Middle East, 1973

The Arab-Israeli war of October 1973 produced several serious nuclear danger points, including the most explicitly nuclear, and most bizarre. superpower confrontation since 1962. The war began on October 6, that year a holy day for both Muslims and Jews, when Egyptian and Syrian units attacked Israeli forces stationed on territories captured by Israel in the 1967 war.^[84] Peter Pry writes that "the decision to launch the October War was evidently based on a miscalculation that nearly resulted in a nuclear catastrophe. Israel apparently was prepared to retaliate with atomic force." In 1976 Time magazine reported:

At the start of the 1973 October War … the Egyptians had repulsed the first Israeli counterattacks along the Suez Canal, causing heavy casualties, and Israeli forces on the Golan Heights were retreating in the face of a massive Syrian tank assault. At 10 p.m. on October 8, the Israeli Commander on the northern front, Major General Yitzhak Hoffi, told his superior: "I am not sure that we can hold out much longer." After midnight, Defense Minister Moshe Dayan solemnly warned Premier Golda Meir: "This is the end of the third temple." Mrs. Meir thereupon gave Dayan permission to activate Israel's Doomsday weapons. As each bomb was assembled, it was rushed off to waiting air force units. Before any triggers were set, however, the battle on both fronts turned to Israel's favor.^[85]

According to Amos Perlmutter, Michael Handel, and Uri Bar-Joseph as well, "It seems that a decision to consider the use of a nuclear threat was made by Israel's top establishment officials. There are indications that Dayan gave an order secretly to put in combat readiness, for the first time, Israeli-made Jericho SS missiles, carrying nuclear warheads, as well as Kfir and Phantom bomber fighters equipped with nuclear devices. Altogether, 13 Israeli-made nuclear weapons were put on alert." Leonard Spector reports that "former and current U.S. officials" he interviewed recently "confirmed that Israel secretly readied nuclear weapons for possible use at this time."^[86]

During the fighting, each superpower supplied its allies with military equipment and "alternated between urging a prompt cease-fire and

using delaying tactics to postpone one, depending on the tide of the battle and estimates of the course of further hostilities."^[87] BY October 11 the Israelis were pushing deep into Syria, and Defense Minister Moshe Dayan publicly said he was going all the way to Damascus.

Soviet Ambassador Dobrynin told Kissinger the obvious: that the USSR "could not be indifferent to threats to Damascus" and that "matters might get out of hand." In his memoirs, Kissinger (who appears to have been in charge, with Nixon distracted by domestic events) reflects at this point on the merits of "intransigence in the face of menace"—even as the Soviets were complaining about Russian casualties in Israeli attacks on civilian targets in Syria and Egypt and on a Soviet merchant ship. Dobrynin brought a message to Kissinger warning: "The Soviet Union will of course take measures which it will deem necessary to defend its ships and other means of transportation."^[88] On the very day that Congress passed the War Powers Act, intended to restrict executive authority for unilateral war making, Kissinger told Dobrynin that the United States would intervene militarily if the Soviets did.

Soviet and American warships were, as Kissinger lightly puts it, "milling around" together and, as in previous crises, could have engaged each other through accident or miscalculation. The chief of naval operations, Admiral Zumwalt, later wrote, "I doubt that major units of the U.S. Navy were ever in a tenser situation since World War II ended than the Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean was for … [that] week." Though both sides took care to avoid naval violence, potentially dangerous incidents did occur. "There were instances of Soviet ships training their guns on U.S. ships, shining searchlights on U.S. ships at night, firing flares near U.S. patrol aircraft, and maneuvering close to U.S. ships," all of which "caused concern in the U.S. units involved." On October 25 U.S. "aircraft detected two small, high-speed surface craft approaching the [U.S. carrier] Independence task group. The group assumed a defensive posture, but fortunately the craft were identified as Israeli before stronger action became necessary." For the first time in a superpower crisis, Soviet ships also took actions that "had an immediate connection with the war" in progress and thus risked coming under attack by Israeli forces. They evacuated Soviet personnel from Egyptian and Syrian ports, maintained intelligence ships near the war zone, provided protection for the Soviet sealift and airlift of military cargo to Arab states, and evidently even used regular Soviet Navy ships to move some supplies. The Israelis did not challenge Soviet warships, despite their important role in keeping the Arab states equipped to fight. But the

Israelis did bomb a Soviet cultural center in Damascus as well as Soviet transport aircraft in Syria, and they sank a Soviet merchant ship in the port of Tartus, leading the Soviets to warn of "grave consequences for Israel itself."^[89]

Kissinger told Alexander Haig that it might soon be time to mount an all-out airlift to Israel "no matter what the risk of confrontation." As cease-fire efforts were breaking down, he told the British, "I think developments now are going to drive us towards a confrontation." He reflects in his memoirs that "once a stalemate had become apparent, either by Soviet design or confusion, we moved decisively, even brutally, to break it." And he remarked to Brent Scowcroft, "Since we are going to be in a confrontation we should go all-out."^[90] Ironically, in the midst of the raging Middle Eastern war and tense superpower standoff, and with a major nuclear crisis attributable mostly to Kissinger only days away, the secretary of state was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize on October 16.

The following day Brezhnev informed Washington that he had no interest in a direct showdown. On October 21 in Moscow, Kissinger and Brezhnev negotiated a cease-fire arrangement (the day after the "Saturday Night Massacre" in Washington, when Nixon fired Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox, and Attorney General Elliot Richardson and Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus resigned in protest during the Watergate affair). Each superpower then sought the acquiescence of its client—a process that nearly led to disaster.

The Soviets gained Sadat's approval of the plan "only after Brezhnev assured him that, if necessary, the U.S.S.R. would act unilaterally to ensure Israel's observance of the cease-fire." Kissinger flew directly to Israel. "About halfway to Tel Aviv," he writes, "it dawned on me that we were heading into a war zone." Perhaps this insight was mostly of personal significance, or perhaps Kissinger realized that the downing of the U.S. secretary of state's plane might raise the kind of wider danger normally found only in spine-tingling adventure novels. In any case, he decided that "it might be a good idea to arrange some protection by aircraft from the US Sixth Fleet," a "large number" of which escorted him from Cyprus all the way to Tel Aviv. Evidently, he did not consider that this idea might have dangers of its own.^[91]

Kissinger secured Israeli acceptance of the cease-fire despite "grumbles about how Egypt's Third Army might have been fully encircled and destroyed in another three days of fighting." In Years of Upheaval he openly admits: "I had indicated that I would understand if there was a

few hours 'slippage' in the cease-fire deadline while I was flying home." That is, he gave the Israelis permission to continue attacking the Third Army after the cease-fire went into effect, violating the solemn assurances he had just given the Soviets. Furthermore, "informed Israeli accounts make clear that Kissinger was even more explicit, commenting, for example, 'Well, in Vietnam the cease-fire didn't go into effect at the exact time that was agreed on.' Moreover, he intentionally scotched efforts to provide U.N. supervision for the cease-fire, knowing that the Israelis had been pressing for more time to destroy the Egyptian Army."^[92]

As Israel continued "an offensive of critical significance," the crisis ignited again in a far more ominous way. The Soviets realized that Kissinger had double-crossed them, and they had made a fateful promise to Sadat. Brezhnev complained urgently over the hot line. Sadat took the extraordinary step of requesting American intervention to stop the Israelis, who finally did offer to stop, but only after achieving their objective: cutting off the Third Army and thereby posing "a potential threat to Cairo itself." As Kissinger writes: "Starving the Third Army out would be a slower process than destroying it militarily. But it would lead to the same result and was almost certain to bring about a confrontation with the Soviets. They could not possibly hold still while a cease-fire they had cosponsored was turned into a trap for a client state." Nevertheless, another cease-fire on this basis went into effect on October 24.^[93] "

Fighting broke out again almost immediately, including an Israeli attack on an Egyptian naval base in the city of Suez. Sadat repeated his plea for American action to rein in Israel. The Soviets publicly warned Israel of the "gravest consequences" if it did not desist. Later that day, a desperate Sadat requested joint superpower intervention to enforce the cease-fire, an idea that the Soviets said they would bring to the U.N. Security Council. Kissinger writes, "We were determined to resist by force if necessary the introduction of Soviet troops into the Middle East regardless of the pretext under which they arrived"—the "pretext" being a request by President Sadat for both Soviet and U.S. troops to station themselves on sovereign Egyptian territory to enforce a U.N. cease-fire that the United States had helped negotiate and that a U.S. client was flagrantly violating.^[94]

By this point Nixon, enmeshed in the Watergate scandals, was evidently under enormous psychological strain and was possibly unstable. "We were," Kissinger writes, "heading into what could have become the gravest foreign policy crisis of the Nixon Presidency—because it involved

a direct confrontation of the superpowers—with a President overwhelmed by his persecution…. [He was] as agitated and emotional as I had ever heard him." Nixon even "expressed the hope that at a briefing scheduled for the next morning I [Kissinger] would tell the Congressional leadership about his central, indispensable role in managing the Mideast crisis. He had already urged me to call some Senators to make this pitch—a symptom of the extremity in which this proud man felt himself." Kissinger quotes him as saying, in reference to his domestic critics: "They are doing it because of their desire to kill the President. And they may succeed. I may physically die."^[95]

The White House told Sadat, "Should the two great nuclear powers be called upon to provide forces, it would introduce an extremely dangerous potential for great-power rivalry in the area." Over the telephone, Dobrynin told Kissinger that the Soviets might introduce the U.N. resolution if the nonaligned countries did not. Kissinger writes: "I told him not to push us to the extreme. We would not accept Soviet troops in any guise. Dobrynin replied that in Moscow, 'they have become so angry, they want troops."'^[96]

Brezhnev wrote a letter supporting joint intervention to enforce the cease-fire and added, "I will say it straight that if you find it impossible to act jointly with us in this matter, we should be faced with the necessity urgently to consider the question of taking appropriate steps unilaterally." Kissinger called the full message "one of the most serious challenges to an American President"; Senator Fulbright called it "urgent"; Senator Jackson called it "brutal, rough."^[97]

American intelligence picked up what one analyst terms "ambiguous, but alarming" evidence of Soviet preparations for intervention—possibly to deal with the situation on the Suez, but perhaps simply to save Syria in case the Israelis drove into Damascus as threatened.^[98] Reportedly, the Soviets put their air force and all seven of their airborne divisions (totaling only about fifty thousand men) on alert, established an airborne command post, and prepared to move their forces.^[99] Seven Soviet amphibious assault vessels and two helicopter carriers arrived in the Mediterranean, putting the Soviet fleet there at the "unprecedented" level of eighty-five ships. American intelligence reportedly noted unusual Soviet activities and communications that appeared to indicate an imminent major operation. By noon on October 24, as Blechman and Hart recount, "a large portion of the Soviet airlift fleet could not be located by U.S. intelligence systems, electronic intercepts indicated that Soviet flight plans for the next day were being changed, and certain

'communications nets' showed a surge in activity, indicating that a major change in Soviet operations could be expected soon."^[100]

Journalist Elizabeth Drew calls the following hours "Strangelove Day." Kissinger, evidently in collaboration with Alexander Haig, decided not to wake the president to inform him of Brezhnev's crucial letter. Instead Kissinger called an urgent meeting of the Washington Special Action Group, which in Nixon's absence, ordered American military forces worldwide, both conventional and nuclear, to go to a Defcon III alert—the highest since the Cuban missile crisis—around midnight that night. Defcon V is normal peacetime status, though some forces, such as the Strategic Air Command, were routinely kept at Defcon IV. As Kissinger explains, "Defcon I is war. Defcon II is a condition in which attack is imminent. Defcon III … is in practice the highest state of readiness for essentially peacetime conditions."^[101]

Yet "something more was necessary." Sixty B-52 nuclear bombers moved from their Guam base to the United States and joined the Strategic Air Command alert of American strategic nuclear forces to "give the Soviets another indication that we were assembling our forces for a showdown." Several aircraft carriers steamed toward the conflict zone, and the 82d Airborne, with fifteen thousand troops, was ordered to be "ready to move" by 6:00 A.M. the next morning. According to one participant, "we decided to alert everything but the kitchen sink." ("Alaska and Panama were the kitchen sink.") The president of the United States "knew nothing about the alert until it appeared in the morning newspapers."^[102]

Following the pattern described above, the White House tried to keep the alert secret, ordering that the Defcon III command be implemented "with minimum public notice." The secrecy had nothing to do with security. The United States wanted the Soviets to become aware of the alert almost immediately. It was the American people the White House wanted to keep in the dark. Officials were afraid of awakening the inconvenient "universal fear" of war that had so bothered Nixon in the 1970 Cuban crisis—afraid, as Blechman and Hart put it, of "engendering a serious public debate in the United States." It is safe to assume that even more "universal fear" would have surfaced had the public known of the ideas Kissinger was entertaining during the crisis, revealed in the remark at this point in his memoirs that "two could play chicken."^[103]

In the midst of preparations for war on both sides, Kissinger refused Dobrynin's "repeated" attempts to communicate, again throwing aside

one of the great lessons supposedly learned in 1962: the need for timely superpower contact to avoid misunderstandings during crises. Kissinger also told the Israelis that the United States would not pressure them to return to the cease-fire line originally agreed on—even though the continued Israeli attack on the surrounded Third Army, in clear violation of the U.S.-brokered agreement, was the reason for the nuclear crisis.^[104]

Finally, a message to Brezhnev, drafted at the meeting but evidently sent in Nixon's name while the president slept,^[105] stated bluntly that "we must view your suggestion of unilateral action as a matter of the gravest concern, involving incalculable consequences." Ironically, the message made an oblique reference to the Agreement on the Prevention of Nuclear War, signed that very year, and then ominously repeated: "We could in no event accept unilateral action…. As I stated above, such action would produce incalculable consequences which would be in the interest of neither of our countries and which would end all we have striven so hard to achieve." At noon the next day, Kissinger reemphasized the nuclear danger during a press conference, noting the "very special responsibility" of the superpowers, since "we possess, each of us, nuclear arsenals capable of annihilating humanity. We, both of us, have a special duty to see to it that confrontations are kept within bounds that do not threaten civilized life."^[106]

Though it is far from clear that the alert played a major role, the Israelis soon relaxed their attacks on the Third Army, the Egyptians duly withdrew their request for superpower troops, and the Soviets stopped pushing for bilateral superpower intervention. Brezhnev told the White House that he would send in only an observer team. The timing was tight: "One Soviet aircraft touched down at the Cairo West airfield in the early morning hours [of the 25th], but returned home almost immediately. It was as if this aircraft, containing the lead element of the interventionary force, had been caught en route when the Kremlin decided the risk was too great and reversed course."^[107]

But the Israelis would not fall back to the original cease-fire line, and, "determined to starve out the Third Army," they blocked food, water, and medical supplies. Kissinger recognized that eventually "what [would] happen [was] another maximum Soviet demand." Yet he promised the Israelis: "You won't be pressured one second before [the starvation of the Third Army] becomes inevitable." Finally, almost two full days after the nuclear alert, Kissinger contacted the Israelis ("on behalf of Nixon. I do not remember checking in advance with the President")

and insisted that they allow humanitarian supplies to reach the trapped Egyptian Army, a step that evidently did not occur for two more days, when a single convoy was given access.^[108]

Meanwhile, in a now familiar pattern, superpower naval forces continued aggressive operations against each other in the tense aftermath of the nuclear alert, even after it "became clear that the new cease-fire … would hold." For instance, Soviet anticarrier exercises—"the Soviet Navy's equivalent of training its guns on the U.S. fleet" and "the most intense signal the Soviets had ever transmitted with their naval forces in a crisis"—went on until November 3.^[109]

There is no way to know just how close to war the superpowers came that weekend. But plausible scenarios could have led to it. As Blechman and Hart ask:

What if the Soviets had decided to intervene in a more direct way in the war? Or what if the Israelis, fearing that such a direct intervention might occur, chose to attack Soviet transports as they entered the war zone? (Note that Israeli aircraft deliberately provoked a battle with Soviet aircraft in 1970, when Soviet air defense units were deployed in Egypt [during the War of Attrition crisis, discussed earlier].) Or what if the Soviets, believing that the United States would interfere with Soviet transports during their vulnerable landing period, chose to attack the U.S. Sixth Fleet preemptively, perhaps along with Israeli Air Force facilities? What then? Where would the conflict have ended?

As these authors conclude from the 1973 record, "once the threshold of active military involvement is crossed, finding a stopping point becomes far from easy. By raising the specter of nuclear war at the onset of the confrontation, the United States made more difficult the termination of any escalatory process which might have ensued short of the use of nuclear weapons."^[110]

In a revealing aftermath to the 1973 crisis, in the spring of 1974, Kissinger reportedly "asked the JCS [Joint Chiefs of Staff] to devise a limited nuclear option that the President might order in the hypothetical case of a Soviet invasion of Iran." Kissinger, as we saw, was frustrated about the lack of a limited nuclear war plan in the 1970 Jordanian crisis. Likewise, he must have wondered what he would have done next in 1973 if, during the massive U.S. nuclear alert, Israel had continued to destroy the Third Army and the Soviets had actually intervened. "The JCS solution was to fire nearly 200 nuclear weapons at military targets, air bases, bivouacs and so forth—in the southern region of the U.S.S.R. near the Iranian border." Not at all pleased, Kissinger responded, "Are

you out of your minds? This is a limited option?" Sent back to the drawing board, the generals returned in a few weeks and suggested the use of three nuclear weapons to destroy two roads leading from the USSR to Iran. This time Kissinger asked, "What kind of nuclear attack is this?" Apparently he judged it a puny act from which Brezhnev would conclude that the president was "chicken."^[111]