On March 27, 1979, Saddam Hussein, the de facto ruler and soon-to-be president of Iraq, laid out his vision for a long, grinding war against Israel in a private meeting of high-level Baathist officials. Iraq, he explained, would seek to obtain a nuclear weapon from "our Soviet friends," use the resulting deterrent power to counteract Israeli threats of nuclear retaliation, and thereby enable a "patient war"—a war of attrition—that would reclaim Arab lands lost in the Six Day War of 1967. As Saddam put it, nuclear weapons would allow Iraq to "guarantee the long war that is destructive to our enemy, and take at our leisure each meter of land and drown the enemy with rivers of blood."
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