In the previous five 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 and the upheaval which racked the United States, Russia, Israel, and the Arab states in the war’s aftermath. In this chapter we’ll look back at the final collapse of the provisional postwar Egyptian government and the resignation of Golda Meir as Israeli prime minister .

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The provisional Egyptian government had been sitting on top of a political and social land mine since the end of World War III; with the Al Kharga riots and the Sinai sandstorm which followed them, that land mine finally detonated. The masses believed the government had let them down at a time when they desperately needed its aid, and this belief would fuel overwhelming rage among them that would explode into an orgy of internal violence powerful enough to destroy the government altogether. Muslim fundamentalists, in an about-face from their former reluctance to working with secular political parties, banded together with Egypt’s two largest secular opposition factions to call for the dissolution of the provisional government. The government’s response to this was to deploy its security forces for a massive crackdown on on all opposition parties whether they were secular or domestic.

With that crackdown the provision government effectively sealed its own doom. In March of 1975, barely two months after the Port Said mutiny, mobs stormed the provisional government’s headquarters and put the entire cabinet to death in an orgy of destruction which also left many of the rioters dead. The riot climaxed with the torching of just about every building that could possibly be burned; also destroyed in the riot were a number of critical documents which, in years to come, might have helped scholars get a fuller view of the course of events in early post-World War III Egyptian history. The destruction of these papers represents an incalculable loss to students of the nuclear era. Had they survived, they could have shed critical light on some of the more controversial decisions made by the provisional government before it collapsed.

The provisional government’s demise left a political vacuum in Egypt that would take decades to fill. The Egyptian armed forces split into rival factions battling not only with each other but also with the fundamentalist and royalist blocs still trying to take over Egypt. In the course of this fighting the city of Port Said was shelled into rubble, and today exists only as a scorched ruin; one of the earliest and most notable casualties of this spate of destruction was onetime Egyptian army chief of staff Saad El Shazli, the lone senior military official from the old regime to have escaped the atomic holocaust that annihilated his peers when Israeli missiles vaporized Cairo. As defense minister for the post-World War III provisional government of Egypt, General Shazli had tried desperately to restore order in Port Said only to fall prey to a fundamentalist sniper who shot him clean through the back of his brain. There have long been rumors that he was deliberately lured into an ambush by one of his own officers, but no evidence has yet been recovered to confirm this thesis; furthermore, the present-day Egyptian government has few if any resources to commit to the kind of investigation which would be necessary to uncover such evidence. So the truth about the circumstances leading up to Shazli’s death will most likely remain a mystery for the foreseeable future.

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What is not a mystery is the departure of Golda Meir from her office as Israeli prime minister. The nuclear holocaust which had ensued in the wake of the first IDF missile strikes against Egypt and Syria had transformed her from heroine to pariah in the blink of an eye; many of her critics, particularly among remained of the far left in the Israeli political spectrum, deemed her to be personally responsible for the destruction of Tel Aviv. In every Israeli city and town which hadn’t been obliterated by nuclear warheads, massive demonstrations were held demanding Meir resign from office at once. What was left of the IDF teetered on the verge of mutiny at the idea of taking any further orders from her. Even within her own cabinet there were those who suggested that it might be prudent for her to step aside in favor of a new prime minister with less political or moral baggage.

At first Meir resisted the demands that she step down as prime minister, insisting that such a move would send a dangerous signal of weakness to Israel’s enemies abroad. But when her own army chief of staff warned that the remnants of the IDF were on the verge of civil war, she reluctantly reversed her stance, and on January 18th, 1976 Meir made a live broadcast over the Kol Israel radio service to tell her fellow countrymen she was retiring “for the good of our nation”. Moshe Dayan, longtime Israeli defense minister and a hero of the Six- Day War, was appointed head of an interim caretaker government. In his first official act as the new Israeli head of state he directed every able-bodied Israeli male not already serving in the IDF or in post-World War III recovery work to assemble in what he described as “emergency civil defense squads” to help restore order within the war- devastated country.

Dayan’s resolute leadership in the days immediately after he assumed office was a critical factor in Israel’s long-term recovery from the nuclear horrors it had experienced during World War III. The fact that Israel managed to survive as a nation in circumstances that could have easily destroyed it is a testament to the effectiveness of Dayan’s skills as prime minister; when in August of 1977 Israel held its first post-World War III national elections, Dayan was returned to the prime minister’s post by a wide margin. It was on Dayan’s watch, in fact, that Israel finally established diplomatic relations with an Arab nation, signing a peace treaty with Jordan in 1985. Dayan would finally retire from the political arena in 1990, but not before he’d scored another diplomatic triumph and normalized diplomatic relations with Egypt as well. In the post-Dayan era his former defense minister, Shimon Peres, would open negotiations with the provisional government of Syria on the question of returning the Golan Heights.

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As physically devastated as Israel was, however, it was still in better shape than many of the European countries which had once made up NATO and the Warsaw Pact. There was hardly a single country on the continent that hadn’t experienced at least some form of nuclear war- related trauma; 90 percent of Europe’s capital cities, in fact, had been wiped off the map as a consequence of the U.S.-Soviet nuclear exchange. London, Paris, Berlin, Brussels, the Hague, Warsaw, Prague, Budapest, Vienna, Warsaw, Istanbul, Bucharest, Belgrade-- all were victims of the nuclear fire. Even cities which weren’t destroyed by nuclear warheads experienced immense suffering: the French port of Cherbourg, to cite just one example, lost more than half of its pre- war population to radiation poisoning in the months after World War III ended. In the Romanian industrial city of Timisoara an already serious environmental pollution crisis became exponentially worse as dust and debris thrown into the upper atmosphere by multiple nuclear blasts not only blotted out the sun but also made it much harder to breathe...