In the previous five chapters of this series we examined the circumstances causing the escalation of the 1973 Arab-Israeli conflict from a regional fight between mutually hostile neighbors into global nuclear war; the upheaval that racked the United States, Russia, Israel, and the Arab countries in the war’s aftermath; the final collapse of Egypt’s provisional postwar government; and the resignation of Golda Meir as Israeli prime minister. In this final installment of the series we’ll examine how the nuclear showdown between the superpowers devastated Europe and speculate on how both it and the Middle East might look today had those continents been spared the horrors of World War III. .

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With the possible exception of Egypt, few places on earth were subjected to greater devastation in the nuclear fires of World War III than continental Europe. With the notable exceptions of Stockholm and Bern, hardly a single one of the old national capitals of Europe would survive the U.S.-Soviet atomic confrontation; indeed, the destruction of two of those capitals, London and Warsaw, would trigger the demise of the NATO and Warsaw Pact alliances. Some of the member countries of those coalitions would cease to exist altogether, the most tragic case of this phenomenon being the virtual annihilation of Belgium by Soviet nuclear warheads.

Ever since the end of World War III, one burning question has haunted historians, scholars, and ordinary citizens alike: what would Europe be like today if the nuclear holocaust had never happened? One possible answer to that question came in 1999 when a group of history scholars in Canada met in Toronto to publish the results of a year- long study of surviving archives from the governments which had been in power in Europe before World War III. Based on the information they obtained in the course of their research, the scholars concluded that if the continent had not been devastated by nuclear holocaust, Europe would have spent much of the 1980s and ‘90s enjoying an era of social tranquility and economic prosperity. Some members of the panel went so far as to suggest that by the year 2000 Germany might have achieved reunification and the major European economic powers of the pre-World War III era established a common regional currency. One particularly bold soul among them even dared to posit the idea of the Soviet Union breaking up in this timeframe and becoming fifteen separate nations. Of course, we can never know how realistic this scenario would have turned out to be, but it does give one considerable food for thought.

Given the totalitarian nature of the CPSU in the final months of the Soviet Union’s existence and the paranoid streak that has been one of the main features of Russian political life since at least the days of Catherine the Great, it is hard to suggest anyway with even a bit of certainty that the country could have evolved from its Communist system of government without internal upheavals similar to the chaos which racked the USSR in the aftermath of World War III. A former KGB officer named Vladimir Putin, one of the few such individuals to have survived the nuclear fire and civil chaos that destroyed his country, told British scholars in 1988 that it most likely would have taken an armed uprising to topple the Communist regime in Moscow whether World War III had happened or not. He also had little faith in the Canadian historians’ optimistic assessment of how the path of European history would have unfolded after 1973 in the absence of a global nuclear war.

Putin is not the only one to suggest a violent end to the Soviet Union was inevitable; a onetime air force officer-turned-university professor, Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, asserted in a 2003 book on the collapse of the CPSU that the thermonuclear holocaust which overtook both Russia and the United States during World War III only served to accelerate a process of decay he believed would have resulted in the bloody destruction of the CPSU even if not one single atomic bomb had been detonated. His central thesis was that decades of living under a succession of repressive Leninist oligarchies had made the people of Russia so embittered about their lot that they saw no way of changing it other than an armed rebellion like the type that had overthrown the last remnants of the Tsarist regime in 1917.

The most recent book to take on this topic, published in 2008 by Oxford Museum of the Atomic Wars chief curator David Cameron, holds just the opposite view. Cameron’s book, titled The Velvet Revolution, argues that the dissident movement that existed inside the U.S.S.R. at the time World War III broke out was growing in numbers and prestige and could, given time, have spurred a wave of political reforms which would have paved the way for a peaceful transition to a post-Communist political system in Russia and its former satellite republics. Though most other historians strongly dispute this conclusion, most everyday readers tend to agree with it-- few if any people can stomach the idea of global nuclear war being inevitable, least of all the citizens of a Britain whose pound sterling now barely retains a tenth of its former value and whose citizens are still traumatized by the annihilation of two of its greatest cities.

For that matter Cameron’s book has sparked a firestorm of debate among historians worldwide about whether or not the Soviet Union’s dissolution could have been managed peacefully. Shortly after the 1999 historians’ conference in Canada, a group of Cold War academic specialists from the United States’ leading colleges and universities met in Austin, Texas to ponder for themselves the question of whether or not the orgy of violence which marked the collapse of the U.S.S.R. was inevitable. Unsurprisingly, none of the participants could agree on that point. (In fact, the seminar nearly broke up a day ahead of schedule because of repeated bitter arguments between two of the principal professors sponsoring the event.)

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One of the most popular and talked-about counterfactual novels published since the end of World War III is Robert L. Conroy’s 1995 AD(Year 22 Post-Holocaust) epic The Arab Spring. Arab Spring tells the story of a pan-Arabic grassroots political movement that starts in Tunisia and gradually spreads across the Middle East in response to popular discontent with the authoritarian regimes dominating the region. While in some respects the book is not entirely realistic-- for example, the notion of Egypt’s Anwar Sadat traveling to Israel for a summit with Menachem Begin is at best wishful thinking-- its story is a reflection of the hopes and dreams that perished around the world in the wake of the nuclear inferno which ravaged Israel, Egypt, and Syria in the early stages of World War III. An ex-Israeli Defense Forces general named Ehud Barak, who emigrated to Argentina in the aftermath of the war, recently described Conroy’s book as “the epitaph for an age”.

Who knows for sure what kind of world we’d be living in today if the 1973 Arab-Israeli war had remained a conventional conflict instead of escalating into global nuclear war? The Soviet Union might still be in existence today, or it might have broken up into separate nations. Europe might have achieved some measure of continental solidarity, or it might yet be still divided between NATO and the Warsaw Pact. Israel might have kept on fighting with its Arab neighbors, or it might have (though it’s difficult to imagine how) reached some kind of armistice with them. But one thing is beyond doubt: it would be a world without the physical scars and environmental mutilation inflicted on the earth after the first nuclear explosions over the Sinai Peninsula.