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. But the action could have triggered dangerous consequences.

Their target, later identified as a not yet operational nuclear reactor modeled on the Yongbyon reactor in North Korea - a uranium- fueled reactor that is capable of producing weapons-grade plutonium as a by-product - was destroyed.

Subsequent reports indicated that electronic countermeasures (ECMs) were used by the Israelis to blind Syrian radar and antiaircraft installations as the planes crossed the border and approached their target. But how close did it bring us to World War Three? The question was a wake-up call, the return of the repressed - 'the bloody Book of Revelation and Armageddon.' We thought we had left that all behind.Д«ut 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.Д¬onsider: 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. There is no doubt, as was later confirmed, the raid happened. Never mind the floods or foot-and-mouth - Gordon really would have been dealing with the bloody Book of Revelation and Armageddon.' 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,' who'd said: 'If people had known how close we came to world war three that day there'd have been mass panic. The article described what it called a 'meticulously planned, brilliantly executed surgical strike by Israeli jets on a nuclear installation in Syria.' It claimed the raid 'may have saved the world from a devastating threat. On 6 September, when Israel struck a nuclear facility in Syria. We Came So Close to World War Three That Day Nuclear war: so retro.Д«ut here, in these Spectator paragraphs anyway, nuclear war, 'World War Three,' was something that had almost just happened: We were worried about nuclear terrorism in 2007, but not nuclear war. 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.

In most of the postвЂ“Cold War period, the so-called 'holiday from history' when many succumbed to a historical amnesia about the dailiness of nuclear dread, the term 'World War Three' has had a ring of unreality. How The End Begins: The Road To A Nuclear World War III

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