Americans in North Queensland, we were pretty much the toughest fittest blokes in the nation. 

  Every morning before breakfast, we ran two miles in step wearing boots and carrying packs containing two housebricks and with rifles at the ready; we could march five miles without a break; we could run up any mountain and arrive at the top with enough air remaining in our lungs to carry out a full charge on the so-called enemy. We were fitter than any professional sportsman and a bloody lot tougher. And yet we knew that Canungra would be hard going even for us and in that we were not mistaken.

... “The PM and the President are entirely agreed. Every intelligence man all over the world who’s on our side is being put on to this operation—Operation Thunderball they’re calling it....”
    The baddies have stolen nuclear weapons to hold the world to ransom, but they reckon without the seductive powers of James Bond, as the monster-villain trying to take over the world theme strengthened and the hero character moved further and further away from the realities of the secret service, which Ian Fleming had originally set out to portray. His successors, John Le Carre and Len Deighton, would achieve his objective for him, but none of them would be able to create a character as appealing to the imagination of the time as agent 007.
    Thunderball began life as the first attempt to put James Bond on film, an original screenplay by Ian Fleming and Kevin McClory but no-one considered it worth financial backing. Think of the fortunes that got missed on that deal. Soon after, Saltzman and Broccoli bought up the options on all James Bond books and set about making Dr No, even though that far from the first book in the series. It wasn’t even the first Bond production, that being a tele-drama of Casino Royale starring Barry Nelson as an American James Bond and Peter Lorre as the villain. At that time, Fleming was obviously stuck for his next Bond idea and so converted the Thunderball screenplay into a novel, which of course was enormously successful.
    Now one of those sad souls who missed the millions was, of course, Kevin McClory, who reckoned he owned a big slab of the intellectual property, and sued Fleming. The matter was settled for a large sum of money, and it seems that part of the deal was that the rights to the Thunderball screenplay went to McClory. By then, the Saltzman/Broccoli version had been made and they gave McClory a producer credit, probably to try and pacify him. But about a decade later, McClory, poor mad thing, set off to make his own version, which was finally released starring an aging Sean Connery, as Never Say Never Again. Apart from being modernised, it is very hard to say what the difference was between the two versions.