Neuvostoliitto, purkalla pystyssä pysyvä Pakistan ja Israel ovat myös kategorisoitavissa ydinaseita omaaviksi häiriköiksi. Jälkimmäisestä voi toki olla monta mieltä, mutta aikoinaan pistivät heittona ilmaan että paskoisivat esim. euroopan surutta jos valtio tulee uhatuksi.
Muistetaan nyt kuitenkin että ydinasevaltioista Israel on ainoa joka on ollut lähellä tuhoutumista, todella lähellä, ja silti pidättäytyivät laukaisemasta, mahdollisesti pelastaen koko siviilisaation. Joten en laskisi sitä häiriköksi sen jälkeen. Siitä osittain on tietenkin kiittäminen USAa joka tiesi että Israelin tunnit käyvät vähiin ilman ydinaseen käyttöä, ja vastapainoksi käynnistivät valtavan konventionaalisen kaluston siirron jolla Israel sai rivinsä ehjiksi ja vyöryttämään takaisin arabeja. Mutta moni muu valtio olisi antanut käskyn ydinaseen käyttöön tilanteessa jossa olemassaolo oli vähintään uhattuna, ja tappio todennäköisempi ilman ydinaseiden käyttöä.
THE LAST NUCLEAR MOMENT
Only in the early morning of Oct. 6 did the Israeli leadership finally understand that it was facing a full-scale attack by Egypt and Syria that very evening. (And even then they had the estimated time of the attack wrong; the war actually started at 2 p.m.) By the next morning, the Egyptian Army had crossed the Suez Canal and columns of Syrian tanks had penetrated deep into the Golan Heights. Hundreds of Israeli soldiers had died in a heroic but hopeless effort to save small, isolated strongholds along Israel's borders.
The hope was that with the arrival of Israel's reserve troops, the military situation would turn around. While this happened to some extent on the Syrian front, things were still a disaster at the Suez.
Israel's first attempted counterattack on Oct. 8 was a miserable failure.
At the end of that day, Defense Minister Moshe Dayan was heard murmuring about ''the end of the Third Kingdom.'' The commander of the air force, Gen. Benny Peled, warned that with the rate of losses his forces were enduring, within a week Israel might no longer have any effective air power. It was arguably the darkest day in the history of the Israeli Army.
It was in the early hours of Oct. 9 that senior Israeli military leaders brought up the idea of using Israel's doomsday weapons. By that time Israel had lost some 50 combat planes and more than 500 tanks -- 400 on the Egyptian battlefield alone. According to a new book by the Israeli journalist Ronen Bergman,
when the prime minister's top military aide heard those ideas, he begged the army's deputy chief of staff, tears in his eyes, ''You must save the people of Israel from these madmen.''
Later that morning, at the end of a somber briefing before the war cabinet, Mr. Dayan raised the nuclear option with the prime minister. No detailed record has surfaced as to what exactly Mr. Dayan proposed, but we know he gave an overall assessment that
Israel was fast approaching the point of ''last resort.'' And certainly Mr. Dayan wanted the United States to take notice that things had reached such a point. That he meant using nuclear weapons (albeit in coded language, as at the time nobody dared call them by name) was confirmed in an interview last week by Naftali Lavie, who was Mr. Dayan's spokesman during the war.
This set the stage for a moment that defined Golda Meir's other legacy, her nuclear legacy. Supported by other members of her war cabinet -- notably the ministers Israel Galili and Yigal Allon -- she refused to concede to Mr. Dayan's gloom and doom rhetoric. Her idea, instead, was to fly secretly to Washington and, as Henry Kissinger later wrote, ''for an hour plead with President Nixon.''
Mr. Kissinger flatly rejected that idea, explaining such a rushed visit ''could reflect only either hysteria or blackmail.'' By that time,
American intelligence had signs that Israel had put its Jericho missiles, which could be fitted with nuclear warheads, on high alert (the Israelis had done so in an easily detectible way, probably to sway the Americans into preventive action).
Mr. Kissinger instead started to arrange air supply to Israel, and within three days a tremendous United States airlift to Israel was in action. The tide was turned. By Oct. 21 the Israelis were within 20 miles of Damascus and had crossed the Suez Canal, encircling the Egyptian Third Army. A permanent cease-fire was established within a few days.
Like John F. Kennedy a decade earlier, Golda Meir had stared into the nuclear abyss and found a path back to sanity. Mrs. Meir's decision not to accept Mr. Dayan's pessimism not only avoided a nuclear catastrophe, it demonstrated to the world that Israel was a responsible and trusted nuclear custodian
Edes GMD ei käsittääkseni ole yhtä tehokas järjestelmä ICBM kohteita vastaan, ja silti yhteisprojektista vain Israelilla on nuita. Ja Israel aloitti juuri jo Arrow 3 seuraajan kehittämisen vaikka kolmonenkin saatu vasta riviin. Ajatellen noita PKn tapaisia roistovaltioita joita vastaan tulisi kyetä torjuntaan vähintään 50 mannertenvälistä vastaan mieluusti tuolla Arrowin 99% tehokkuudella.