Ron Rosenbaum - How the End Begins: The Road to a Nuclear World War III

ALSO BY RON ROSENBAUM

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Copyright 2011 by Ron Rosenbaum

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First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition March 2011

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Rosenbaum, Ron.

How the end begins: the road to a nuclear World War III / Ron Rosenbaum.1st Simon & Schuster hardcover ed.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Nuclear warfare. 2. World War III. 3. Nuclear weaponsHistory. 4. Deterrence (Strategy)History. I. Title.

U263.R67 2011

355.0215dc22

2010022474

ISBN 978-1-4165-9421-5

ISBN 978-1-4391-9007-4 (ebook)

To Major Harold I. Hering (ret.)
For the courage to question

Please dont let it happen. But let me see it all the same, as its happening and from every angle, and let me be among the first to know.

FROM IAN McEWANS SATURDAY

KENT: Is this the promised end?
EDGAR: Or image of that horror?

KING LEAR

It is an act of evil to accept the state of evil as either inevitable or final.

RABBI ABRAHAM JOSHUA HESCHEL

HOW THE END
BEGINS

T he London-based continuously published periodical in the English language, dating back to eighteenth-century London coffeehouse literary culture. It has survived as a respected general interest weekly, politically eclectic, culturally snobbish in a louche Old Etonian way, with highly regarded sources from within the old boy network in the leading British ministries.

But it rarely discloses anything as sensational and chilling as it did in the opening paragraphs of an article in the October 6, 2007, issue. It stopped me dead. It was not just the invocation of the jolting phrase World War Three. It was the deadly serious way in which it was invoked.

In most of the postCold War period, the so-called when many succumbed to a historical amnesia about the dailiness of nuclear dread, the term World War Three has had a ring of unreality. It usually sounded or read like an antiquated paranoid fear from a half-remembered past, the way we feel when we read of the Black Plague, a relic of the bad old days that still nonetheless conveys a ghostly chill. We were worried about nuclear terrorism in 2007, but not nuclear war. Nuclear war: so retro.

But here, in these Spectator paragraphs anyway, nuclear war, World War Three, was something that had almost just happened:

SO CLOSE TO WAR

We Came So Close to World War Three That Day

James Forsyth and Douglas Davis

6 OCTOBER 2007

On 6 September, when Israel struck a nuclear facility in Syria

The article described what it called a surgical strike by Israeli jets on a nuclear installation in Syria. It claimed the raid may have saved the world from a devastating threat. The only problem is that no one outside a tight-lipped knot of top Israeli and American officials knows precisely what that threat involved. The article went on to say that this report has been confirmed by a very senior British ministerial source, whod said: If people had known how close we came to world war three that day thered have been mass panic. Never mind the [seasonal] floods or foot-and-mouth [disease][Prime Minister] Gordon [Brown] really would have been dealing with the bloody Book of Revelation and Armageddon.

There is no doubt, , the raid happened. But how close did it bring us to World War Three? The question was a wake-up call, the return of the repressedthe bloody Book of Revelation and Armageddon. We thought we had left that all behind.

But one could not read the story without war-gaming concatenations of regional nuclear wars that might cascade, through miscalculation or misperception, into global conflagration from such a close call.

It was not inconceivable.

Consider: the raid began with Israeli jets taking off after dark and proceeding north toward the northeast corner of Syria, toward a bleak barely habited stretch of land near the Euphrates. Subsequent (ECMs) were used by the Israelis to blind Syrian radar and antiaircraft installations as the planes crossed the border and approached their target.

as a not yet operational nuclear reactor modeled on the Yongbyon reactor in North Koreaa uranium-fueled reactor that is capable of producing weapons-grade plutonium as a by-productwas destroyed. But the action could have triggered dangerous consequences. For one thing, the former Soviet Union, as well as the United States, is known to have satellite look-down capacity focused on trouble spots. There is little doubt the Russians would have picked up the Israeli jets takeoff andin the context of threats and counterthreats exchanged between Iran and Israel over the Iranian nuclear weapons programthey may well have warned the Iranians, with whom they have murky military and nuclear ties, that a potential Israeli attack on their nuclear facilities was under way. The Russians could easily have fired off an electronic warning to the Israelis not to attack Iranand/or Syriaand implicitly or explicitly threatened severe consequences or some other euphemism for putting nukes on the table.

, are reported to have sent an indirect nuclear warning to the Israelis at least once beforeat the close of the 1973 war when the Israeli army was threatening to crush the Egyptian Third Army, the last barrier before Cairo. They dispatched an aggressive note to the United States warning of intervention if Israel persisted, which led the U.S. to raise its nuclear alert status to DEFCON-3 before Israel backed off. In other words, the Russians may have invoked that night what is known as a nuclear umbrellaor as U.S. nuclear savants more euphemistically call it, extended deterrencein which a nuclear power uses nuclear threats to deter attacks against a nonnuclear ally.

Israel of course, though it has still not acknowledged it officially, Union in preparation for a retaliation should such a Soviet threat have been carried out.