In the early days of the Yom Kippur war of 1973 and incident occurred which tells a great deal about how the game of nuclear diplomacy is played. The sudden and successful attack by Egyptian troops under the command of Gen. Saaduddin Shazli not only put the Egyptians back on the Sinai Peninsula but also unveiled a new generation of Soviet weapons and tactics to match. At the northern end of Israel a Syrian armored attack under Gen. Mustafa Tlas was threatening to push the surprised Israelis down the slopes of the Golan Heights.
In just the first three days of the conflict the highly regarded Israeli Air Force lost over forty fighter aircraft and a huge number of tanks to the new generation of Soviet anti-aircraft and anti-tank missiles. The panicked Israelis turned to the USA for assistance but found them reluctant. Both, President Richard Nixon and his National Security Advisor, Henry Kissinger, till then were of the opinion that a degree of battlefield reversal was needed to get an increasingly intransigent Israel to the conference table. Caught, in a manner of speaking, between the devil and the deep sea, the Israelis then played their nuclear card.
US surveillance satellites and high-flying reconnaissance aircraft suddenly began to pick up unusually heightened activity around the Israel's nuclear facility at Dimona in the Negev desert. The Israeli Defense Minister, Moshe Dayan, while imploring Kissinger to start the airlift of urgently needed weapons and military technical assistance told him about how desperate their situation actually was and had already hinted that Israel might have to resort to nuclear weapons to halt the Arab armies. The alarmed Americans sent a SR-71 Blackbird reconnaissance aircraft fitted with special sensors to detect nuclear material over Dimona. The SR-71 capable of sustained speeds in excess of Mach 3 and flying at altitudes of over 70,000 feet, was then and presumably still is invulnerable to any jet interceptor or anti-aircraft missile. This successor to the U-2 spy plane even regularly over flew the Soviet Union unscathed and to the great annoyance of the Russians.
Yet when the SR-71 was beginning its run over Dimona, the Israelis scrambled a flight of F-4 Phantoms to intercept the Blackbird. Both, the SR-71 pilot and American sigint ships snooping nearby heard the Israeli flight commanders reporting to the ground controller that the US spy plane was sighted and heard him in turn urgently order the F-4's to shoot down the Blackbird. Even as the Israeli aircraft tried vainly to shoot it down the SR-71 made its run over Dimona airfield and its sensors picked up the signature of nuclear material on a bomb conveyor apparently loading an Israeli fighter-bomber. Whether the nuclear flare registered was from an actual nuclear weapon or radioactive material in a container to simulate a weapon will never be known.
To the advantage of the Israelis, the Americans read this as preparations for an imminent nuclear attack. Would the Soviets sit quietly when their allies are subjected to a nuclear attack would have been the immediate thought? Was this going to be the beginning of WW III? Within minutes President Nixon was on the line to Golda Meir telling her that a massive US airlift bearing much needed weapons and military advisors was ordered and that supply would begin within hours. As it happened US military advisors were able to develop tactics and devise electronic jammers to fob off the Soviet SAM missiles. From the fifth day onwards Israeli aircraft losses were significantly down and the tide of the battle began to turn. By the thirteenth day an Israeli thrust under Maj. Gen. Ariel Sharon had crossed the Suez and had begun threatening to encircle Shazli's advancing army on the Sinai. Only a Soviet threat to the Americans that their troops would physically join the battle with all "available" weapons compelled the Americans to force the Israelis to accept a cease-fire. Thus, twice in two weeks the threat of nuclear escalation had the desired outcomes for the parties involved.
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