The Arab-Israeli war 50 years ago brought us close to nuclear Armageddon

The 1973 war began on the morning of Oct. 6, when Egypt and Syria launched a coordinated surprise attack against Israel, not unlike the attack by Hamas on Israel this weekend. The United States was caught off guard, too. “The news of the attack on Israel took us completely by surprise,” President Richard M. Nixon, who was ensnared in the Watergate scandal at the time, said later. “As recently as the day before, the CIA had reported that war in the Middle East was unlikely.”

The conflict soon became a proxy war between Egypt’s principal backer, the Soviet Union, and Israel’s patron, the United States. Things became so dire that U.S. global forces went to a Defcon 3 alert, the highest state of peacetime readiness, reflecting the risk of nuclear confrontation with the Soviets.

Paragliding fighters flew into Israel. A similar attack happened 35 years ago.

“The 1973 nuclear alert is one of the overlooked stories of the Cold War,” said James Acton, a co-director of the nuclear policy program of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He called it “probably the most dangerous moment” of the second half of the Cold War.

Fifty years later, the facts and the intelligence about Soviet actions that led Secretary of State Henry Kissinger to push for the Defcon 3 alert remain fuzzy, as does the matter of whether the alert was warranted.

“I think Kissinger’s decision to call for the Defcon alert was a very questionable move,” said military analyst and historian Michael O’Hanlon of the Brookings Institution.

“Kissinger got the situation wrong,” agreed Timothy Naftali, a research scholar at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs. “I think Kissinger panicked. He thought he had the Israelis, the Soviets and the Egyptians under control.”

The Defcon alert system was created by the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1959 to provide the U.S. military with a uniform system of progressive readiness conditions after a communications foul-up during a joint American-Canadian exercise. Five Defcon levels were established. Defcon 1 means imminent war; Defcon 5 indicates normal peacetime conditions.

A Defcon 3, or “Round House,” alert calls for the Air Force, including the strategic bomber crews and missile operators of its Strategic Air Command, to be prepared to mobilize in 15 minutes to deliver a nuclear strike.

Forgotten U-2 pilots helped end the Cuban Missile Crisis 60 years ago

The first use of the Defcon system, and the first Defcon 3 alert, took place in May 1960, during the U-2 spy plane crisis, after Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev stormed out of a Paris summit with President Dwight Eisenhower and sparked fears of an attack on the United States or Europe. The 1962 Cuban missile crisis triggered a Defcon 2. The only other Defcon 3 alert came after the terrorist attacks on the United States on Sept. 11, 2001.

But what exactly were the Soviets planning in October 1973? That was not clear. Fifty years later, it still isn’t.

A few days into the war, Kissinger — who had become secretary of state just weeks before — proposed that the United States and the U.S.S.R. jointly call for an end to the fighting and a return to the cease-fire lines established after the 1967 1967 war. Leonid Brezhnev, the volatile Soviet premier, agreed, but Egyptian President Anwar Sadat rejected the proposal. Hoping to avoid an Arab defeat, Moscow began to supply Egypt and Syria with arms. The United States responded with a massive airlift of tanks, bombs and materiel to Israel.

The Yom Kippur War now had taken on the additional dimension of a proxy war between the United States and the Soviet Union, straining the détente that had been Nixon’s greatest foreign policy achievement.

Meanwhile, the tide of the war turned irrevocably against the Arabs. On Oct. 16, Israeli forces under the command of Gen. Ariel Sharon crossed the Suez Canal and were advancing on Cairo. The war was not going any better for Egypt’s Syrian allies, as Israeli troops reached the outskirts of Damascus.

Now Sadat began to show interest in a cease-fire, leading Brezhnev to invite Kissinger to Moscow, where they quickly drew up a framework for a cessation of hostilities. Next, Kissinger flew to Tel Aviv, where the Israeli government agreed to the terms. However, when Kissinger arrived back in Washington on Oct. 23, he learned that the cease-fire had already been broken, and the Israeli Army was threatening to destroy the besieged Egyptian Army.

Still, Kissinger did not seem too perturbed. “Today there is a little flap,” he told his State Department staff that evening, adding, “The major thing to remember is that the events of the last two weeks have been on the whole a major success for the United States [and] for the policy that preceded it, because without the close relationship with the Soviet Union, this thing could have easily escalated.”

As Israeli forces continued to advance into Egyptian territory, the alarmed Soviets informed the White House that they intended to introduce a United Nations Security Council resolution calling for both the U.S.S.R. and the United States to dispatch military contingents to the Middle East battleground to enforce the cease-fire.

Things were definitely falling apart now. Kissinger made clear that the United States would veto such a resolution and would not tolerate outside military forces in the region. He saw the move as a strategy to shore up the Kremlin’s waning influence with its Arab allies while Nixon was embroiled in Watergate.

On the night of Oct. 24, the Soviet ambassador to the United States, Anatoly Dobrynin, called Kissinger to tell him that he had an urgent letter from Brezhnev.

“It was in effect an ultimatum,” Kissinger wrote later. It called for joint U.S.-Soviet enforcement of the cease-fire but threatened that if the United States did not cooperate, the U.S.S.R. would act unilaterally.

Moreover, it appeared that Moscow was already on the move. The CIA reported that the Soviet airlift of equipment had stopped that morning and that the Soviet transport planes were apparently being refitted to fly in Soviet paratroopers to impose Brezhnev’s peace.

“There was no question in my mind,” Kissinger wrote, “that we would have to reject the Soviet proposal in a manner that shocked the Soviets into abandoning the unilateral move they were threatening, and from all our information, planning.” As Nixon later wrote, “Words were not making our point — we needed action, even the action of a military alert.”

But what exactly was Brezhnev planning? U.S. intelligence had been wrong before about the Kremlin’s intentions, most famously during the Cuban missile crisis, and had also failed to predict the Arab attack.

Kissinger pointed to “ominous reports,” which we now know, thanks to the recent declassification of the President’s Daily Briefs, referred to intelligence that Moscow was transferring nuclear warheads to Egypt by sea. Kissinger was worried that the escalating crisis was about to go nuclear.

Adm. Thomas Moorer, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who was at the late-night White House meeting that produced the Defcon alert, was not sure. “I pointed out that the military indicators might lead one to believe that this was a premeditated action on the parts of the Soviets,” he wrote later.

“The U.S. intelligence community was having a hard time separating noise from signals, as is often the case for any intelligence service,” Naftali said, adding, “and Kissinger, its main consumer, was excitable.”

“Because President Nixon was preoccupied with Watergate, Kissinger had more latitude to act on his own than in previous crises,” said Harvard historian Fredrik Logevall. “Indeed, at several moments, he and [White House] Chief of Staff Alexander Haig acted without even consulting Nixon.”

The specter of Armageddon, including the still-vivid memory of the Cuban missile crisis, hung over the White House Situation Room on the night of Oct. 24. Kissinger wanted a dramatic gesture suggesting that the United States was willing to go to the brink of world war to prevent the Soviets from doing whatever they were planning to do. It was time to go to Round House. All U.S. forces worldwide were placed on Defcon 3.

“The alert was still an inadequate signal,” Martin Indyk, a former U.S. ambassador to Israel, writes in his 2021 book, “Master of the Game: Henry Kissinger and the Art of Middle East Diplomacy.” “Channeling his inner Nixon, Kissinger told the group that ‘when you decide to use force you must use plenty of it.’”

To ensure Moscow got the hint, Kissinger also decided to transfer two U.S. aircraft carrier task forces to the Mediterranean and recalled 75 nuclear-armed B-52 bombers from Guam to the continental United States.

“I believe Kissinger panicked, blaming Nixon’s Watergate problems and not his own management of the Israelis, who had clearly violated the cease-fire, whatever the Egyptians were up to,” Naftali said. “He thought the only way to show toughness was to send as strong a message as President Kennedy had sent in the Cuban missile crisis, although the geopolitical situations were not equivalent.”

One major difference was that the American populace was aware of the missile crisis. After all, President John F. Kennedy had called Moscow’s nuclear bluff on national television. The country was largely in the dark about the Defcon alert.

Meanwhile, the American military scrambled into action. Steve Winkle, a navigator on one of the activated B-52s in Guam, remembered getting a phone call telling troops to report to the briefing room. “Then the lights went out and we heard ‘SAC is in Defcon 3,’” he told Air & Space magazine in 2014, referring to the Strategic Air Command. “The room went totally silent.”

Robert Rubel, the pilot of a Naval Air Forces A-7 Corsair, was already aloft above the Mediterranean, checking the activity of the Soviet fleet.

“Our job was to keep an eye on the decks,” Rubel, who later became dean of the Naval Warfare Center at the Naval War College, told Air & Space magazine in 2014. “If we saw the smoke of a missile launch, we’d send a Zippo report back, as in, ‘Hey, World War III is on.’ The idea was that we’d get that report out before we died.”

In case that happened, Rubel and his fellow A-7 pilots planned to descend on the enemy ships and unleash their 500-pound bombs “like [U.S. Navy aviator Wade] McClusky divebombing the Japanese carriers at Midway.”

Fortunately, World War III was not on.

“All of these actions culminated in the most desirable response possible from the American perspective,” the Nixon Foundation’s postmortem smugly reports. “The Soviets were utterly shocked by the U.S.’s escalated, yet calculated response and Sadat did indeed rescind his request for Soviet troops. That same day, October 25, UN resolution 340 was approved, ending the war.”

True – but the question remains: Was the alert justified?

Naftali thinks not, judging by all the evidence now available. “Brezhnev decided the best response was to ignore it,” he said, “since the Soviets never planned to intervene.”

Acton of the Carnegie Endowment agreed that some of the intelligence, including the report about the Soviet freighter supposedly carrying nukes to Egypt, was a mirage, “not least because the CIA backed away from the claim within days of making it.”

Fifty years later, the world watches in horror as the sequel to the first Yom Kippur War plays itself out. Although tensions between Washington and Moscow have once again risen in recent years, there appears to be little likelihood of their nuclear forces going to the brink again — at least not over Israel.

But of course there is always the possibility that the two superpowers can get their signals wrong, as they did in 1973.

Gordon F. Sander is a journalist and historian who frequently writes about military history. His latest book, “The Note Crisis: Kekkonen, Kennedy, Khrushchev and the Cold War,” will be published by Cornell University Press in 2024.