QWhy was the Israeli A-4 Skyhawk carrying a nuclear bomb?
AThe nuclear bomb was intended to repulse the invading Syrian Army which was making threatening gains into Israeli-held territory. The Skyhawk is destroyed by a surface-to-air missile (SAM), and the bomb crashes into the desert where it is buried by sand over the years. In the novel, four Israeli Skyhawks were each armed with a nuclear bomb. When the Syrian Army advance is halted in the Golan Heights, the necessity for the strike is averted. But chaos on the airfield, which involved a damaged F-4E Phantom igniting leaking fuel upon landing, result in a nuclear bomb being accidentally left on the fourth Skyhawk during the rearming process. All four Skyhawks are lost in an attack on a Syrian SAM battery. The unarmed nuclear bomb broke loose from the fourth Skyhawk as it disintegrated in mid-air, burying itself meters from the home of a Druze farmer. It is obtained by PFLP (Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine) terrorists years later.
QWhy didn't Israel try to recover the lost nuclear bomb? Don't they control the Golan Heights?
AIt is never explained in the film. In the novel, the Skyhawk was lost within Syrian territory east of the Purple Line (now a United Nations buffer zone), close to the Syrian-Lebanese border. Furthermore, Israel did not know there was a nuclear bomb missing until three days after the Skyhawk was lost over the Golan Heights. But it was not until the day after the Yom Kippur War ended that they were able to reconstruct the details of its loss.
ASpinnaker is Cabot's secure source inside the Kremlin. They exchange info with each other, keeping 'the back channels open in hopes of staving off disaster.' His identity is revealed at the end of the movie.
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