It has been a couple of years since I last read through the material and confused the Six Day War with the Yom Kippur War. Another correction is that while the

It has been a couple of years since I last read through the material and confused the Six Day War with the Yom Kippur War. Another correction is that while the Soviet Union was supplying Syrian and Egyptian forces it wasn't a war that the Soviet Union instigated (unlike the Six Day War). For those who don't want to wade through the bulk of the material (which is still fascinating) the relevant history begins is Section III of the document and relevant sections condensed below: Defense Minister Moshe Dayan, obviously not at his best at a press briefing, was, according to Time magazine, rattled enough to later tell the prime minister that “this is the end of the third temple,” referring to an impending collapse of the state of Israel. “Temple” was also the code word for nuclear weapons... The Israelis assembled 13 twenty-kiloton atomic bombs. U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger was notified of the alert several hours later on the morning of 9 October.... Israeli commandos flew to Fort Benning, Georgia to train with the new American TOW anti-tank missiles and return with a C-130 Hercules aircraft full of them in time for the decisive Golan battle. American commanders in Germany depleted their stocks of missiles, at that time only shared with the British and West Germans, and sent them forward to Israel. Thus started the subtle, opaque use of the Israeli bomb to ensure that the United States kept its pledge to maintain Israel's conventional weapons edge over its foes. There is significant anecdotal evidence that Henry Kissinger told President of Egypt, Anwar Sadat, that the reason for the U.S. airlift was that the Israelis were close to “going nuclear.”