The majority of narratives about the October 1973 Arab-Israeli War stress that air power did not play a dominant role. The deployment of strong, well-integrated air defenses by Egypt and Syria, that caused heavy losses to the Israeli air force early during that conflict, not only spoiled Israel's prewar planning, but prevented it from providing support for Israeli ground forces too. A cross-examination of interviews with dozens of Egyptian participants in that conflict, contemporary reporting in the media, and also intelligence reports, offers an entirely different picture. Accordingly, for much of that war, the Israelis flew heavy air strikes on Port Said, on the northern entry to the Suez Canal. Furthermore, they repeatedly attacked two major Egyptian air bases in the Nile Delta - el-Mansourah and Tanta - in turn causing some of the biggest air battles of this war. Indeed, in Egypt, the response to these attacks reached the level of legend: the supposed repelling of an Israeli air strike on el-Mansourah, on 14 October 1973, prompted Cairo to declare not only a massive victory, but also that date for the day of its air force. However, the actual reasons for Israeli air strikes on Port Said, el-Mansourah and Tanta remain unclear to this day: there are no Israeli publications offering a sensible explanation, and there are no Egyptian publications explaining the reasoning. Only a cross-examination of additional reporting provides a possible solution: el-Mansourah was also the base of the only Egyptian unit equipped with R-17E ballistic missiles, known as the SS-1 Scud in the West. As of October 1973, these missiles were the only weapon in Egyptian hands capable of reaching central Israel - and that only if fired from the area around Port Said. While apparently unimportant in the overall context, this fact gains immensely in importance considering reports from the US intelligence services about the possible deployment of Soviet nuclear warheads to Egypt in October 1973. Discussing all the available information, strategy, tactics, equipment and related combat operations of both sides, '1973: the First Nuclear War' provides an in-depth insight into the Israeli efforts to prevent the deployment of Egyptian Scud missiles - whether armed with Soviet nuclear warheads or not - in the Port Said area: an effort that dictated a lengthy segment of the application of air power during the October 1973 Arab-Israeli war, and resulted in some of the most spectacular air-to-air and air-to-ground battles of that conflict. Illustrated by over 100 photographs, a dozen maps and 18 color profiles, this book thus offers an entirely new thesis about crucial, but previously unknown factors that determined the flow of the aerial warfare in October 1973.
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists is the premier public resource on scientific and technological developments that impact global security. Founded by Manhattan Project Scientists, the Bulletin's iconic "Doomsday Clock" stimulates solutions for a safer world.
This monograph analyzes military escalation and intrawar deterrence by examining two key wars where these concepts became especially relevant-the 1973 Arab-Israeli War and the 1991 Gulf War against Iraq. Intrawar deterrence is defined as the effort to control substantial military escalation during an ongoing war through the threat of large-scale and usually nuclear retaliation should the adversary escalate a conflict beyond a particularly important threshold. The deep contrasts between the 1973 and 1991 dangers of escalation underscore the range of problems that can occur in these types of circumstances. In the first case, this monograph relies upon an extensive body of openly available scholarship and investigative reporting on the 1973 War to discuss the potential for Israeli nuclear weapons use during that conflict. Although Israel is not a fully declared nuclear power, virtually all serious academic analysis both in and outside of that country assumes that there has been a strong Israeli nuclear weapons program for decades. Most major studies of the 1973 war suggest that Israel had or probably had some sort of nuclear option that it could have gone forward with in the event of an existential threat. Broad "hints" by the Israeli leadership, as well as their ongoing spending on nuclear research and nuclear-capable missile delivery systems, tend to support this. The work has proceeded on the assumption that the vast majority of scholarship about Israeli possession of a nuclear option during this conflict is correct, and that strong evidence included in this scholarship (which will be recounted here) suggests that Israel probably had a nuclear weapons option in 1973. In the very unlikely case that it did not, the Israelis probably had a different weapons of mass destruction (WMD) option that it could have used in conjunction with systems such as the Jericho I missile. This work asserts that the Egyptians and the Syrians attacked Israel in 1973 with limited goals that included the capture of important territorial objectives but did not include the destruction of the Israeli state. Waging war into Israel itself beyond the range of their integrated air defense systems was beyond the capabilities of the Arab militaries, and they knew it. The Arab leadership appeared to believe that this situation should have been obvious to the Israeli leadership, but it was not. Although some military professionals such as then- Major General Ariel Sharon immediately understood the situation, others such as Defense Minister Moshe Dayan feared an existential threat. The sudden onset of a new war that began with a series of Arab battlefield victories deeply disoriented some Israeli leaders and appears to have pushed some into serious consideration of a nuclear solution. This outcome appears to have been avoided by the ability of Israeli leaders to discuss the threat in an open, professional, and democratic fashion which in this case allowed the most reasonable voices to come to the fore. The decisive Israeli battlefield victory of October 14 eliminated the need for Israel to consider nuclear weapons use, although the Egyptians then faced defeat themselves and signaled that they also had serious options for escalating the war.
This provocative and timely work examines various scenarios in which the deployment of nuclear weapons could occur, the probable consequences of such an escalation, the likely world reactions, and the plausible policy ramifications. Rather than projecting the physical damage that would result from nuclear attacks, George H. Quester offers an exploration of the political, psychological, and social aftermath of nuclear conflict. The prospect of nuclear attack -- sixty years after atomic bombs destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki -- is difficult to confront on many levels. We may avoid the discussion for emotional reasons, for fear of generating a self-confirming hypothesis, or simply because of the general "nuclear taboo." But there are also self-denying propositions to be harnessed here: if the world gives some advance thought to how nuclear weapons might be used again, such attacks may be headed off. If the world avoids nuclear weapons use until the year 2045, it will be able to celebrate one hundred years of nuclear concord. Quester suggests that this may be achieved through the careful consideration of possible nuclear deployment scenarios and their consequences. In this insightful analysis, he provides a starting point for informed and focused reflection and preparation. -- Martha Smith-Norris
"On the afternoon of October 6, 1973, on Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar, the armies of Egypt and Syria launched major assaults against Israeli positions along the Suez Canal and in the Golan Heights. Within a day, Arab armies had seized the east bank of the Canal and substantial territory in the Heights, and had repelled Israeli air and ground counterattacks. The mood in the Israeli high command was dark, and in some places almost apocalyptic. Moshe Dayan, defense minister and national hero, went so far as to suggest that the very existence of Israel the third Temple could be in jeopardy. It has long been rumored that in this desperate context Israel alerted or somehow manipulated its nuclear forces perhaps in order to blackmail the United States into providing greater support, as one American journalist alleges, or to deter further Arab assault. If true, this would constitute one of the very few serious nuclear threats of the nuclear era. This in and of itself makes it a topic of enduring interest. But in light of the continued and perhaps growing salience of nuclear weapons and thus also their political uses in the hands of U.S. adversaries as well as allies and partners, this study is of more than antiquarian interest because, in concert with other examples drawn from crises and conflicts, it helps elucidate how nuclear weapons can affect and influence the course of politics and war. Yet there has never been a serious, in-depth study of this incident that has had access not only to key participants (both American and Israeli) and open sources, but also to the tremendous store of U.S. Government documents pertaining to the Yom Kippur War. This study is the first of this kind on this incident and represents the results of almost a year of extensive research in U.S. Government archives and in the open literature, numerous interviews with participants and experts, and the convocation of a workshop to discuss the issue."--Abstract.
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists is the premier public resource on scientific and technological developments that impact global security. Founded by Manhattan Project Scientists, the Bulletin's iconic "Doomsday Clock" stimulates solutions for a safer world.
This paper is a history of the Israeli nuclear weapons program drawn from a review of unclassified sources. Israel began its search for nuclear weapons at the inception of the state in 1948. As payment for Israeli participation in the Suez Crisis of 1956, France provided nuclear expertise and constructed a reactor complex for Israel at Dimona capable of large-scale plutonium production and reprocessing. The United States discovered the facility by 1958 and it was a subject of continual discussions between American presidents and Israeli prime ministers. Israel used delay and deception to at first keep the United States at bay, and later used the nuclear option as a bargaining chip for a consistent American conventional arms supply. After French disengagement in the early 1960s, Israel progressed on its own, including through several covert operations, to project completion. Before the 1967 Six-Day War, they felt their nuclear facility threatened and reportedly assembled several nuclear devices. By the 1973 Yom Kippur War Israel had a number of sophisticated nuclear bombs, deployed them, and considered using them. The Arabs may have limited their war aims because of their knowledge of the Israeli nuclear weapons. Israel has most probably conducted several nuclear bomb tests. They have continued to modernize and vertically proliferate and are now one of the world's larger nuclear powers. Using "bomb in the basement" nuclear opacity, Israel has been able to use its arsenal as a deterrent to the Arab world while not technically violating American nonproliferation requirements.
The Cold War offers a brief but detailed treatment of one of the most complex eras of the 20th Century. In this fully revised second edition, J.P.D. Dunbabin, drawing on international scholarship and using much new material from communist sources, describes a world in which covert operations could be as important as outright diplomacy, 'soft' power as influential as 'hard', and in which competing ideologies ruled the hearts as much as the heads of the leaders in power. Dunbabin’s account is global in scope, taking into account the importance of players beyond the superpowers, and shedding light on the proxy conflicts such as those in Africa and the Middle East that, if not caused by the continuing stalemate between the great powers, were used as weapons within it.
