|
|
|
 |
FreeRepublic , LLC PO BOX 9771 FRESNO, CA 93794
|
|
It is in the breaking news sidebar! |
|
Posted on 10/06/2003 10:35:26 PM PDT by the_greatest_country_ever
The Last Nuclear Moment By AVNER COHEN
Since the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, the world has come to the nuclear brink only twice. The first, and better known, was the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. The second, and much less discussed, occurred in the early days of the Yom Kippur war, which began 30 years ago today.
The shock Israelis felt at the Egyptian-Syrian surprise attack on Oct. 6, 1973, can best be compared to that felt by Americans after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Israel was caught totally unprepared: the government had assumed that its intelligence services would be able to alert it at least 48 hours before any invasion.
Yet, while Israeli intelligence had detailed knowledge of Egyptian and Syrian war plans, and Prime Minister Golda Meir had even been secretly warned of an imminent war by King Hussein of Jordan on Sept. 25, the information was not translated into military preparedness. This colossal failure — due to a combination of arrogance, self-deception and misperception — is part of Golda Meir's legacy.
Only in the early morning of Oct. 6 did the Israeli leadership finally understand that it was facing a full-scale attack by Egypt and Syria that very evening. (And even then they had the estimated time of the attack wrong; the war actually started at 2 p.m.) By the next morning, the Egyptian Army had crossed the Suez Canal and columns of Syrian tanks had penetrated deep into the Golan Heights. Hundreds of Israeli soldiers had died in a heroic but hopeless effort to save small, isolated strongholds along Israel's borders.
The hope was that with the arrival of Israel's reserve troops, the military situation would turn around. While this happened to some extent on the Syrian front, things were still a disaster at the Suez. Israel's first attempted counterattack on Oct. 8 was a miserable failure. At the end of that day, Defense Minister Moshe Dayan was heard murmuring about "the end of the Third Kingdom." The commander of the air force, Gen. Benny Peled, warned that with the rate of losses his forces were enduring, within a week Israel might no longer have any effective air power. It was arguably the darkest day in the history of the Israeli Army.
It was in the early hours of Oct. 9 that senior Israeli military leaders brought up the idea of using Israel's doomsday weapons. By that time Israel had lost some 50 combat planes and more than 500 tanks — 400 on the Egyptian battlefield alone. According to a new book by the Israeli journalist Ronen Bergman, when the prime minister's top military aide heard those ideas, he begged the army's deputy chief of staff, tears in his eyes, "You must save the people of Israel from these madmen."
Later that morning, at the end of a somber briefing before the war cabinet, Mr. Dayan raised the nuclear option with the prime minister. No detailed record has surfaced as to what exactly Mr. Dayan proposed, but we know he gave an overall assessment that Israel was fast approaching the point of "last resort." And certainly Mr. Dayan wanted the United States to take notice that things had reached such a point. That he meant using nuclear weapons (albeit in coded language, as at the time nobody dared call them by name) was confirmed in an interview last week by Naftali Lavie, who was Mr. Dayan's spokesman during the war.
This set the stage for a moment that defined Golda Meir's other legacy, her nuclear legacy. Supported by other members of her war cabinet — notably the ministers Israel Galili and Yigal Allon — she refused to concede to Mr. Dayan's gloom and doom rhetoric. Her idea, instead, was to fly secretly to Washington and, as Henry Kissinger later wrote, "for an hour plead with President Nixon." Mr. Kissinger flatly rejected that idea, explaining such a rushed visit "could reflect only either hysteria or blackmail." By that time, American intelligence had signs that Israel had put its Jericho missiles, which could be fitted with nuclear warheads, on high alert (the Israelis had done so in an easily detectible way, probably to sway the Americans into preventive action).
Mr. Kissinger instead started to arrange air supply to Israel, and within three days a tremendous United States airlift to Israel was in action. The tide was turned. By Oct. 21 the Israelis were within 20 miles of Damascus and had crossed the Suez Canal, encircling the Egyptian Third Army. A permanent cease-fire was established within a few days.
Like John F. Kennedy a decade earlier, Golda Meir had stared into the nuclear abyss and found a path back to sanity. Mrs. Meir's decision not to accept Mr. Dayan's pessimism not only avoided a nuclear catastrophe, it demonstrated to the world that Israel was a responsible and trusted nuclear custodian.
Ultimately, Mrs. Meir's nuclear legacy goes far beyond those days in October 1973. Her prudence contributed significantly to the creation of the nuclear taboo — the recognition that nuclear weapons are not like any other weapons humanity has ever invented; that under virtually any circumstances they must never be used.
In this sense, her legacy is as relevant today as it was 30 years ago.
|
|
|
|
|
FreeRepublic , LLC PO BOX 9771 FRESNO, CA 93794
|
|
It is in the breaking news sidebar! |
|
Ah, how quickly the writers at the New York Times forget...that India and Pakistan went to the brink of nuclear war two years ago.
Similar to the Stalin's denial prior to Barbarosa. Soviet spy Richard Sorge knew all about the plans for the German invasion of the Soviet Union from his espionage in Tokyo, but Stalin refused to believe him.
Stalin was being besieged from every conceivable allied governmental source even from his very own intelligence gathering networks warning him about Hitler's inevitable attack,the most emphatic of all from Great Britain and to which in every case he dismissed out-of-hand.
Stalin believed that all the various reports of an imminent German invasion were all part of the same desperate allied plot towards convincing him to open a second front on Nazi Germany. He even steafastedly refused to fortify his troops on the German-Soviet border so as not to give Hitler the slightest pretext for invasion.
If only they'd finished the job when they had the chance ..... :(
I don't see anything in this article that indicates nukes wouldn't have been used had the US not thown a massive amount of air support to Israel.
Yep,which is why it really gripes my cookies when I hear people constantly whining about how Israel,America etc have WMDs so why pick on Iraq?
Sooner or later people who are not "a responsible and trusted nuclear custodian" will have a nuclear weapon and will use it at the earliest available opportunity on those same folks.
"Like John F. Kennedy a decade earlier, Golda Meir had stared into the nuclear abyss and found a path back to sanity"
No doubt there are certain folks who would stare into the nuclear abyss and grin from ear to ear.It seems only a matter of time before we have more "nuclear moments".
good read,thanks
God bless
I'm not sure you were meant to.The point I think is that they were willing to try whatever it took in order not to use them.I expect that they probably would have used them had not American support been forthcoming.
There are some folks who would actively pursue the option of using a nuclear weapon regardless of what other options they had.It would be their first choice.
The airlift was primarily supplied from NATO stocks since these were the closest, and there was great fear that the Soviets would take advantage of NATO's depleted tanks, ammo and other things to expand a war which they no doubt had a hand in since Egypt and Syria were Soviet clients...
This is the only time this ever happened, and the only time live rounds were issued other then on our hard sites. It was very strange being in the German woods wondering what was going on in the middle east.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.