The Lion of Babylon Roars - a Ba'athist Iraq wank
- Thread starter Onkel Willie
- Start date
Update time 
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In 1998, Pakistan had conducted its first nuclear test with a series of five underground detonations, the largest of them having a 40 kiloton yield. That was the second most powerful first test after the French 70 kiloton Gerboise Bleue and twice as strong as the US Trinity test of July 1945. Pakistan started to think about nuclear weapons development in January 1972 under the leadership of Prime Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, who delegated the program to the Chairman of Pakistan's Atomic Energy Commission Munir Ahmad Khan. This program would reach fruition under President General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, then-Chief of Army Staff. Pakistan’s nuclear weapons development was in response to neighbouring India's development of nuclear weapons and the decisive defeat of Pakistan in the 1971 Indo-Pakistani War. Bhutto convened the senior academic scientists and engineers in January 1972, in Multan, the so-called “Multan meeting”. Bhutto was the main architect of this programme and it was here that Bhutto orchestrated a nuclear weapons programme and rallied Pakistan’s academic scientists to build the atomic bomb for national survival.
Iraq had insider knowledge on the program, enough for Saddam Hussein to get an atomic bomb of his own. The Iraqi team of nuclear physicists and chemists managed to copy the gas centrifuges the Pakistanis had used and these were an effective way to enrich uranium, even if it was becoming increasingly outdated. The scientists of Saddam’s atomic bomb program also obtained design specifications for a nuclear fuel processing plant and – with more modern equipment than in the 1970s when the plant was built in Pakistan – it was able to produce 500 grams of weapons grade plutonium annually. The gas centrifuges, in the meantime, started to separate the valuable isotope uranium-235 from the next to useless uranium-238. This was all done in facilities hidden in plain sight, namely underneath the existing power plants with harmless light water reactors. In addition to this, Russia’s new President Vladimir Putin was friendly toward Saddam Hussein’s regime and proved helpful as well.
Israel continued to accuse Iraq of having an atomic bomb program, but continued to lack anything other than circumstantial evidence. Saddam Hussein in the meantime proposed bilateral arms controls and confidence building measures: a joint declaration renouncing the manufacture or acquisition of nuclear weapons, mutual inspection of each other’s nuclear installations with full access, simultaneous adherence to the Non-Proliferation Treaty and a zero-missile zone were proposals that Iraq repeatedly put forward. Israel rejected them all every single time and Iraq turned the tables by accusing Israel of having something to hide, and that “something” was a nuclear weapons arsenal (this played into the large suspicion that Israel indeed had atomic bombs). Iraq’s representatives in the UN were eager to denounce Israel vehemently and vociferously with other Arab states joining in. They repeatedly asked questions on why Israel wouldn’t allow IAEA inspections, hounding the Israeli representatives, which led to doubt being cast about Israel’s honesty and peaceful intentions.
In the meantime, the United States saw the end of the Kemp administration after Jack Kemp’s second term came to an end in 2000. George W. Bush had made his way up in the Republican Party, though with difficulty, and ended up being the running mate of Dick Cheney. Together they represented a somewhat conservative turn in the Republican Party which resulted from the drop in Kemp’s approval ratings concerning an economic malaise in the late 1990s, which critics of Kemp saw as a result of the latter’s “liberalism”. The Democrats’ candidate was Al Gore and his running mate was Bill Clinton. Gore, because of his son’s accident in 1989, had refrained from competing for the candidacy with Michael Dukakis in 1992. Bill Clinton had suffered no such impediment and had tried to become the Presidential candidate in that year, with bad results that somewhat damaged his career. Al Gore returned in full force after 1992 and created a furore with his meteoric rise, and he granted Bill Clinton a second chance at getting into the White House, albeit only as Vice President. A spike in oil prices caused the recession and Al Gore used that to promote his ecological viewpoints by spinning it as making the United States less dependent on foreign imported oil. The US was to turn to nuclear and coal power which could be produced with indigenous means and, preferably, also to more environmentally friendly power sources like solar, wind, hydroelectric, natural gas and biogas power to meet its energy needs. Besides that, Gore was a fan of building more fuel economic diesel cars to reduce America’s foreign dependence more. He was a proponent of signing the Kyoto Protocol in accordance with these views. In terms of economic policies Gore and Clinton promoted a more interventionist policy, including a national health insurance and other Keynesian policies. Gore, with extensive foreign diplomacy experience, advocated resuming the Israeli-Palestinian peace process which had stalled after Rabin’s death in 1995. The two were proponents of a two-state solution, which was the last key point of their election campaign.
Carrying 33 states plus DC and a majority in the popular vote, the Gore/Clinton ticket won in a landslide, leaving the Cheney/Bush ticket with a measly 17 states. It was the worst Republican showing in ages. It marked the beginning of a shift in US politics: of all the Presidents elected from 1968 to 1996 only two had been Democrats (Jimmy Carter and Michael Dukakis) and both of those had served only one term. The other six Presidents had all been Republicans. That now stood to change.
While beginning with the implementation of their domestic agenda, with success due to a Democratic majority in both houses, Gore and Clinton turned to realize their foreign agenda as well. President Gore immediately realized that the Palestinians, mainly Yasser Arafat, wouldn’t budge an inch without Baghdad’s say-so considering Iraq was militarily the strongest Arab state and the main backer of the Palestine Liberation Organization. In June 2001, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and Vice President Bill Clinton travelled to Israel with a diplomatic delegation and pressured Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak. Barak was reluctant about concessions to the Palestinians, never mind a two-state solution, considering that was one of the reasons why his predecessor Netanyahu had lost the elections in 1999. He made vague promises and Gore had to settle for it since the US delegation would travel to Baghdad and didn’t want to affront their host Saddam Hussein by being late. Saddam stated he fully supported Palestinian independence in the context of a two-state solution, but had qualms about Jerusalem as the Israeli capital, stating East Jerusalem should be the capital of Palestine (even though he knew full well Israel would never agree to that, not even with a conciliatory government).
In the meantime, Saddam Hussein attempted to improve Iraq’s relations with its neighbour Syria. Relations had been bad ever since Saddam, still only Deputy Secretary of the Iraqi Ba’ath party at the time, had sabotaged negotiations for a unification of the two countries for fear of losing his power in the 1970s. Syrian ruler Hafez al-Assad died in 2000 and he was succeeded by his son Bashar al-Assad, and he proved open to improving relations (he had been only a child when Iraqi-Syrian relations had turned sour). A tentative opening was created in August 2000 when Iraqi Foreign Minister Muhammad Saeed al-Sahhaf visited Damascus, offering Saddam’s condolences to Bashar, who had just lost his father. Relations improved and by the time Syria’s Foreign Minister Farouk al-Sharaa paid a return visit, Syria agreed that the two countries should present a united front in the Palestinian matter.
Negotiations dragged on as a result and in 2002 Yasser Arafat, on the urging of Baghdad and Damascus, requested non-member observer status in the United Nations. A majority in the UN General Assembly voted in favour of this, to the ire of Israel. The major foreign policy goal of President Gore remained unachieved, which proved a major frustration, something that the success of his domestic agenda couldn’t compensate for in his mind. What happened next in Iraq would have potentially earthshaking consequences.
Saddam Hussein was not very patient when it came to a programme that served, among other things, to boost his ego some more. He gave priority to uranium enrichment since U-235, unlike plutonium, could be used in a gunshot type bomb, like the Hiroshima bomb, which was a relatively simple design. Multiple bombs were reported to be complete in 2003 and the test date was set on April 28th, Saddam’s birth day: at 6:00 AM in the majority Sunni province Al Anbar a bomb was set off in the middle of the desert, irregardless of the fact that the Partial Test Ban Treaty, of which Iraq was a signatory, forbade atmospheric tests. During the early morning of April 28th, Israeli seismographs detected a tremor originating from Iraq that corresponded to an 18 kiloton blast. Israeli fears were soon confirmed when the US detected radioactive fission products in the atmosphere following a southwest-ward direction. On April 29th 2003 President Al Gore released the following statement in wordings similar to the statement of Truman in 1949 after the Soviet Union’s first nuclear test: “We have evidence that in the past 36 hours an atomic explosion has occurred in Iraq”. Around the time of that statement Iraqi state television and radio bombastically announced the news in Iraq, complete with images of the blast, and from there the news spread like wildfire. In Iraq itself, the event was celebrated with massive state orchestrated public endorsements of Saddam Hussein and the Ba’ath party. After almost fifteen years, if not more, Iraq’s atomic bomb program had bore fruit. To demonstrate Iraq’s nuclear capabilities four underground tests were conducted in the week that followed with yields varying between 12 and 25 kilotons. Collectively, these five tests were codenamed Babil-1.
The Israeli response was a hostile one while President Gore condemned the Iraqi violation of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, from which Iraq withdrew in response. Baghdad responded that, in light of Israel’s ambiguity concerning its nuclear energy program, deception and perhaps even aggressive intent had to be assumed. In other words, Saddam Hussein and his government had just assumed that Israel’s silence on the subject had been a tacit admission to possession of the bomb. That had left Iraq with no other option but to develop means to defend itself. Saddam Hussein reiterated that he’d allow Israeli inspections if Israel reciprocated and also that he’d begin disarmament if Israel did the same. He rejected unilateral Iraqi disarmament regardless of foreign pressure to do so and also refused to declare a no-first-use policy because of the fact that Israel hadn’t done so either. Saddam furthermore issued a warning (obviously directed toward Israel) that any attempts to attack or sabotage Iraq’s “purely defensive nuclear program” would be perceived as an act of war.
In the White House, cooler heads prevailed and the Israeli government was urged to be cautious after US satellite images showed Israel was preparing an air strike. Gore told Prime Minister Ehud Barak that he ought to consider whether destroying Iraq’s nuclear installations was worth the destruction of cities like Tel Aviv or Haifa. The latter concluded that this wasn’t the case based on estimates that Iraq still had up to half a dozen nuclear weapons after its Babil-1 test (which could effectively be deployed by Iraq’s air force). In the Arab world, the response was generally positive and calls were made to “wipe Israel off the map”, although Saddam wouldn’t do that because he knew the result would be “mutually assured destruction”. It did, however, encourage the Palestinians to rise up in what was the Second Intifada. The Palestinians used guerrilla, terror and sabotage tactics like ambushes, sniper attacks, remotely operated landmines and other improvised explosive devices, suicide bombings, drive-by shootings and car bombs. From the Gaza Strip, the West Bank and southern Lebanon the Palestinian insurgents also fired mortars and rockets against civilian targets right across the border.
It went further: a wave of violence struck Jerusalem itself when Muslims erected improvised barricades made up of vehicles and construction materials and set up unofficial checkpoints. Israeli Jews were effectively kept from entering East Jerusalem, which the Palestinians claimed as their national capital. Urban combat against the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) resulted. In most places the Israelis had the advantage due to superior training and equipment, proving excellent in urban environments and everywhere else. The Palestinians still inflicted a serious death toll, and this was markedly so in Jerusalem for a simple reason: the IDF was wary of causing Israeli civilian casualties and of possibly unintentionally damaging Jewish and Christian holy sites. East Jerusalem was labelled “Israel’s Stalingrad” by one newspaper and the term quickly became popular, especially in anti-Zionist circles. The Middle East was in crisis.
.Chapter V: President Gore, Saddam’s Bomb and the Second Intifada, 1999-2003.
In 1998, Pakistan had conducted its first nuclear test with a series of five underground detonations, the largest of them having a 40 kiloton yield. That was the second most powerful first test after the French 70 kiloton Gerboise Bleue and twice as strong as the US Trinity test of July 1945. Pakistan started to think about nuclear weapons development in January 1972 under the leadership of Prime Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, who delegated the program to the Chairman of Pakistan's Atomic Energy Commission Munir Ahmad Khan. This program would reach fruition under President General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, then-Chief of Army Staff. Pakistan’s nuclear weapons development was in response to neighbouring India's development of nuclear weapons and the decisive defeat of Pakistan in the 1971 Indo-Pakistani War. Bhutto convened the senior academic scientists and engineers in January 1972, in Multan, the so-called “Multan meeting”. Bhutto was the main architect of this programme and it was here that Bhutto orchestrated a nuclear weapons programme and rallied Pakistan’s academic scientists to build the atomic bomb for national survival.
Iraq had insider knowledge on the program, enough for Saddam Hussein to get an atomic bomb of his own. The Iraqi team of nuclear physicists and chemists managed to copy the gas centrifuges the Pakistanis had used and these were an effective way to enrich uranium, even if it was becoming increasingly outdated. The scientists of Saddam’s atomic bomb program also obtained design specifications for a nuclear fuel processing plant and – with more modern equipment than in the 1970s when the plant was built in Pakistan – it was able to produce 500 grams of weapons grade plutonium annually. The gas centrifuges, in the meantime, started to separate the valuable isotope uranium-235 from the next to useless uranium-238. This was all done in facilities hidden in plain sight, namely underneath the existing power plants with harmless light water reactors. In addition to this, Russia’s new President Vladimir Putin was friendly toward Saddam Hussein’s regime and proved helpful as well.
Israel continued to accuse Iraq of having an atomic bomb program, but continued to lack anything other than circumstantial evidence. Saddam Hussein in the meantime proposed bilateral arms controls and confidence building measures: a joint declaration renouncing the manufacture or acquisition of nuclear weapons, mutual inspection of each other’s nuclear installations with full access, simultaneous adherence to the Non-Proliferation Treaty and a zero-missile zone were proposals that Iraq repeatedly put forward. Israel rejected them all every single time and Iraq turned the tables by accusing Israel of having something to hide, and that “something” was a nuclear weapons arsenal (this played into the large suspicion that Israel indeed had atomic bombs). Iraq’s representatives in the UN were eager to denounce Israel vehemently and vociferously with other Arab states joining in. They repeatedly asked questions on why Israel wouldn’t allow IAEA inspections, hounding the Israeli representatives, which led to doubt being cast about Israel’s honesty and peaceful intentions.
In the meantime, the United States saw the end of the Kemp administration after Jack Kemp’s second term came to an end in 2000. George W. Bush had made his way up in the Republican Party, though with difficulty, and ended up being the running mate of Dick Cheney. Together they represented a somewhat conservative turn in the Republican Party which resulted from the drop in Kemp’s approval ratings concerning an economic malaise in the late 1990s, which critics of Kemp saw as a result of the latter’s “liberalism”. The Democrats’ candidate was Al Gore and his running mate was Bill Clinton. Gore, because of his son’s accident in 1989, had refrained from competing for the candidacy with Michael Dukakis in 1992. Bill Clinton had suffered no such impediment and had tried to become the Presidential candidate in that year, with bad results that somewhat damaged his career. Al Gore returned in full force after 1992 and created a furore with his meteoric rise, and he granted Bill Clinton a second chance at getting into the White House, albeit only as Vice President. A spike in oil prices caused the recession and Al Gore used that to promote his ecological viewpoints by spinning it as making the United States less dependent on foreign imported oil. The US was to turn to nuclear and coal power which could be produced with indigenous means and, preferably, also to more environmentally friendly power sources like solar, wind, hydroelectric, natural gas and biogas power to meet its energy needs. Besides that, Gore was a fan of building more fuel economic diesel cars to reduce America’s foreign dependence more. He was a proponent of signing the Kyoto Protocol in accordance with these views. In terms of economic policies Gore and Clinton promoted a more interventionist policy, including a national health insurance and other Keynesian policies. Gore, with extensive foreign diplomacy experience, advocated resuming the Israeli-Palestinian peace process which had stalled after Rabin’s death in 1995. The two were proponents of a two-state solution, which was the last key point of their election campaign.
Carrying 33 states plus DC and a majority in the popular vote, the Gore/Clinton ticket won in a landslide, leaving the Cheney/Bush ticket with a measly 17 states. It was the worst Republican showing in ages. It marked the beginning of a shift in US politics: of all the Presidents elected from 1968 to 1996 only two had been Democrats (Jimmy Carter and Michael Dukakis) and both of those had served only one term. The other six Presidents had all been Republicans. That now stood to change.
While beginning with the implementation of their domestic agenda, with success due to a Democratic majority in both houses, Gore and Clinton turned to realize their foreign agenda as well. President Gore immediately realized that the Palestinians, mainly Yasser Arafat, wouldn’t budge an inch without Baghdad’s say-so considering Iraq was militarily the strongest Arab state and the main backer of the Palestine Liberation Organization. In June 2001, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and Vice President Bill Clinton travelled to Israel with a diplomatic delegation and pressured Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak. Barak was reluctant about concessions to the Palestinians, never mind a two-state solution, considering that was one of the reasons why his predecessor Netanyahu had lost the elections in 1999. He made vague promises and Gore had to settle for it since the US delegation would travel to Baghdad and didn’t want to affront their host Saddam Hussein by being late. Saddam stated he fully supported Palestinian independence in the context of a two-state solution, but had qualms about Jerusalem as the Israeli capital, stating East Jerusalem should be the capital of Palestine (even though he knew full well Israel would never agree to that, not even with a conciliatory government).
In the meantime, Saddam Hussein attempted to improve Iraq’s relations with its neighbour Syria. Relations had been bad ever since Saddam, still only Deputy Secretary of the Iraqi Ba’ath party at the time, had sabotaged negotiations for a unification of the two countries for fear of losing his power in the 1970s. Syrian ruler Hafez al-Assad died in 2000 and he was succeeded by his son Bashar al-Assad, and he proved open to improving relations (he had been only a child when Iraqi-Syrian relations had turned sour). A tentative opening was created in August 2000 when Iraqi Foreign Minister Muhammad Saeed al-Sahhaf visited Damascus, offering Saddam’s condolences to Bashar, who had just lost his father. Relations improved and by the time Syria’s Foreign Minister Farouk al-Sharaa paid a return visit, Syria agreed that the two countries should present a united front in the Palestinian matter.
Negotiations dragged on as a result and in 2002 Yasser Arafat, on the urging of Baghdad and Damascus, requested non-member observer status in the United Nations. A majority in the UN General Assembly voted in favour of this, to the ire of Israel. The major foreign policy goal of President Gore remained unachieved, which proved a major frustration, something that the success of his domestic agenda couldn’t compensate for in his mind. What happened next in Iraq would have potentially earthshaking consequences.
Saddam Hussein was not very patient when it came to a programme that served, among other things, to boost his ego some more. He gave priority to uranium enrichment since U-235, unlike plutonium, could be used in a gunshot type bomb, like the Hiroshima bomb, which was a relatively simple design. Multiple bombs were reported to be complete in 2003 and the test date was set on April 28th, Saddam’s birth day: at 6:00 AM in the majority Sunni province Al Anbar a bomb was set off in the middle of the desert, irregardless of the fact that the Partial Test Ban Treaty, of which Iraq was a signatory, forbade atmospheric tests. During the early morning of April 28th, Israeli seismographs detected a tremor originating from Iraq that corresponded to an 18 kiloton blast. Israeli fears were soon confirmed when the US detected radioactive fission products in the atmosphere following a southwest-ward direction. On April 29th 2003 President Al Gore released the following statement in wordings similar to the statement of Truman in 1949 after the Soviet Union’s first nuclear test: “We have evidence that in the past 36 hours an atomic explosion has occurred in Iraq”. Around the time of that statement Iraqi state television and radio bombastically announced the news in Iraq, complete with images of the blast, and from there the news spread like wildfire. In Iraq itself, the event was celebrated with massive state orchestrated public endorsements of Saddam Hussein and the Ba’ath party. After almost fifteen years, if not more, Iraq’s atomic bomb program had bore fruit. To demonstrate Iraq’s nuclear capabilities four underground tests were conducted in the week that followed with yields varying between 12 and 25 kilotons. Collectively, these five tests were codenamed Babil-1.
The Israeli response was a hostile one while President Gore condemned the Iraqi violation of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, from which Iraq withdrew in response. Baghdad responded that, in light of Israel’s ambiguity concerning its nuclear energy program, deception and perhaps even aggressive intent had to be assumed. In other words, Saddam Hussein and his government had just assumed that Israel’s silence on the subject had been a tacit admission to possession of the bomb. That had left Iraq with no other option but to develop means to defend itself. Saddam Hussein reiterated that he’d allow Israeli inspections if Israel reciprocated and also that he’d begin disarmament if Israel did the same. He rejected unilateral Iraqi disarmament regardless of foreign pressure to do so and also refused to declare a no-first-use policy because of the fact that Israel hadn’t done so either. Saddam furthermore issued a warning (obviously directed toward Israel) that any attempts to attack or sabotage Iraq’s “purely defensive nuclear program” would be perceived as an act of war.
In the White House, cooler heads prevailed and the Israeli government was urged to be cautious after US satellite images showed Israel was preparing an air strike. Gore told Prime Minister Ehud Barak that he ought to consider whether destroying Iraq’s nuclear installations was worth the destruction of cities like Tel Aviv or Haifa. The latter concluded that this wasn’t the case based on estimates that Iraq still had up to half a dozen nuclear weapons after its Babil-1 test (which could effectively be deployed by Iraq’s air force). In the Arab world, the response was generally positive and calls were made to “wipe Israel off the map”, although Saddam wouldn’t do that because he knew the result would be “mutually assured destruction”. It did, however, encourage the Palestinians to rise up in what was the Second Intifada. The Palestinians used guerrilla, terror and sabotage tactics like ambushes, sniper attacks, remotely operated landmines and other improvised explosive devices, suicide bombings, drive-by shootings and car bombs. From the Gaza Strip, the West Bank and southern Lebanon the Palestinian insurgents also fired mortars and rockets against civilian targets right across the border.
It went further: a wave of violence struck Jerusalem itself when Muslims erected improvised barricades made up of vehicles and construction materials and set up unofficial checkpoints. Israeli Jews were effectively kept from entering East Jerusalem, which the Palestinians claimed as their national capital. Urban combat against the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) resulted. In most places the Israelis had the advantage due to superior training and equipment, proving excellent in urban environments and everywhere else. The Palestinians still inflicted a serious death toll, and this was markedly so in Jerusalem for a simple reason: the IDF was wary of causing Israeli civilian casualties and of possibly unintentionally damaging Jewish and Christian holy sites. East Jerusalem was labelled “Israel’s Stalingrad” by one newspaper and the term quickly became popular, especially in anti-Zionist circles. The Middle East was in crisis.
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James G
Gone Fishin'
Sorry to be picky, because I am enjoying this timeline, but I am left confused by the opening paragraph.
Are you saying that the Pakistani test of a 40k thermonuclear bomb was the second most powerful behind the French test of a 70k one in 1960?
Because there was this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_bomba
BOOM!
And many, many other Soviet and American weapons tests both above and below ground.
Are you saying that the Pakistani test of a 40k thermonuclear bomb was the second most powerful behind the French test of a 70k one in 1960?
Because there was this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_bomba
BOOM!
And many, many other Soviet and American weapons tests both above and below ground.
Sorry to be picky, because I am enjoying this timeline, but I am left confused by the opening paragraph.
Are you saying that the Pakistani test of a 40k thermonuclear bomb was the second most powerful behind the French test of a 70k one in 1960?
Because there was this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_bomba
BOOM!
And many, many other Soviet and American weapons tests both above and below ground.
If I read it right what he was saying is that is was the second most powerful FIRST test explosion. I.e. Sue later American, Soviet, etc. weapons and their tests were more powerful but as a first test explosion (or is implosion more correct?) it was the second most powerful.
Interesting story Onkie. Please continue.
HeavyWeaponsGuy
Banned
While this is obviously up to the author's discretion, that seems the most likely course of action.
Not necessarily because the Soviets would like palling around with a basket case like postwar Iran, but because it's in both Soviet and American strategic interest to make sure there is a balance of power. It's classic divide-and-rule policy to prevent the formation of a hegemon, and the only real issue with this scenario, fascinating as it is, is that people are ignoring its emergence.
If Saddam hangs on until the Arab Spring, I can imagine his reponse would make Assad look like a democratic, western leader. Keep the up the good work
While something like the Arab Spring is possible, seeing the same one complete with self-immolation as per OTL is extremely unlikely given the changes present here.
If anything, the widespread success of secular, republican Iraq and the quashing of the first successful example of political Islamism may well continue to push the Middle East towards Western/Soviet style secularism which it seemed to have been going on until the Iranian Revolution.
Sorry to be picky, because I am enjoying this timeline, but I am left confused by the opening paragraph.
Are you saying that the Pakistani test of a 40k thermonuclear bomb was the second most powerful behind the French test of a 70k one in 1960?
Because there was this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_bomba
BOOM!
And many, many other Soviet and American weapons tests both above and below ground.
I stated the Pakistani Chagai I was the second most powerful first test after the French first test. But I see you've already noticed.
Alright then. The last chapter of this fairly short TL. I hope y'all enjoyed it.
In one major Arab country the result was a political shift: this was Egypt. President Hosni Mubarak refused to condemn Israel and support the Palestinians and stated that the latter group had only themselves to blame for the civilian casualties the Israelis inflicted. His statements were met with outrage in the Arab world, including in Egypt itself, resulting in demonstrations against his regime. In 2005, Minister of the Interior Habib el-Adly used his security forces to stage a palace coup in which he deposed Hosni Mubarak and installed his 42 year old son Gamal. While the ex-President could receive the death penalty for treason, his son pardoned him and simply kept him under house arrest. Gamal Mubarak assumed a much more anti-Israel stance and began supplying the Intifada with weapons, conspiring with both Iraq and Syria.
Gamal Mubarak made official state visits to Baghdad where he met with Saddam Hussein as well as Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. The three agreed to assume a common platform in the Israeli-Palestine conflict which was based on the following demands: 1) a two-state solution resulting in a Palestinian state consisting of the Gaza Strip, the West Bank and East Jerusalem 2) a return of the Golan Heights to Syria. The three also signed an agreement known as the Baghdad Pact which was a treaty of mutual assistance under which all three would go to war if one of them came under attack, a defence pact obviously directed against Israel. The new Egyptian President returned to Cairo feeling like he was the reincarnation of his namesake, Gamal Abdel Nasser, who is seen as the founder of modern Arab nationalism. Indeed, Arab nationalism experienced an upsurge in the Arab world, as did the popularity of Nasser and his legacy as an opponent of Zionism. Israel, in the meantime, was beginning to feel the heat as the Palestinians turned up the heat of the Second Intifada rather than showing signs of becoming weaker. This was the result of these recent developments in the Arab world, developments which worried Israel because Egypt had gotten much stronger since their last run-in thanks to receiving modern American equipment like the Abrams M1 main battle tank and the F-16 Fighting Falcon (as well as the older F-4 Phantom II and the Mirage 2000 from France).
Saddam Hussein, in the meantime, was turning to address the issue of his succession once and for all. Originally his oldest son was the natural heir apparent to his father simply because convention dictated the oldest son was the successor, but he proved more vicious and venal than even his father could tolerate. In 1988, Uday Hussein had clubbed Saddam’s friend and food taster Kamel Hana Gegeo and had finished him off with an electric carving knife, all of this on a party in honour of Suzanne Mubarak (wife to Hosni Mubarak). The reason was that this man had introduced Saddam to his second wife and his first wife, Uday’s mother, had been less than pleased. Uday took her side in the matter and possibly killed Gegeo as per her wishes; at any rate, she convinced his father to not send him to jail like he originally intended and instead to banish him to Switzerland where he would work in the embassy (he was subsequently kicked out of Switzerland because he got into fights so often). Uday was a regular playboy who partied almost every night, indulging in alcohol and drugs, and satisfying his enormous sexual appetite with around two dozen women a week: prostitutes, mistresses and innocent 14 year old school girls that had been snatched off the streets by his cronies for him to rape. He raped at least one woman on her wedding day after which a maid had to witness the bride’s dead body being carried out of the room. The maid was told to “clean up the mess” – bloodstains, hair and peeled flesh – and not talk about anything she’d seen lest her entire family be killed.
He possessed hundreds of cars and he had no qualms about gobbling up property for palaces and to keep lions, ostriches and other exotic animals as pets. His staff spent hours collecting and counting Uday’s possessions. They kept careful reports on the whereabouts of even mundane items, such as a walking stick, with every receipt checked, approved and signed by Uday himself. He lived at the centre of a freaky and complex universe of ciphers and rituals that he had concocted. He assigned code names for each of the places he frequented: the Boat Club was called 200; the Olympic Committee, 60; al-Abit palace, 111 and hose in his employ were assigned numbers too. Uday changed these codes every few months, and anyone who forgot the new system was beaten, according to a note written by Uday at the bottom of the most recent code sheet. A family friend says Uday had his staff periodically weighed and if someone had gained weight, Uday would assume they were stealing to buy extra food, and he would send them to a “discipline” camp until the pounds were gone. He subjected his personnel to torture and the smallest thing could set him off and induce rage: the internet proved a particularly black day for Iraqis because he used it to look up torture techniques. In his position as head of the Iraqi Olympic Committee, one of his few and unimpressive official positions, he tortured Iraqi athletes who had failed to perform: after the Iraqi national soccer team had lost 4-0 against Japan in 2000, he had the soles of the keeper’s feet beaten. He was no less demanding at parties: his ‘friends’ had to drink obscene amounts of liquor and if one passed out or took a nap, he was thrown into a cage with an aggressive monkey which scratched the unfortunate inebriate’s face. Uday Hussein was vain, narcissistic, cruel, cunning and erratic and proved too radical even for his father, as well as damaging for the regime’s reputation.
Saddam’s younger son was named Qusay and he was plainly the favoured one after the late 1980s. Qusay had been working for his father in small jobs in internal security when his big break came in the form of squashing the “Marsh Arabs” who resisted the draining of their marshes in the early 1990s. His loyalty and ruthlessness proven, Qusay would move on to other assignments. He became commander of the Republican Guard and head of the Special Security Organization, which was part secret police, part security detail for Saddam and part umbrella group for his elite military forces. He too partied, drinking a quarter bottle of $120 dollar per bottle Johnny Walker Blue Label, and he too had mistresses, but was highly discrete about them. Qusay was not above petty power abuses either, having a maid flung into a cell and beaten because she’d giggled about something he had said. Unlike his brother’s personal, arbitrary and spontaneous brand of terror, however, Qusay killed icily and for political aims. He was much more controllable and therefore useful to Saddam whereas the older son was a loose cannon, a threat to whomever’s wife or daughter he came across and capable of killing in a rage over something trivial. That tainted the regime and it was a matter of when, and not if, Uday Hussein would cause a major diplomatic incident of some kind (it was a miracle that he hadn’t already, and that was only because he somewhat feared his father). Qusay was idolatrous of his father, to the point that he had the same brushy moustache and wore the same shoes and suits, while Uday’s relationship with Saddam was often troubled.
By the early 2000s, Qusay was unofficially the heir apparent to his father. In 2004, he was made Minister of the Interior by his father and that greatly improved his power base within the regime: besides controlling the Republican Guard and the Special Security Organization, he now also controlled Iraq’s police forces and the intelligence apparatus. Uday wrote a letter to his father to express his disappointment about being passed over, a letter revealing he despised his younger brother, and Saddam knew what happened to people whom Uday despised. Saddam could have his older son arrested to make him less of a threat, but he was still his son. Therefore, Saddam created a propaganda ministry which Uday was to lead because of the fact that he controlled a number of media outlets already. Saddam also found Uday useful in instilling fear in the Iraqi nuclear scientists which motivated them to work harder and granted him a position in the Iraqi Atomic Energy Committee (IAEC). The jealous older son was thereby provided with a cabinet position and an additional official post, thereby calming him down. Qusay, however, was officially proclaimed by Saddam to be his heir, something that Uday had to accept while attempting to curry favour with his father. He wasn’t particular successful, as exemplified by Qusay being named Deputy Prime Minister in February 2005, replacing Tariq Aziz. Aziz was named Foreign Minister, reassuming the position he had held between 1983 and 1991 and effectively being demoted. Qusay Hussein had finally become the second most powerful man in Iraq while his older brother remained a relatively marginal figure in national politics.
What was now effectively a diarchy of father and son, Saddam and Qusay, was soon faced with a crisis in which confrontation would prove inevitable. The Intifada was still ongoing as of 2005 and its intensity didn’t look like it would decrease, this thanks to support in terms of weapons and finances from Iraq, Syria and Egypt. On April 13th 2005, some Israeli air force F-15s ended up being ordered to attack a column of Palestinian vehicles, a bunch of technicals headed by a T-34 that the insurgents had somehow obtained, fleeing to the Egyptian border. The Israeli F-15s crossed the border by doing so (it is rather surprising that this hadn’t happened any sooner) and the Egyptian commander of the nearest air force basis didn’t hesitate. He ordered a mix of Egyptian F-15s, F-16s and MiG-21s to intercept and that resulted in a dogfight with the Israeli planes eventually withdrawing, though after having inflicted serious losses. Several Egyptian fighter planes crossed into Israeli territory and the result was that two MiG-21s were shot down by anti-aircraft missiles with the pilots escaping by using their ejection seats. The Israeli border incursion was not the first one and Egypt had expressed its annoyance earlier, but it would be the one that would blow up in Israel’s face.
Despite signs marking them as Egyptian, or perhaps because of that, they were taken prisoner and were not released immediately upon Egypt’s demand, but were instead kept for interrogation in an improvised Israeli command post near the border. Rather than wait, Egypt launched a rescue mission with ground forces after identifying with certainty the location of their lost pilots. They ran into an Israeli patrol which they took prisoner, but the rescue operation itself failed and now turned into an Israeli effort to get their patrol back. Low level commanders on both sides proved too untrusting for a prisoner exchange to be arranged and within hours the situation had devolved into skirmishes between Israeli and Egyptian infantry and light armoured vehicles. By now, President Gamal Mubarak had been informed and he decided to be obstinate in the matter out of principle. He sent a complete armour division to the border, provoking an Israeli air strike against several principal transportation hubs to slow the Egyptians down, resulting in several dozen civilian casualties. That blew up the matter beyond negotiation: newsreels across Egypt broadly meted it out to millions of Egyptian families, revealing how “the Jews now spread the terror they rain down every day on the Palestinians to all Arabs”.
Gamal Mubarak ordered a general mobilization of Egypt’s armed forces and plans to directly assist the beleaguered Palestinians were to be put in effect. On April 20th 100.000 men with 700 tanks, 1.000 infantry fighting vehicles, 1.200 artillery guns, and 1.500 armoured personnel carriers under cover from Egyptian Air Force F-16s, F-15s and MiG-21s overran the border between Egypt and the Gaza Strip. Outnumbered Israeli forces were pushed back in fierce urban combat against the Egyptians and Palestinian forces. The Egyptians, now motivated and properly equipped, proved to be a challenge unlike the last time around. Street-to-street fighting took place with the Israelis putting up as many obstacles as possible in an attempt to make the Egyptian advance costly and piecemeal, but they had to deal with a generally hostile population as well.
Syria and Iraq immediately conducted a general mobilization of their own and pledged their support to Egypt and the Palestinian cause. Jordan, though remaining neutral, was pro-Iraq and expressed its political support to the Arab cause by sending a volunteer legion to fight alongside their Iraqi, Syrian and Palestinian brethren. On April 22nd, Syria thundered into the Golan Heights with armoured spearheads of T-55, T-62 and T-72 tanks while the Iraqis provided air cover with MiG-29s, MiG-25s and Su-30s. The Syrians, who deployed seven divisions, soon clashed with the UN peacekeeping mission and overran them. Israeli defences consisted of a few brigades at the time, although Israel was busy marshalling all available forces. Good Iraqi air support evened out the situation and the Iraqi and Israeli air forces cancelled each other out, making the fight on the ground purely a matter of ground forces. The Syrians made a better showing than in 1973, but the Israeli Merkava tank proved superior to the tanks Syria fielded and losses increased exponentially for the Syrians as they advanced further across the Golan Heights. They nonetheless reached Israel proper on April 28th, after six days, albeit in a state of exhaustion. By then, however, the Syrians’ Iraqi allies had been able to deploy two Republican Guard divisions, fanatic and utterly loyal to Saddam Hussein, to the frontline. They were top of the line and endowed with the most recent weapons acquisitions of Iraq, such as all of Iraq’s 75 T-90 tanks. Two regular Iraqi divisions came with them as well, but they would form the secondary attack wave whereas the Republican Guard constituted the primary wave. In the meantime, Hezbollah conducted an offensive from Lebanon on its own initiative.
The advance resumed on April 30th despite UN calls for a ceasefire and a lot of diplomatic hectoring by the major powers, but no one listened. By now, President Al Gore had raised the alertness level of US forces to DEFCON 3 and had dispatched the Sixth Fleet from Naples. The Syrians and Iraqis crossed the border that same day and Safed, about ten kilometres from the border, was reached after two days of intense combat wherein the Israelis valiantly resisted against a vastly numerically superior enemy. It was a vital traffic hub and Israel now feared the collapse of its front, something which would leave the entire north of the country open to invasion. Ehud Barak felt he had no other choice but to push the red button despite the possibility of Iraqi retaliation.
And so the IDF deployed a 10 kiloton tactical nuclear warhead, mainly hitting the Syrians on the Iraqi right flank. It was thought Iraq might not retaliate in kind if their forces weren’t targeted. Secondly, the Iraqis were now at the tip of a salient due to the chaotic Syrian retreat, a salient the Israelis planned to cut off. The belief was that the Arabs could be brought to the negotiation table if the strongest one of them was defeated in the field, but that proved a miscalculation. When the Republican Guard was cut off Saddam decided to rescue his elite forces and simultaneously show he was willing to escalate if need be. He deployed a 25 kiloton nuclear weapon to blow a hole in Israeli lines and extract his forces. President Gore now finally raised the alertness level to DEFCON 2, a level that’s not believed to have been used since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. The UN Security Council finally got its act together because Russia and China stopped stonewalling and a resolution demanding an immediate ceasefire was passed unanimously. Both sides complied on May 5th to prevent the war escalating into full-on mutually assured destruction, but the war was a clear Arab victory, the first one since Israel’s inception in 1948, thereby finally eliminating that trauma from Arab collective memory.
A conference took place in Oslo in May-June 2005 where a final Israeli-Palestinian peace was enforced by the five permanent members of the UN Security Council. The only hassle was the status of East Jerusalem, but considering the advantageous position of the Arab forces Russia and China successfully lobbied for the Arab cause. The Republic of Palestine was proclaimed and it consisted of the Gaza Strip, the West Bank and East Jerusalem. It immediately received diplomatic recognition from the Arab world and the major powers, and Israel grudgingly followed suit. President Gore saw his foreign policy goals achieved, albeit in a costly and violent way, but at least he could comfort himself with the thought that the region now had a lasting peace. His Vice President Bill Clinton received his endorsement and won the 2008 election, extending Democrat rule to twelve years.
Peace had been achieved in the Middle East after more than half a century and Saddam Hussein was now considered the hero of the Arab people, especially the Palestinians. His regime remained despotic and abusive, killing thousands of people who resisted him, but opposition to the liberator of Palestine was momentarily discredited and his dictatorship was allowed to persist. Even Shi’ites could now agree that Saddam’s rule had produced something good. Saddam Hussein could now die happily with that knowledge. The Iraqi dictator died in 2012 at age 75 of a heart attack after an iron fist rule that had spanned 33 years from 1979 to 2012 and had been turbulent to say the least. His son Qusay Hussein was sworn in as the new President of Iraq who would lead Iraq into the 21st century.
Chapter VI: The Arab-Israeli War and Palestinian Independence, 2003-2013.
Iraq finished construction on two spherical implosion-type bombs that used weapons grade plutonium rather than highly enriched uranium and which were significantly more powerful (as well as more complex to build). In January 2004, Iraq again conducted an atmospheric test and this one produced a yield of 40 kilotons. In September, a test occurred with a boosted fission bomb (boosted by a small amount of deuterium-tritium) which produced a 75 kiloton explosion. The CIA estimated that by that time Iraq possessed 15-25 atomic bombs with yields varying between 10 and 80 kilotons of explosive force.
In one major Arab country the result was a political shift: this was Egypt. President Hosni Mubarak refused to condemn Israel and support the Palestinians and stated that the latter group had only themselves to blame for the civilian casualties the Israelis inflicted. His statements were met with outrage in the Arab world, including in Egypt itself, resulting in demonstrations against his regime. In 2005, Minister of the Interior Habib el-Adly used his security forces to stage a palace coup in which he deposed Hosni Mubarak and installed his 42 year old son Gamal. While the ex-President could receive the death penalty for treason, his son pardoned him and simply kept him under house arrest. Gamal Mubarak assumed a much more anti-Israel stance and began supplying the Intifada with weapons, conspiring with both Iraq and Syria.
Gamal Mubarak made official state visits to Baghdad where he met with Saddam Hussein as well as Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. The three agreed to assume a common platform in the Israeli-Palestine conflict which was based on the following demands: 1) a two-state solution resulting in a Palestinian state consisting of the Gaza Strip, the West Bank and East Jerusalem 2) a return of the Golan Heights to Syria. The three also signed an agreement known as the Baghdad Pact which was a treaty of mutual assistance under which all three would go to war if one of them came under attack, a defence pact obviously directed against Israel. The new Egyptian President returned to Cairo feeling like he was the reincarnation of his namesake, Gamal Abdel Nasser, who is seen as the founder of modern Arab nationalism. Indeed, Arab nationalism experienced an upsurge in the Arab world, as did the popularity of Nasser and his legacy as an opponent of Zionism. Israel, in the meantime, was beginning to feel the heat as the Palestinians turned up the heat of the Second Intifada rather than showing signs of becoming weaker. This was the result of these recent developments in the Arab world, developments which worried Israel because Egypt had gotten much stronger since their last run-in thanks to receiving modern American equipment like the Abrams M1 main battle tank and the F-16 Fighting Falcon (as well as the older F-4 Phantom II and the Mirage 2000 from France).
Saddam Hussein, in the meantime, was turning to address the issue of his succession once and for all. Originally his oldest son was the natural heir apparent to his father simply because convention dictated the oldest son was the successor, but he proved more vicious and venal than even his father could tolerate. In 1988, Uday Hussein had clubbed Saddam’s friend and food taster Kamel Hana Gegeo and had finished him off with an electric carving knife, all of this on a party in honour of Suzanne Mubarak (wife to Hosni Mubarak). The reason was that this man had introduced Saddam to his second wife and his first wife, Uday’s mother, had been less than pleased. Uday took her side in the matter and possibly killed Gegeo as per her wishes; at any rate, she convinced his father to not send him to jail like he originally intended and instead to banish him to Switzerland where he would work in the embassy (he was subsequently kicked out of Switzerland because he got into fights so often). Uday was a regular playboy who partied almost every night, indulging in alcohol and drugs, and satisfying his enormous sexual appetite with around two dozen women a week: prostitutes, mistresses and innocent 14 year old school girls that had been snatched off the streets by his cronies for him to rape. He raped at least one woman on her wedding day after which a maid had to witness the bride’s dead body being carried out of the room. The maid was told to “clean up the mess” – bloodstains, hair and peeled flesh – and not talk about anything she’d seen lest her entire family be killed.
He possessed hundreds of cars and he had no qualms about gobbling up property for palaces and to keep lions, ostriches and other exotic animals as pets. His staff spent hours collecting and counting Uday’s possessions. They kept careful reports on the whereabouts of even mundane items, such as a walking stick, with every receipt checked, approved and signed by Uday himself. He lived at the centre of a freaky and complex universe of ciphers and rituals that he had concocted. He assigned code names for each of the places he frequented: the Boat Club was called 200; the Olympic Committee, 60; al-Abit palace, 111 and hose in his employ were assigned numbers too. Uday changed these codes every few months, and anyone who forgot the new system was beaten, according to a note written by Uday at the bottom of the most recent code sheet. A family friend says Uday had his staff periodically weighed and if someone had gained weight, Uday would assume they were stealing to buy extra food, and he would send them to a “discipline” camp until the pounds were gone. He subjected his personnel to torture and the smallest thing could set him off and induce rage: the internet proved a particularly black day for Iraqis because he used it to look up torture techniques. In his position as head of the Iraqi Olympic Committee, one of his few and unimpressive official positions, he tortured Iraqi athletes who had failed to perform: after the Iraqi national soccer team had lost 4-0 against Japan in 2000, he had the soles of the keeper’s feet beaten. He was no less demanding at parties: his ‘friends’ had to drink obscene amounts of liquor and if one passed out or took a nap, he was thrown into a cage with an aggressive monkey which scratched the unfortunate inebriate’s face. Uday Hussein was vain, narcissistic, cruel, cunning and erratic and proved too radical even for his father, as well as damaging for the regime’s reputation.
Saddam’s younger son was named Qusay and he was plainly the favoured one after the late 1980s. Qusay had been working for his father in small jobs in internal security when his big break came in the form of squashing the “Marsh Arabs” who resisted the draining of their marshes in the early 1990s. His loyalty and ruthlessness proven, Qusay would move on to other assignments. He became commander of the Republican Guard and head of the Special Security Organization, which was part secret police, part security detail for Saddam and part umbrella group for his elite military forces. He too partied, drinking a quarter bottle of $120 dollar per bottle Johnny Walker Blue Label, and he too had mistresses, but was highly discrete about them. Qusay was not above petty power abuses either, having a maid flung into a cell and beaten because she’d giggled about something he had said. Unlike his brother’s personal, arbitrary and spontaneous brand of terror, however, Qusay killed icily and for political aims. He was much more controllable and therefore useful to Saddam whereas the older son was a loose cannon, a threat to whomever’s wife or daughter he came across and capable of killing in a rage over something trivial. That tainted the regime and it was a matter of when, and not if, Uday Hussein would cause a major diplomatic incident of some kind (it was a miracle that he hadn’t already, and that was only because he somewhat feared his father). Qusay was idolatrous of his father, to the point that he had the same brushy moustache and wore the same shoes and suits, while Uday’s relationship with Saddam was often troubled.
By the early 2000s, Qusay was unofficially the heir apparent to his father. In 2004, he was made Minister of the Interior by his father and that greatly improved his power base within the regime: besides controlling the Republican Guard and the Special Security Organization, he now also controlled Iraq’s police forces and the intelligence apparatus. Uday wrote a letter to his father to express his disappointment about being passed over, a letter revealing he despised his younger brother, and Saddam knew what happened to people whom Uday despised. Saddam could have his older son arrested to make him less of a threat, but he was still his son. Therefore, Saddam created a propaganda ministry which Uday was to lead because of the fact that he controlled a number of media outlets already. Saddam also found Uday useful in instilling fear in the Iraqi nuclear scientists which motivated them to work harder and granted him a position in the Iraqi Atomic Energy Committee (IAEC). The jealous older son was thereby provided with a cabinet position and an additional official post, thereby calming him down. Qusay, however, was officially proclaimed by Saddam to be his heir, something that Uday had to accept while attempting to curry favour with his father. He wasn’t particular successful, as exemplified by Qusay being named Deputy Prime Minister in February 2005, replacing Tariq Aziz. Aziz was named Foreign Minister, reassuming the position he had held between 1983 and 1991 and effectively being demoted. Qusay Hussein had finally become the second most powerful man in Iraq while his older brother remained a relatively marginal figure in national politics.
What was now effectively a diarchy of father and son, Saddam and Qusay, was soon faced with a crisis in which confrontation would prove inevitable. The Intifada was still ongoing as of 2005 and its intensity didn’t look like it would decrease, this thanks to support in terms of weapons and finances from Iraq, Syria and Egypt. On April 13th 2005, some Israeli air force F-15s ended up being ordered to attack a column of Palestinian vehicles, a bunch of technicals headed by a T-34 that the insurgents had somehow obtained, fleeing to the Egyptian border. The Israeli F-15s crossed the border by doing so (it is rather surprising that this hadn’t happened any sooner) and the Egyptian commander of the nearest air force basis didn’t hesitate. He ordered a mix of Egyptian F-15s, F-16s and MiG-21s to intercept and that resulted in a dogfight with the Israeli planes eventually withdrawing, though after having inflicted serious losses. Several Egyptian fighter planes crossed into Israeli territory and the result was that two MiG-21s were shot down by anti-aircraft missiles with the pilots escaping by using their ejection seats. The Israeli border incursion was not the first one and Egypt had expressed its annoyance earlier, but it would be the one that would blow up in Israel’s face.
Despite signs marking them as Egyptian, or perhaps because of that, they were taken prisoner and were not released immediately upon Egypt’s demand, but were instead kept for interrogation in an improvised Israeli command post near the border. Rather than wait, Egypt launched a rescue mission with ground forces after identifying with certainty the location of their lost pilots. They ran into an Israeli patrol which they took prisoner, but the rescue operation itself failed and now turned into an Israeli effort to get their patrol back. Low level commanders on both sides proved too untrusting for a prisoner exchange to be arranged and within hours the situation had devolved into skirmishes between Israeli and Egyptian infantry and light armoured vehicles. By now, President Gamal Mubarak had been informed and he decided to be obstinate in the matter out of principle. He sent a complete armour division to the border, provoking an Israeli air strike against several principal transportation hubs to slow the Egyptians down, resulting in several dozen civilian casualties. That blew up the matter beyond negotiation: newsreels across Egypt broadly meted it out to millions of Egyptian families, revealing how “the Jews now spread the terror they rain down every day on the Palestinians to all Arabs”.
Gamal Mubarak ordered a general mobilization of Egypt’s armed forces and plans to directly assist the beleaguered Palestinians were to be put in effect. On April 20th 100.000 men with 700 tanks, 1.000 infantry fighting vehicles, 1.200 artillery guns, and 1.500 armoured personnel carriers under cover from Egyptian Air Force F-16s, F-15s and MiG-21s overran the border between Egypt and the Gaza Strip. Outnumbered Israeli forces were pushed back in fierce urban combat against the Egyptians and Palestinian forces. The Egyptians, now motivated and properly equipped, proved to be a challenge unlike the last time around. Street-to-street fighting took place with the Israelis putting up as many obstacles as possible in an attempt to make the Egyptian advance costly and piecemeal, but they had to deal with a generally hostile population as well.
Syria and Iraq immediately conducted a general mobilization of their own and pledged their support to Egypt and the Palestinian cause. Jordan, though remaining neutral, was pro-Iraq and expressed its political support to the Arab cause by sending a volunteer legion to fight alongside their Iraqi, Syrian and Palestinian brethren. On April 22nd, Syria thundered into the Golan Heights with armoured spearheads of T-55, T-62 and T-72 tanks while the Iraqis provided air cover with MiG-29s, MiG-25s and Su-30s. The Syrians, who deployed seven divisions, soon clashed with the UN peacekeeping mission and overran them. Israeli defences consisted of a few brigades at the time, although Israel was busy marshalling all available forces. Good Iraqi air support evened out the situation and the Iraqi and Israeli air forces cancelled each other out, making the fight on the ground purely a matter of ground forces. The Syrians made a better showing than in 1973, but the Israeli Merkava tank proved superior to the tanks Syria fielded and losses increased exponentially for the Syrians as they advanced further across the Golan Heights. They nonetheless reached Israel proper on April 28th, after six days, albeit in a state of exhaustion. By then, however, the Syrians’ Iraqi allies had been able to deploy two Republican Guard divisions, fanatic and utterly loyal to Saddam Hussein, to the frontline. They were top of the line and endowed with the most recent weapons acquisitions of Iraq, such as all of Iraq’s 75 T-90 tanks. Two regular Iraqi divisions came with them as well, but they would form the secondary attack wave whereas the Republican Guard constituted the primary wave. In the meantime, Hezbollah conducted an offensive from Lebanon on its own initiative.
The advance resumed on April 30th despite UN calls for a ceasefire and a lot of diplomatic hectoring by the major powers, but no one listened. By now, President Al Gore had raised the alertness level of US forces to DEFCON 3 and had dispatched the Sixth Fleet from Naples. The Syrians and Iraqis crossed the border that same day and Safed, about ten kilometres from the border, was reached after two days of intense combat wherein the Israelis valiantly resisted against a vastly numerically superior enemy. It was a vital traffic hub and Israel now feared the collapse of its front, something which would leave the entire north of the country open to invasion. Ehud Barak felt he had no other choice but to push the red button despite the possibility of Iraqi retaliation.
And so the IDF deployed a 10 kiloton tactical nuclear warhead, mainly hitting the Syrians on the Iraqi right flank. It was thought Iraq might not retaliate in kind if their forces weren’t targeted. Secondly, the Iraqis were now at the tip of a salient due to the chaotic Syrian retreat, a salient the Israelis planned to cut off. The belief was that the Arabs could be brought to the negotiation table if the strongest one of them was defeated in the field, but that proved a miscalculation. When the Republican Guard was cut off Saddam decided to rescue his elite forces and simultaneously show he was willing to escalate if need be. He deployed a 25 kiloton nuclear weapon to blow a hole in Israeli lines and extract his forces. President Gore now finally raised the alertness level to DEFCON 2, a level that’s not believed to have been used since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. The UN Security Council finally got its act together because Russia and China stopped stonewalling and a resolution demanding an immediate ceasefire was passed unanimously. Both sides complied on May 5th to prevent the war escalating into full-on mutually assured destruction, but the war was a clear Arab victory, the first one since Israel’s inception in 1948, thereby finally eliminating that trauma from Arab collective memory.
A conference took place in Oslo in May-June 2005 where a final Israeli-Palestinian peace was enforced by the five permanent members of the UN Security Council. The only hassle was the status of East Jerusalem, but considering the advantageous position of the Arab forces Russia and China successfully lobbied for the Arab cause. The Republic of Palestine was proclaimed and it consisted of the Gaza Strip, the West Bank and East Jerusalem. It immediately received diplomatic recognition from the Arab world and the major powers, and Israel grudgingly followed suit. President Gore saw his foreign policy goals achieved, albeit in a costly and violent way, but at least he could comfort himself with the thought that the region now had a lasting peace. His Vice President Bill Clinton received his endorsement and won the 2008 election, extending Democrat rule to twelve years.
Peace had been achieved in the Middle East after more than half a century and Saddam Hussein was now considered the hero of the Arab people, especially the Palestinians. His regime remained despotic and abusive, killing thousands of people who resisted him, but opposition to the liberator of Palestine was momentarily discredited and his dictatorship was allowed to persist. Even Shi’ites could now agree that Saddam’s rule had produced something good. Saddam Hussein could now die happily with that knowledge. The Iraqi dictator died in 2012 at age 75 of a heart attack after an iron fist rule that had spanned 33 years from 1979 to 2012 and had been turbulent to say the least. His son Qusay Hussein was sworn in as the new President of Iraq who would lead Iraq into the 21st century.
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One wonders what would happen to Iraq under the rule of Qusay Hussain. Or indeed, what would happen to the rest of the Middle East now that the Palestinian question seems to be more or less solved. Thanks for that enjoyable TL.
That was absolutely amazing Onkel Willie! I loved every second of it, and I don't say that about a lot of TLs! Although I don't know enough about the contemporary Middle East, and don't have enough time to do it myself, someone should definitely make a spin-off!
Yeah, a spin-off would be great.
Ah, yes. Here's the modern Middle East:
Very well-written. Question, will the Gulf War be featured in this timeline?
Maybe it's an alternate timeline where they can be?
Maybe it's an alternate timeline where they can be?
It already was, as the Gulf Crisis. Iraq stopped short of conquering South Kuwait, where the people are, so the Western powers didn't intervene and Saddam got to keep North Kuwait and its oil.