In the first four chapters of this series we examined   the circumstances that led to the escalation of the 1973 Arab-   Israeli conflict from a regional struggle between mutually hostile neighbors into global nuclear war. In this installment we’ll see how the Israelis, the Arabs, the United States and the Soviet Union were racked by upheaval in the aftermath of the worldwide nuclear holocaust.

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It took until just after 6:00 AM U.S. Eastern Daylight Time on the morning of October 7th for U.S. authorities to re-establish communications with the Soviet government. Part of this was due to the simple fact that the destruction of both Washington and Moscow by ICBM strikes meant the “hotline” between the superpowers had been knocked out of commission and would inevitably take a great deal of effort to restore. There was also the matter of radioactive particles in the atmosphere interfering with the transmission of phone and radio signals across vast distances. Last but not least, locating the senior CPSU leadership-- or more accurately what was left of it--was a highly daunting task given the utter chaos which had descended on Russia and the naturally secretive mentality of the Communist ruling circle that had been part of Soviet politics since the days of Lenin and Trotsky.

And even when President Nixon finally did get a link with General Secretary Brezhnev, the Soviet leader wasn’t entirely sure at first that Nixon was on the level in wanting to arrange a cease-fire between the United States and the Soviet Union. The initial reaction among Brezhnev’s cabinet to Nixon’s call was that this might be a distraction to keep them off-balance while the U.S. inflicted a final crushing blow on the Rodina. It wasn’t until Secretary of State Henry Kissinger spoke directly to the Soviet premier that Brezhnev was at last convinced the American president was serious about wanting to end the hostilities that had pushed the world to the brink of apocalypse.

The American president and the Soviet premier spent the next two and a half hours walking a diplomatic tightrope in their efforts to achieve a workable cease-fire. One wrong or misinterpreted phrase could spell disaster for all parties concerned. To facilitate the peace-making process, both superpowers stood down their respective nuclear arsenals while the negotiations were in progress; one of the key planks of Nixon’s cease-fire offer was a proposal for both the United States and the Soviet Union to reduce and eventually eliminate their respective remaining nuclear warhead inventories.

In the Middle East, where the chain of events leading to World War III had started, the situation had deteriorated into something close to anarchy. The Egyptian and Syrian governments, having been effectively decapitated, were in no position to do anything to keep their panicked citizens under control. Even the Israeli government, which had managed to remain largely intact thanks to its evacuation from Tel Aviv before Soviet warheads obliterated that city, had its hands full trying to calm down a panicked citizenry in the face of a catastrophe unprecedented in human history. Those kibbutzim that had somehow miraculously managed to survive in the face of the early Arab incursions into Israel and the outbreak of global war between the U.S. and Soviet blocs were hanging on by only the slenderest of threads as they, along with the rest of the world, awaited some signal that the atomic nightmare into which they’d been plunged was finally nearing an end.

That signal finally came around 9:00 AM U.S. Eastern Daylight Time when President Nixon made a radio broadcast from Mount Weather to announce that a cease-fire pact had been reached with the Soviets and would officially take effect at 12:00 PM that afternoon. All surviving U.S. and Soviet military forces worldwide were to stand down and U.N. observers would oversee the withdrawal of the two nations’ respective remaining conventional combat troops from the positions they had held at the time the cease-fire accord was reached. The global holocaust was over; now it was time to begin trying to salvage what was left of human civilization from the ruins.

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Since the end of World War III there has been endless debate as to whether or not the Israeli Defense Forces could have won the 1973 October War by conventional means. The prevailing wisdom in most quarters is that the Israelis could not have recovered from the shock of the initial Arab attacks against their homeland on Yom Kippur and that Egypt, Syria, and Jordan would have eventually overwhelmed the beleaguered IDF-- or at least succeeded in fighting it to a stalemate. A highly vocal group of dissenters has challenged this belief, saying the Israelis could have snatched victory from the jaws of defeat as they did in 1948 and 1956. As most of the IDF’s archives were lost in the Soviet nuclear strike that destroyed Tel Aviv, this debate will never be conclusively settled; nonetheless the argument reflects the fascination the October War still holds for historians and ordinary citizens alike decades after the nuclear holocaust that destroyed the Soviet Union and ravaged much of the United States.

The devastation wrought when the ’73 Arab-Israeli conflict escalated into World War III was so horrific that in some cases, to borrow a phrase from the late Nikita Khrushchev, the living envied the dead. For some countries the escalation proved to be a nightmarish event even if they were never hit by nuclear weapons at all; North Vietnam, a key Soviet ally in Southeast Asia before the October War broke out, collapsed into chaos amidst fears that the nuclear horror might soon be visited on Vietnamese soil. Ho Chi Minh’s long-cherished dream of a reunified Vietnam under socialist rule died in the wake of the nuclear confrontation between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R; on both sides of the 17th parallel anarchy became the prevalent condition of life for the Vietnamese people, with much of the country turning into what one Australian journalist described as “a killing field”. To this very day Vietnam has still not succeeded in putting back together even the semblance of a working national government. Indeed, the Vietnamese people themselves are in danger of becoming extinct-- years of famine, disease, natural disaster and a seemingly endless civil war between a multitude of warlords have taken and continue to take a severe toll on Vietnam’s human population.

While Australia and New Zealand were physically left nearly untouched by the horrors of World War III, they too suffered from its consequences. Indeed, these countries would prove to be the proverbial “canaries in the coal mine” for the entire Southern Hemisphere as they were among the first nations to experience the social, environmental, and economic catastrophes which would eventually befall millions of people in Asia, Africa, South America, and the Pacific Rim. While it would take a year for them to experience the nightmares already being visited on the Northern Hemisphere, when disaster did come it struck full force.

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The destruction of Moscow in the last hours of World War III was simply the first link in the chain of events that would climax with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1974. Grief and sorrow over the massive casualties the Soviet people had sustained in the course of the nuclear showdown with the United States turned into anger at the Brezhnev government for letting the catastrophe happen; consequently the CPSU’s grip on power began to slip away. It started with a handful of demonstrations over delays in the delivery of emergency food relief supplies, then escalated to mass protests over the Brezhnev regime’s conscription of what able-bodied men had survived the holocaust to be workers in the postwar decontamination and recovery effort, and in the end became an orgy of internal violence that rivaled-- and at times surpassed --the worst bloodshed of the civil war which had gripped the country in the wake of the 1917 October Revolution.

Getting accurate information about Russia’s internal affairs was a tricky proposition even before the nuclear holocaust that destroyed the Soviet Union; today it is a nearly impossible task. Nonetheless, a vivid example of the swiftness with which Soviet authority crumbled is available to us by way of a Swedish newspaper article published in the first week of February 1974. That article, published in English as a two-part feature in Time a month later, described an incident in which a government labor draft team visited a town near the Pripet Marshes for their weekly roundup of men to serve decontamination duty; before the team had even gotten out of their cars they came under attack from snipers firing from buildings in the town’s main square. As the draft team was attempting to find shelter from the sniper attack, they were seized by a group of vigilantes and savagely beaten with everything from fists to steel pipes. The draft team leader died of a fatal skull fracture while two of his colleagues were hanged in the town square; the rest of the team barely managed to escape with their lives, and even then they spent a good deal of time looking over their shoulders in fear that their attackers might still be pursuing them. Within just six weeks after that article went to press, anti-government riots were an almost hourly event in those Soviet cities not destroyed by nuclear missiles and Red Army soldiers were beginning to openly mutiny against their officers for the first time since the end of the 1918-21 civil war. The Brezhnev regime’s grip on power, already tenuous in the first place as a result of all the carnage from World War III, would soon be broken altogether as popular rage against the CPSU boiled over and the masses decided the time had arrived to consign the Communist regime to what its own founder had once dubbed “the dustbin of history”.

On May 18th, 1974 an angry mob stormed the emergency bunker where Leonid Brezhnev and his cabinet had been sheltering since Moscow was destroyed; to date, few details about the mob’s actions have reached the West, but the information that is available suggests they had to have received some measure of help from dissident elements among the KGB security detail guarding the bunker. Within less than three hours after the mob initially broke into the bunker, Brezhnev and his senior deputies were all dead-- Brezhnev shot and killed by a hastily formed firing squad, his top cabinet ministers strangled by hangman’s nooses.

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Richard Nixon’s fate wasn’t quite as gruesome as Leonid Brezhnev’s had been, but he too would eventually be ousted from power as a result of popular anger among his countrymen. This anger toward Nixon on the part of his fellow Americans was fueled not only by the horrific blows the United States had taken during World War III but also by a series of persistent rumors that the President had employed less-than-ethical means to secure his re-election in 1972. A pair of ex-Washington Post correspondents named Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, who’d been lucky enough to be out of D.C. before the nation’s capital was destroyed by Soviet nuclear warheads, had learned the President’s re-election team was involved in a break-in at the Democratic National Committee’s old headquarters in the now-vaporized Watergate Hotel and were conducting what amounted to a two-man board of inquiry in an attempt to determine just how deep that involvement ran.

   Their task was hardly an easy one given that much of the White House archive had perished along with the White House itself when Soviet missiles obliterated Washington. However, by means of round- the-clock research and clandestine contacts with a presidential aide known only as “Deep Throat”-- and sometimes just plain luck-- they gradually managed to piece together some semblance of the full story behind the break-in. Even before the 1973 Arab-Israeli conflict had mushroomed into World War III Woodward and Bernstein had been dogged in their efforts to confirm the White House’s role in the break-in conspiracy, and as Nixon’s political fortunes continued to sour the two reporters found many people willing-- if not eager-- to shred the tissue of secrets the Nixon Administration had attempted to put over the Watergate plot. Although for obvious reasons the full account of what happened the night of the break-in can never be known, what has come to light was revealed largely through the work of the Woodward- Bernstein team; those revelations would turn out to be the straw that broke the back of the Nixon Administration.

In January of 1974, just under eight months after Leonid Brezhnev was executed, the U.S. Senate-- now headquartered in an underground bunker complex in the Rocky Mountains --formally convened impeachment proceedings against the President. Concurrent with these proceedings a certain independent Congressman from Vermont with heavily socialist views started pushing for Nixon to be put on trial for war crimes in light of the millions of deaths his decision to use nuclear weapons on the Soviet Union had caused. The war crimes tribunal would ultimately be canceled as a result of Nixon’s death from cardiac arrest, but he still paid a heavy price for the misdeeds he’d committed while he was in office; on February 2nd, 1974 the impeachment panel convicted him on twenty criminal counts including perjury, obstruction of justice, and abuse of presidential authority and voted unanimously to remove Nixon from the presidency.

     The new chief executive, former Vice-President and Michigan U.S. representative Gerald R. Ford, was inheriting a nation that was on the verge of coming apart at the seams. The racial and social tensions of the ‘60s had been newly exacerbated by the hardships World War III had inflicted on American society; America’s medical infrastructure was in ruins, opening the door for a resurgence of diseases once thought gone forever or least brought under control. Casualty estimates from all of the epidemics which swept the continental United States are still hard to come by even now, but the most reliable data from that era suggests at least a quarter of the post-World War III population of the United States succumbed to typhus or smallpox between June of 1974 and March of 1975. And at the same time old plagues were resurfacing, new ones were being introduced into the American medical lexicon-- in July of 1975 doctors working at a Red Cross refugee camp east of what had once been San Francisco diagnosed three of the camp’s residents as having been infected with a mutated form of respiratory virus previously seen only in birds. Officially it was designated as Avian Immunodeficency Sickness, but the American public would soon come to know it better by its acronym: AIDS.

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As bad as things had gotten in the United States and Russia in the wake of World War III, they were exponentially worse in Egypt. The fragile provisional government that had assumed power after the demise of Anwar Sadat and his cabinet in the nuclear strike on Cairo had to contend not only with crippling famine and disease but was also beset by an Islamic fundamentalist insurgency intent on making the country a theocracy. In turn the fundamentalists themselves were plagued by a group of monarchists who wanted to restore the old royal government which had been abolished by the Nasser revolution of 1952. This three- way civil war made it nearly impossible to accomplish any significant reconstruction work, and the country’s already badly ruined social and economic infrastructure crumbled still further. By the end of 1974 the Egyptian agricultural sector-- never very robust to begin with-- had totally collapsed and five out of every six Egyptian children suffered from malnutrition. Egyptians of all ages were suffering from a variety of physical and psychological ailments; one of the few doctors in the country who survived the nuclear holocaust described the situation as “a devil’s bouquet”.

In the early months of 1975 the post-nuclear holocaust Egyptian government, fragile enough to begin with, was pushed to its breaking point by three calamities which befell it in rapid succession. First came the Port Said mutiny, in which the crew of the Egyptian navy’s lone remaining destroyer refused direct orders from their captain to open fire on a small fishing vessel which had ventured into the Suez Canal in direct violation of Cairo’s edict closing the canal to all but the most essential naval and economic recovery operations on its waters. The second was the Al Kharga riot, in which government troops were forced to use lethal means to break up a crowd of demonstrators who had thrown stones at them when they arrived in town as part of a security detail guarding revenue agents who’d been sent to collect a recovery tax from the town’s citizens.

The third, and perhaps most catastrophic, of these events was a sandstorm that hit the Sinai Peninsula three weeks after the riots at Al Kharga. Before it finished running its course it had brought most of the remnants of Egypt’s land transport system to a screeching halt and rendered the Suez Canal impassable, essentially severing Egypt’s economic jugular vein. When that happened the provisional government’s last hope for resolving its problems was obliterated and the country descended into anarchy....