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.
“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.