1973 YOM KIPPUR WAR CAME CLOSE TO A NUCLEAR STRIKE BY ISRAEL

A decade after the October 1962 Cuban missile crisis, the two nuclear

superpowers (both now on par with their overwhelming overkill capability) came close once more to a military showdown in the volatile Middle East – a strategic and oil-rich region of intense and intractable local rivalries and international contention.

             The occasion was the 1973 Yom Kippur War (6-25 October) that had started off with a sudden invasion by a coalition of Arab forces against Israel. Massive incursions by the invading Egyptian and Syrian troops in the first three days of fighting had threatened the leadership in Tel Aviv with imminent defeat. Should Israel go nuclear for self-survival, how would or how could the superpowers react?

            According to online Wikipedia article, the war began when the Arab coalition launched a surprise attack on Israeli positions in Israeli-occupied territories on the day of Tom Kippur, the holiest in Judaism, during the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan. Crossing ceasefire lines, Egyptian forces entered the Sinai Peninsula, and Syrian forces the Golan Heights – both places captured by Israel in the 1967 Six-Day War.

             Both the United States and the Soviet Union started to move massive supplies to their respective allies during the war, leading to a near-confrontation between the two nuclear Goliaths.

             Although the American leaders had initially expected the Israelis to turn the tide in three or four days of hard combat, their breakthrough did not come until 14 October after decisively repulsing a strong armoured attack by 800-1,000 Egyptian tanks. The Israelis then quickly followed up with a multidivisional counter-assault on the night of 15 October. They crossed the Suez Canal on 18 October and, by the time of the UN-brokered ceasefire on 22 October (as arranged by American and Soviet diplomats), Israeli troops had come to about 100 km from Egypt’s capital city of Cairo, having cut off the Cairo-Suez road and encircled the Egyptian Third Army.

            Because of bilateral violations of the ceasefire, President Leonid Brezhnev sent a “very urgent” letter on the late evening of 24 October to President Richard Nixon, blaming Israel and calling for joint action to “compel observance of the cease-fire without delay”. The Soviet leader also threatened to “consider taking appropriate steps unilaterally” to curb Israel.

           Since this crisis occurred at the height of the Watergate scandal in Washington, Nixon was so agitated and indisposed that his closest and most senior advisers, including Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, had to decide what to do and how to respond to Brezhnev, which they judiciously managed to do in a conciliatory manner. They also asked President Anwar Sadat to drop his request for Soviet assistance, threatening that should the Soviet Union intervene, the US would do so as well.

            Luckily, the Soviet leaders remained level-headed and restrained. “It is not reasonable to become engaged in a war with the United States because of Egypt and Syria,” Premier Alexi Kosygin remarked. The KGB chief Yuri Andropov chimed in, saying “We shall not unleash the Third World War...”

           Thus, on the following morning of 25 October when Sadat wisely accepted the American suggestion not to seek Soviet assistance, the crisis passed its darkening climax to come to a peaceful and timely end.

            Then unknown to the outside world, Prime Minister Golda Meir had initially overruled a military pre-emptive strike against Syria only a few hours before the Arab assault. US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger had also rejected pre-emption.

             Also unknown to the world at large, the nuclear option (Israel’s “Holy of Holies” ) had been invoked at the early critical stage of the Yom Kippur conflict when Tel Aviv had encountered daunting military difficulties and the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) had suffered unexpectedly high losses. On 8 October an alarmed Moshe Dayan, hero of the Six-Day War, warned of Israel’s impending total defeat.

             At a cabinet meeting the next day, Dayan warned that the country was approaching a point of “last resort”. That meant pointing to the nuclear trigger.

             That night of 9 October, Golda Meir reportedly authorized the assembly of 13 20KT (84That night of 9 October, Golda Meir reportedly authorized the assembly of 13 20KT (84  TJ) tactical atomic weapons for the Jericho missiles deployed at Sdot Micha Airbase (with three squadrons of Jericho Intermediate-Range Ballistic Missiles) near Zekharia, and also for the F-4 aircraft stationed at Tel Nof Airbase near Rehovat. Those 13 IRBMs were readied for use against Egyptian and Syrian targets.

              For his 2011 book How the End Begins: The Road to a Nuclear World War III, Ron Rosenbaum interviewed Moshe Halbertal, professor, philosopher and author, Israel’s leading military ethicist and co-author of the IDF code of ethics.

              As Israel is said to be highly vulnerable to a nuclear attack with just one (megaton) or two bombs targeted against its capital city of Tel Aviv and metropolitan area (covering 300 square miles, slightly bigger in land area than Singapore), Rosenbaum wanted to know whether the possible destruction of Israel would represent a second Holocaust, another “Supreme Emergency” which would justify crossing the threshold of nuclear retaliation.

             “Yes. Sure,” Halbertal said without hesitation. Then he referred to the October 1973 Yom Kippur war.  He read somewhere that Moshe Dayan gave the order to be ready with the nukes. And the eminent military ethicist described the nuclear option as a “real dilemma”.

              With Israel on the verge of collapse, Rosenbaum asked, “Can you, at last resort, use a nuclear bomb?”

              Halbertal said: “... Now what we are speaking of here is not really pre-emption of nuclear attack. But pre-emption against loss of independence. Loss of the state. If not loss of existence itself, then a homeless people again, perhaps vulnerable to slaughter again...”

               Israel has been reported to have a nuclear arsenal of 200 or more nuclear warheads, not counting the 200KT nuclear cruise missiles and the nuclear-armed Harpoon missiles on a couple of recently acquired Dolphin-class submarines.

                As a nuclear power, Israel is enviably in the same league as Britain, China and France.        

     

                Israel has been operating a fleet of 5 submarines since the late 2000’s.

                According to a recent note posted online by military sources on October 2009: “Their presence (Israel’s five nuclear-armed subs) outside Israel’s waters is a powerful deterrent to any surprise nuclear or conventional attack, endowing Israel with an instantaneous second-strike nuclear capability...”