The Lord of Silence

1200 kilometers into and then … back out of an avowed enemy’s territory. A nuclear facility that could explode into a nuclear holocaust upon its destruction. Why even attempt such a mission?

By 1979, Saddam Hussein was in the throes of developing a nuclear bomb at a plant called Osiraq, 12 kilometers south of Baghdad. With this bomb Saddam vowed to destroy Israel. The world stood deaf to Israel’s pleas. Israel’s major allies believed Saddam’s nuclear ambitions peaceful, or they simply supported Saddam as a counter-power to Iranian aggression, a chess-piece on a larger game-board. Annihilation, however, presents itself much larger than global politics.

In The Lord of Silence, a thrilling espionage and adventure novel, focused as much on the people involved in such danger as on human history—taking global politics as much as the state of Israel and her leaders for plot and intrigue and unfolding the ins and outs of nuclear terror—Martin Nakell manages to steady his story-telling hand in a patient examination of the events of a true-life Nuclear Showdown. Mission Impossible, 24 … yet, unlike the over-technological fantasies projected by uber-patriotic narration, The Lord of Silence focuses on and explores the American genius and ingenuity of new weapons and military preparation that aided Israel.

With risky intelligence gathering inside the very heart of Saddam’s Iraq, with diplomatic and military strategy sessions in Jerusalem, with intensive training in the United States, at great personal sacrifice, dedication, and above all courage, Israel carried out one of the world’s great acts of detonation. Purpose, urgency, and an inescapable necessity for action changed the world. Now, it reminds us of the legacy of such fortitude in the face of even newer nuclear challenges—Iran, for one. In reality, the story of The Lord of Silence is not over.