Wi: Successful Yom kipper war, Would Sadat be able to merge with his neighbors

So what would happen in the event Israel is destroyed but the Samson option is used and most major Arab cities are ashes?

For example if Cairo, Baghdad, and Mecca are hit than the heart of the Arab world has been destroyed.
 
So what would happen in the event Israel is destroyed but the Samson option is used and most major Arab cities are ashes?

For example if Cairo, Baghdad, and Mecca are hit than the heart of the Arab world has been destroyed.

No if Israel goes Samson Egypt ceases to exists destroy the Aswan dam and you flood the Nile were some 70% of Egypt's pop resides plus throw in a nuke or two on Cairo and Alexandria
 
IMHO Israel probably would not want to hit Mecca. The Samson option would be utilized to STOP the Arab armies from overrunning Israel, before the major population centers had been occupied. If there are appropriate choke points or concentrations a couple of tac strikes might be used, and between strategic strikes and tac strikes the hope would be the IDF could push Arab armies back past the 1967 prewar borders or beyond. Since the plan would be for Israel to continue, hitting Mecca would be something that would be seen as gratuitous and further inflame international opinion and would piss off Muslims in non-Arab countries who might very well not care much about the "Palestinian cause". Of course, if the Israelis see overrun as inevitable, maybe gas has been used on civilians and so forth, then Mecca becomes a revenge target. I would even go so far as to suggest that hitting Saudi and other oil fields (a ground burst followed by an airburst to blow the fallout back down on the oil field for long term contamination) as a middle finger to the world that stood by (again) in the face of a Jewish Holocaust could happen.

In the "stop the war" Samson option IMHO ground zero for most nukes would be military bases, now if they were next to a city too bad. Damascus, Baghdad, Cairo would be hit with GZ being the defense ministry, and of course bye-bye Aswan Dam. Alexandria and Latakia naval bases go away as examples. In the stop the war scenario the Israelis want to destroy Arab military-industrial capabilities so another attack is a long way off. Once you get to revenge, all bets are off - city busting, Mecca, one one the Suez Canal and so forth. The only country that might get off scot-free in the region is Iran, which in 1973 was still under the Shah and not participating against Israel.
 
Isn't a successful Yom Kippur war by definition the total defeat and annihilation of the Jewish people?
I don't think so. From what I've read, Egypt's plans were to grab the canal, make a impenetrable defensive 'box', and wait for Israel to come to the negotiating table. Syria wanted to grab the Golan Heights and apparently move down into Israel proper, mostly with the goal of forcing Israel to return the GH, not 'conquer all of Israel'. Jordan... didn't want any part of the war. They did end up sending a lone armored unit to Syria when the latter was desperate and on the ropes, but nothing else really. Egypt and Syria went into war to get back the territory they'd lost in the 6-Day War and regain some of the honor they'd lost in that one too.
 

CalBear

Moderator
Donor
Monthly Donor
Realistically no.

If Egypt had been 100% successful in the October War Sadat would STILL have been seen as an appeaser by most of the Palestinian hardliners, indeed by most hardliners in the region, simply because he didn't drive the Israelis into the Sea. While that was, AFAIK, never Sadat's goal, that was (and is) the only acceptable outcome to way too many member of the PLO (as is the case with Hamas today).

Sadat almost literally couldn't win.
 
Top