Интересные факты о сердце человека

Проблемы сердца волнуют человечество с незапамятных времен. Только представьте  себе, какое количество песен, поэм, стихов и романов посвящено чувству, зарождающемуся в сердце – любви. Эта статья познакомит вас с органом, без которого человек не сможет жить.

1. От сердца к сердцу.

Обратите внимание на то, как с вами общаются братья наши меньшие. Как собака виляет хвостом, видя хозяина, кошка трется о ноги человека. Не так давно проводились исследования, целью которых было выяснить, какие же животные могут выражать свои эмоции по отношению к людям. Как оказалось, сердце лошади – детектор человеческих эмоций. В то время, когда человек находится в контакте с лошадью, сердце животного отражает человеческие эмоции. Ученые предполагают, что в будущем данное свойство лошадей можно будет использовать для того, чтобы измерять уровень стресса у человека.

2. Мощный насос.

С момента рождения и до конца жизни сердце постоянно перекачивает кровь в каждую клеточку организма. Только представьте: всего за один день  сердце делает примерно 100 000 ударов. При этом оно перегоняет 5 литров крови, снабженную кислородом. Кровь перегоняется по кровеносной системе, а это длина в 60 000 миль.

3. Как «починить» разбитое сердце.

Когда человеку разбивает сердце любимый, оно испытывает такую боль, что хочется вырвать сердце из груди и заменить новым. А еще лучше бы выпить таблетку, которая поспособствует «склеиванию» разбитого сердца. Это может показаться странным, но два эти варианта вполне могут стать возможными. Под изучение ученых попал зеленоватый тритон.  Его организм всесторонне изучают для того, чтобы создать новую клеточную терапию для тех людей, чье сердце разбилось. Почему именно тритон? Да потому, что его организм превращает сердечные ткани в стволовые. Это восстанавливает сердечную мышцу.

4. Большое сердце.

Есть люди, у которых размер сердца больше, чем у остальных. Такая особенность говорит о том, что у человека широкая душа. Как правило, когда сердце увеличивается, это начало проблем в области кардиологии. Увеличение сердечных камер – кардиомиопатия – самая распространенная болезнь.

5. Тост за сердце.

А знали ли вы, что стакан красного вина способствует работе вашего сердца? Ученые проводили исследования, которые показали, что и белое вино полезно не меньше. Раньше утверждалось, что вся польза не в виноградном соке, а в антиоксидантах, которые находятся в  кожуре винограда. Сейчас ученые уверенны, что в мякоти винограда, как белого, так и красного, содержатся кардиозащитные компоненты.

6. Разбитое сердце.

Оказывается, это не просто метафора. Такие события, как смерть близкого человека, особенно разрыв с любимым и дорогим человеком, могут в последствии разбить сердце, в буквальном смысле этого слова – на много повышают риск сердечного приступа.

7. Смейтесь на здоровье.

Когда от смеха идут слезы – это смех от самого сердца. Во время приступа смеха расслабляются внутренние стенки сердечных сосудов. Это повышает скорость кровотока.

8. Женское сердце.

Победа для женщины – разбить мужское сердце. А вот что касается заболеваний, связанных с сердцем, тут победители – именно мужчины. Такое мнение существовало на протяжении многих лет. Но статистика гласит об обратном. Каждый год в Соединенных Штатах Америки от сердечных заболеваний умирает 50 000 мужчин, а женщин – полмиллиона.

9. Сердце – символ любви.

Древние греки были уверенны в том, что в сердце находилось вместилище духа. Египтяне считали, что именно из сердца рождались интеллект и эмоции. Китайцы думали, что сердце – сосредоточие счастья.

Task № 18

The World of Mars

‘‘We have an unknown distance yet to run, an unknown river to explore. What falls there are, we know not; what rocks beset the channel, we know not; what walls ride over the river, we know not. Ah, well! we may conjecture many things.’’  — John Wesley Powell

John Wesley Powell is one of my heroes. One hundred and forty three years ago from the day that our Curiosity rover landed on Mars (Aug. 5, 2012), the one-armed Civil War veteran led nine men in four wooden dories down the untamed and uncharted Colorado River and into the equally untamed and uncharted Grand Canyon.

I have been thinking about Powell a lot lately as there seem to be some un-Earthly parallels between what occurred in the magnificent desolation of the northern Arizona desert so long ago, and what is happening on Mars today. Those multitoned buttes and mesas, and that incandescent sequence of colorful bands that make one of the natural wonders of the world so grand, can also be found over 100 million miles away.

The Powell Geographic Expedition was a turning point in understanding the geologic history not just of the region, or even continent, but our entire planet. With NASA’s Curiosity mission, we have not only redefined what Mars once was, we found it to be more welcoming to life than we knew. We also are roving our way to another potential turning point. And this one looks a lot like the Grand Canyon.

Today, we all know what the Grand Canyon looks like. But 143 years ago Powell and his team had only a vague sense of what lay ahead. Three hundred years before Powell, Spanish conquistadors became the first Europeans to visit the canyon. Three even managed to make it a third of the way down the southern rim before thirst and a sense of self-preservation got the better of them. Others came later and wondered at the majesty of it all, but before 1869 no one with a scientific eye had looked up from its mile-deep floor and asked, “What does this mean?”

Powell was not only one heck of a scientist, he was also a real mensch. During the Battle of Shiloh in the American Civil War, he lost part of his right arm to a rifle ball. A staunch believer in the Union cause, he returned and participated in several more campaigns. He even struck up a friendship with Ulysses S. Grant, the commander of the Union armies.

Ever the rock hound, ‘‘the Major’’ (as he preferred to be called) made a study of the fossils he found in the trenches at the Battle of Vicksburg. After the war, he became a professor of natural sciences at Illinois Wesleyan University, but left the position when the urge to explore the American West overwhelmed him. (A side story, also after the war: Powell befriended a Confederate officer who lost his left arm at Shiloh. From then on, whenever either one purchased a set of gloves, he sent the unneeded glove to the other.)

Of course, lacking part of an arm, the Major did not count white-water rafting and climbing cliff faces as part of his skill set. Even with all his book learning and field work, the man did not have a clue about what he was getting into. But he did have an idea of what he was searching for. He knew it was all conjecture, but Powell had the kind of scientific hunch that comes from years of work in the field. That is why he went.

Shooting the uncharted rapids whenever possible, and portaging their heavy oak and pine boats when it was impossible (which was quite often), the first scientific expedition of the Grand Canyon wound its way through the alcoves, crags and amphitheaters of the canyon in an effort to chart it and document its geologic history.

Powell’s expedition rewrote the textbooks of our planet’s history. Equipped with barometers, chronometers, thermometers, compasses, notebooks and pencils, the Major and his crew began filling in glaring holes in Earth’s historical record. Among their finds was that the thick successions of rock layers that help make the Grand Canyon so awe-inspiring constitute one of the richest geologic archives anywhere in the world. In addition, a radical idea took root in Powell’s mind that the canyon itself was formed as the Colorado River chewed its way slowly, over millions of years, through a vertical mile of rock. Even more improbably, if the river took millennia to dissect a mile-thick pile of rock layers, then how old were the layers themselves?

John Grotzinger is a professor of geology at the California Institute of Technology and the project scientist for the Mars Science Laboratory rover mission.

Task № 19

Nazi Veterans Created Illegal Army

From Der Spiegel

Newly discovered documents show that in the years after World War II, former members of the Nazi Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS formed a secret army to protect the country from the Soviets. The illegal project could have sparked a major scandal at the time.

For nearly six decades, the 321-page file lay unnoticed in the archives of the BND, Germany’s foreign intelligence agency — but now its contents have revealed a new chapter of German postwar history that is as spectacular as it is mysterious.

The previously secret documents reveal the existence of a coalition of approximately 2,000 former officers — veterans of the Nazi-era Wehrmacht and the Waffen-SS — who decided to put together an army in postwar Germany in 1949. They made their preparations without a mandate from the German government, without the knowledge of the parliament and, the documents show, by circumventing Allied occupation forces.

The goal of the retired officers: to defend nascent West Germany against Eastern aggression in the early stages of the Cold War and, on the domestic front, deploy against the Communists in the event of a civil war. It collected information about left-wing politicians like Social Democrat (SPD) Fritz Erler, a key player in reforming the party after World War II, and spied on students like Joachim Peckert, who later became a senior official at the West German Embassy in Moscow during the 1970s.

The new discovery was brought about by a coincidence. Historian Agilolf Kesselring found the documents — which belonged to the Gehlen Organization, the predecessor to the current foreign intelligence agency — while working for an Independent Historical Commission hired by the BND to investigate its early history. Similar commissions have been hired by a number of German authorties in recent years, including the Finance and Foreign Ministries to create an accurate record of once hushed-up legacies.

Kesselring uncovered the documents, which were given the strange title of “Insurances,” while trying to determine the number of workers employed by the BND.

Instead of insurance papers, Kesselring stumbled upon what can now be considered the most significant discovery of the Independent Historical Commission. The study he wrote based on the discovery was released this week.

An Ease in Undermining Democracy

The file is incomplete and thus needs to be considered with some restraint. Even so, its contents testify to the ease with which democratic and constitutional standards could be undermined in the early years of West Germany’s existence.

According to the papers, German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer didn’t find out about the existence of the paramilitary group until 1951, at which point he evidently did not decide to break it up.

In the event of a war, the documents claimed, the secret army would include 40,000 fighters. The involvement of leading figures in Germany’s future armed forces, the Bundeswehr, are an indication of just how serious the undertaking was likely to have been.

Among its most important actors was Albert Schnez. Schnez was born in 1911 and served as a colonel in World War II before ascending the ranks of the Bundeswehr, which was founded in 1955. By the end of the 1950s he was part of the entourage of then Defense Minister Franz Josef Strauss (CDU) and later served the German army chief under Chancellor Willy Brandt and Defense Minister Helmut Schmidt (both of the SPD).

Statements by Schnez quoted in the documents suggest that the project to build a clandestine army was also supported by Hans Speidel — who would become the NATO Supreme Commander of the Allied Army in Central Europe in 1957 — and Adolf Heusinger, the first inspector general of the Bundeswehr.

Kesselring, the historian, has a special connection to military history: His grandfather Albert was a general field marshal and southern supreme commander in the Third Reich, with Schnez as his subordinate “general of transportation” in Italy. Both men tried to prevent Germany’s partial surrender in Italy.

In his study, Kesselring lets Schnez off easily: He doesn’t mention his ties to the right-wing milieu, and he describes his spying on supposed left-wingers as “security checks.” When asked about it, the historian explains that he will deal with these aspects of the file in a comprehensive study in the coming year. But the BND has recently released the “Insurances” files, making it possible to paint an independent picture.

The army project began in the postwar period in Swabia, the region surrounding Stuttgart, where then 40-year-old Schnez traded in wood, textiles and household items and, on the side, organized social evenings for the veterans of the 25th Infantry Division, in which he had served. They helped one another out, supported the widows and orphans of colleagues and spoke about times old and new.

Fears of Attack from the East

But their debates always returned to the same question: What should be done if the Russians or their Eastern European allies invade? West Germany was still without an army at the time, and the Americans had removed many of their GIs from Europe in 1945.

At first, Schnez’ group considered allowing themselves to be defeated and then leading partisan warfare from behind the lines, before relocating somewhere outside of Germany. In the event of a sudden attack from the East, an employee with the Gehlen Organization would later write, Schnez wanted to withdraw his troops and bring them to safety outside of Germany. They would then wage the battle to free Germany from abroad.

To prepare a response to the potential threat, Schnez, the son of a Swabian government official, sought to found an army. Even though it violated Allied law — military or “military-like” organizations were banned, and those who contravened the rules risked life in prison — it quickly became very popular.

The army began to take shape starting at the latest in 1950. Schnez recruited donations from businesspeople and like-minded former officers, contacted veterans groups of other divisions, asked transport companies which vehicles they could provide in the worst-case scenario and worked on an emergency plan.

Anton Grasser, a former infantry general who was then employed by Schnez’ company, took care of the weapons. In 1950, he began his career at the Federal Interior Ministry in Bonn, where he became inspector general and oversaw the coordination of German Police Tactical Units in the German states for the event of war. He wanted to use their assets to equip the troop in case of an emergency. There is no sign that then Interior Minister Robert Lehr had been informed of these plans.

Schnez wanted to found an organization of units composed of former officers, ideally entire staffs of elite divisions of the Wehrmacht, which could be rapidly deployed in case of an attack. According to the lists contained in the documents, the men were all employed: They included businesspeople, sales representatives, a coal merchant, a criminal lawyer, an attorney, a technical instructor and even a mayor. Presumably they were all anti-Communists and, in some cases, motivated by a desire for adventure. For example, the documents state that retired Lieutenant General Hermann Hölter “didn’t feel happy just working in an office.”

Most of the members of the secret reserve lived in southern Germany. An overview in the documents shows that Rudolf von Bünau, a retired infantry general, led a “group staff” out of Stuttgart. There were further sub-units in Ulm (led by retired Lieutenant General Hans Wagner), Heilbronn (retired Lieutenant General Alfred Reinhardt), Karlsruhe (retired Major General Werner Kampfhenkel), Freiburg (retired Major General Wilhelm Nagel) and many other cities as well.

Records Have Disappeared

It remained to be determined where they could relocate to in case of emergency. Schnez negotiated with Swiss locations, but their reactions were “very restrained,” the documents state he later planned a possible move to Spain to use as a base from which to fight on the side of the Americans.

Contemporaries described Schnez as an energetic organizer, but also self-confident and aloof. He maintained contacts with the League of German Youth and its specialized organization, the Technischer Dienst (Technical Service), which were preparing themselves for a partisan war against the Soviets. The two groups, secretly funded by the United States, included former Nazi officers as members, and were both banned by the West German federal government in 1953 as extreme-right organizations. Schnez, it seems, had no qualms whatsoever associating himself with former Nazis.

Schnez also maintained a self-described intelligence apparatus that evaluated candidates for the “Insurance Company,” as he referred to the project, and determined if they had suspicious qualities. A criminal named K. was described as “intelligent, young and half-Jewish.”

US documents viewed by SPIEGEL indicate that Schnez negotiated with former SS Obersturmbannführer Otto Skorzeny. The SS officer became a Nazi hero during World War II after he carried out a successful mission to free deposed Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, who had been arrested by the Italian king. The former SS man had pursued plans similar to those of Schnez. In February 1951, the two agreed to “cooperate immediately in the Swabia region.” It is still unknown today what precisely became of that deal.

In his search for financing for a full-time operation, Schnez requested help from the West German secret service during the summer of 1951. During a July 24, 1951 meeting, Schnez offered the services of his shadow army to Gehlen, the head of the intelligence service, for “military use” or “simply as a potential force,” be it for a German exile government or the Western allies.

A notation in papers from the Gehlen Organization states that there had “long been relations of a friendly nature” between Schnez and Reinhard Gehlen. The documents also indicate that the secret service first became aware of the clandestine force during the spring of 1951. The Gehlen Organization classified Schnez as a “special connection” with the unattractive code name “Schnepfe,” German for “snipe”.

Did Adenauer Shy Away?

It’s likely that Gehlens’ enthusiasm for Schnez’s offer would have been greater if had it come one year earlier, when the Korean War was breaking out. At the time, the West German capital city of Bonn and Washington had considered the idea of “gathering members of former German elite divisions in the event of a catastrophe, arming and then assigning them to Allied defense troops.”

Within a year, the situation had defused somewhat, and Adenauer had retreated from this idea. Instead, he pushed for West Germany to integrate more deeply with the West and for the establishment of the Bundeswehr. Schnez’s illegal group had the potential to threaten that policy — if its existence had become public knowledge, it could have spiraled into an international scandal.

Still, Adenauer decided not to take action against Schnez’s organization — which raises several questions: Was he shying away from a conflict with veterans of the Wehrmacht and the Waffen-SS?

There were misgivings within the Gehlen Organization, particularly surrounding Skorzeny. According to another BND document seen by SPIEGEL, a division head raised the question of whether it was possible for the organization to take an aggressive stance against Skorzeny. The Gehlen Organization man suggested consulting “the SS”, adding, the SS “is a factor and we should sound out opinions in detail there before making a decision.” Apparently networks of old and former Nazis still exercised considerable influence during the 1950s.

It also became clear in 1951 that years would pass before the Bundeswehr could be established. From Adenauer’s perspective, this meant that, for the time being, the loyalty of Schnez and his comrades should be secured for the event of a worst-case scenario. That’s probably why Gehlen was assigned by the Chancellery “to look after and to monitor the group.”

It appears Konrad Adenauer informed both his American allies as well as the political opposition of the plan at the time. The papers seem to indicate that Carlo Schmid, at the time a member of the SPD’s national executive committee, was “in the loop.”

Little Known about Disbanding of Army

From that point on, Gehlen’s staff had frequent contact with Shnez. Gehlen and Schnez also reached an agreement to share intelligence derived from spying efforts. Schnez boasted of having a “particularly well-organized” intelligence apparatus.

From that point on, the Gehlen Organization became the recipient of alert lists including the names of former German soldiers who had allegedly behaved in an “undignified” manner as Soviet prisoners of war, the insinuation being that the men had defected to support the Soviet Union. In other instances, they reported “people suspected of being communists in the Stuttgart area.”

But Schnez never got showered with the money he had hoped for. Gehlen only allowed him to receive small sums, which dried up during the autumn of 1953. Two years later, the Bundeswehr swore in its first 101 volunteers. With the rearmament of West Germany, Schnez’s force became redundant.

It is currently unknown exactly when the secret army disbanded, as no fuss was made at the time. Schnez died in 2007 without ever stating anything publicly about these events. His records on the “Insurance Company” have disappeared. What is known stems largely from documents relating to the Gehlen Organization that made their way into the classified archive of its successor, the BND.

It appears they were deliberately filed there under the misleading title “insurances” in the hope that no one would ever find any reason to take interest in them.

Task 20

How Six Day war almost led to Armageddon

New evidence of 1967 Soviet plan to invade Israel shows how close the world came to nuclear conflict  Israel and the Middle East: special report

The morning of June 10 1967 was "a time of great concern and utmost gravity" in the White House Situation Room, according to Llewellyn Thompson, a former ambassador to the USSR turned presidential adviser. A message had just been received over the Moscow-Washington hotline threatening Soviet military action that would lead to a nuclear confrontation. New evidence now reveals what action the Soviets were preparing: a naval landing on Israel's shores to prevent its total victory in the Six Day War.

The Soviet Union had played a central role in escalating tension in the Middle East and had falsely accused Israel of massing forces on the Syrian border. For the first time, Moscow sent much of its Black Sea fleet into the Mediterranean and backed up the Egyptian president, Gamal Abdel Nasser, when he blocked Israeli shipping in the Red Sea and demanded the removal of the United Nations force from Sinai.

In memoirs published recently, Nikita Khrushchev said the USSR's military command persuaded its political leadership to support these steps, knowing they were aimed at starting a war to destroy Israel.

On June 5, after Israel launched a pre-emptive strike against its Arab neighbours, the Soviet prime minister, Alexei Kosygin, had activated the hotline to Washington for the first time since it was installed following the Cuban missile crisis of 1962.

"I went into my office every morning at seven o'clock," said the then secretary of defence, Robert S. McNamara. "At 7.15 the telephone rang. 'Mr Secretary, this is General Smith in the War Room. Kosygin is on the hotline and wants to talk to [President Lyndon] Johnson...what should I tell him?' I said: 'Why the hell do you ask me?' He said: 'The hot line ends at the Pentagon.' It wasn't even a telephone line then but a teletype, and I didn't even know it ended there."

Mr McNamara called the sergeant standing guard outside Lyndon Johnson's door and ordered him to wake the president. Within fifteen minutes they and the secretary of state, Dean Rusk, had begun what became a nearly continuous conference in the Situation Room.

On June 10, according to Kosygin, Israeli forces were heading for the Syrian capital, Damascus. The US no longer had a manned embassy in Damascus and - incredibly - had no independent assessment of the Israeli offensive on the Golan Heights. The director of the CIA, Richard Helms, was called in, but the best he could do was to try and reach "friendly powers" which still had missions in Syria.

'A grave catastrophe'

Kosygin's message went on: "A very crucial moment has now arrived which forces us, if military actions are not stopped in the next few hours, to adopt an independent decision. We are ready to do this. However, these actions may bring us into a clash which will lead to a grave catastrophe ... we purpose [sic] that you demand from Israel that it unconditionally cease military action... we purpose to warn Israel that if this is not fulfilled, necessary actions will be taken, including military."

Mr McNamara recalled: "In effect it said: Mr President, if you want war, you'll get war."

The presidential adviser McGeorge Bundy later remembered that there had been "considerable discussion about what in fact the Soviets would be able to do to the Israelis if they did try to carry out their threat. The Russians' possibilities were really not that impressive."

But now a first hand account from one of the Soviet officers involved reveals that the Soviets were nonetheless poised to invade Israel.

In June 1967, Yuri Khripunkov was a young gunnery lieutenant on board a BPK (large anti-submarine ship) of the Soviet navy, part of a large reinforcement for the Mediterranean flotilla which had arrived from the Black Sea base of Sevastopol in early May.

In an interview, Mr Khripunkov, now 59 and a respected writer and educator, said that when Arab-Israeli hostilities broke out, his captain ordered him to raise and command a 30-man detachment of "volunteers" for a landing on the Israeli coast.

Similar parties were being assembled on all the 30-odd Soviet vessels in the Mediterranean: a total of some 1,000 men. "There was also one BDK with about 40 tanks and maybe a battalion of infantry," Mr Khripunkov said. His platoon was ordered to penetrate Haifa - Israel's main commercial harbour and naval base.

Only one of the ship's sailors refused to "volunteer". He was later transferred off the ship but not otherwise punished. Mr Khripunkov himself had no hesitations - "I was young and foolish," he said - even though the seamen were neither trained nor equipped for a commando raid on land.

"What were we supposed to accomplish, with my pistol and the sailors' AK47s? 'Get in there and see,' they told us. 'Wipe out the enemy forces'."

"It was a different world then. I had a holy faith in it all - the red flag, my officer's oath. We were going on a sacred mission, the [Israeli] aggressors had assaulted these poor Arabs and we were going to let them have it. Today I'm wiser and I probably wouldn't do it."

Mr Khripunkov's account confirms how near the Soviets came to implementation of a "contingency plan". An officer of the GRU (Soviet military intelligence) later told a senior American analyst that the defence minister, Andrei Grechko, and his team wanted to "provide the progressive Arabs with a unique and historic achievement - the destruction of Israel" for which "they would remain eternally beholden to Moscow". Though the Soviets were confident of the Arabs' capability to defeat Israel, the contingency plan was prepared.

While the landing force would probably have been overcome by Israel, it might have caused substantial casualties - and might have halted the Israeli advance. But as Mr Khripunkov points out, the gamble was much larger: globalising the conflict.

"There would have been no Israel left if we had landed. I've studied 'special weapons', and even without a hydrogen bomb, 10-15 warheads would have been enough," he said.

Mr Khripunkov and his men were well aware they were little but pawns in a global power play. "A thousand men was nothing for the USSR," he said.

"They started counting at 5m. Each side wanted to demonstrate its dominant role _ The US sends in the [Sixth] Fleet. We bring in our Black Sea squadron. They send in spy planes. We start preparing a landing in Israel. The Israeli tanks move through Sinai and are ready to skip over the Suez Canal. What then? We land our force and world war three begins? We knew it was going to happen, that the whole world would be destroyed."

This was the "grave catastrophe" threatened by Kosygin.

A member of the Israeli general staff at the time recalls hearing that a Soviet landing "had been discussed as a theoretic possibility at cabinet sessions", but there is no evidence that Israel or the US knew the particulars of the impending operation.

Mr McNamara dismissed the suggestion that, ironically, Israel itself may have prevented an early warning of this threat when its warplanes attacked and disabled the American intelligence ship Liberty in the Mediterranean on June 8, thus probably crippling US capability to eavesdrop on Soviet ships in the region.

But the ships never landed and Moscow's failure to intervene caused the Soviets considerable trouble with their other proteges, particularly Cuba.

Immediately after the Six Day War, Kosygin hastened to Havana to placate Fidel Castro's anxieties and, according to the CIA cable, "informed Castro that the USSR had been prepared to aid the UAR [United Arab Republic, Egypt's official name] in the struggle against Israel but Field Marshal Amir [Abdel-Hakim Amer], chief of the UAR armed forces, told the USSR that the UAR intended to stop fighting within several days."

Fear of domination

However, the CIA later reported that Amer and a powerful faction in the Cairo leadership had wanted to prevent total Soviet domination of Egypt.

The Soviets made their threat over the hotline only when Syria too appeared to be on the verge of defeat. Thompson was "impressed how much greater Soviet sensibility there was to the plight of the Syrians than to that of the Egyptians. At the time, the Syrians were the apple of the Russians' eye".

After Kosygin's menacing message was received, the US under-secretary of state, Nicholas Katzenbach, was dispatched from the Situation Room to "call in the Israeli ambassador and put pressure on the Israelis to accept a ceasefire". The Israelis, presumably informed of the Soviet threat, did - after completing their conquest of the Golan.

The main taskforce of the Sixth Fleet had been circling in the central Mediterranean. On June 6, Johnson had remonstrated to Kosygin because the Soviet media was repeating Nasser's "invented charge that US carrier aircraft had participated in attacks on Egypt ... you know where our carriers are".

When the "auxiliary ship" Liberty was attacked, Johnson told Kosygin that the USS Saratoga was ordered "to dispatch aircraft to investigate". So on June 10, said Mr McNamara, the fleet "was steaming west, toward Gibraltar, on a training exercise". Now, following Kosygin's threat, it was sent into the fray.

"President Johnson and I," said Mr McNamara, "decided to turn the fleet around and send it back toward Israel, not to join with Israel in an attack on Syria - not at all - but to be close enough to Israel so, if the Soviets supported a Syrian attack on Israel, we could come to Israel's defence with the fleet, prevent Israel from being annihilated."

The story, as filtered down to Mr Khripunkov's crew, was that "Brezhnev [Leonid, then first secretary of the Communist party] and the president got on the phones and realised that half an hour after we landed the world would be in ruins. And that was that."

His ship, which had at last been ordered to head for the Israeli coast, turned back and the landing was aborted. That day, Moscow severed diplomatic ties with Israel.

The landing plan remained a potentiality and appears gradually to have become known to the US and Israel. In February 1968, a CIA cable spoke of "the first information received regarding Soviet plans to participate in a limited Arab offensive against Israel ... the Soviets will actively aid the Arabs in gaining back the territory lost in the June 1967 war."

However, the document, recently declassified in a heavily censored form, states: "The Soviets made it very clear that Israel is here to stay and they will not ... facilitate its destruction".

• Isabella Ginor is an Israeli journalist specialising in the former USSR who arrived in Israel from Russia a few months before the events described in this story.

“Greater Israel”: The Zionist Plan for the Middle East

The Infamous "Oded Yinon Plan". Introduction by Michel Chossudovsky

Global Research Editor’s Note

The following document pertaining to the formation of “Greater Israel” constitutes the cornerstone of powerful Zionist factions within the current Netanyahu government (which has recently been re-elected), the Likud party, as well as within the Israeli military and intelligence establishment.  The election was fought by Netanyahu on a political platform which denies Palestinian statehood.  

According to the founding father of Zionism Theodore Herzl, “the area of the Jewish State stretches: “From the Brook of Egypt to the Euphrates.”  According to Rabbi Fischmann,  “The Promised Land extends from the River of Egypt up to the Euphrates, it includes parts of Syria and Lebanon.”

When viewed in the current context, the war on Iraq, the 2006 war on Lebanon, the 2011 war on Libya, the ongoing war on Syria and Iraq, the war in Yemen, the process of regime change in Egypt, must be understood in relation to the Zionist Plan for the Middle East. The latter consists in weakening and eventually fracturing neighboring Arab states as part of an Israeli expansionist project.

“Greater Israel” consists in an area extending from the Nile Valley to the Euphrates.

The Zionist project supports the Jewish settlement movement. More broadly it involves a policy of excluding Palestinians from Palestine leading to the eventual annexation of both the West Bank and Gaza to the State of Israel.

Greater Israel would create a number of proxy States. It would include parts of Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, the Sinai, as well as parts of  Iraq and Saudi Arabia. (See map).

According to Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya in a 2011 Global Research article,   The Yinon Plan was a continuation of Britain’s colonial design in the Middle East:

“[The Yinon plan] is an Israeli strategic plan to ensure Israeli regional superiority. It insists and stipulates that Israel must reconfigure its geo-political environment through the balkanization of the surrounding Arab states into smaller and weaker states.

Israeli strategists viewed Iraq as their biggest strategic challenge from an Arab state. This is why Iraq was outlined as the centerpiece to the balkanization of the Middle East and the Arab World. In Iraq, on the basis of the concepts of the Yinon Plan, Israeli strategists have called for the division of Iraq into a Kurdish state and two Arab states, one for Shiite Muslims and the other for Sunni Muslims. The first step towards establishing this was a war between Iraq and Iran, which the Yinon Plan discusses.

The Atlantic, in 2008, and the U.S. military’s Armed Forces Journal, in 2006, both published widely circulated maps that closely followed the outline of the Yinon Plan. Aside from a divided Iraq, which the Biden Plan also calls for, the Yinon Plan calls for a divided Lebanon, Egypt, and Syria. The partitioning of Iran, Turkey, Somalia, and Pakistan also all fall into line with these views. The Yinon Plan also calls for dissolution in North Africa and forecasts it as starting from Egypt and then spilling over into Sudan, Libya, and the rest of the region.

Greater Israel” requires the breaking up of the existing Arab states into small states.

“The plan operates on two essential premises. To survive, Israel must 1) become an imperial regional power, and 2) must effect the division of the whole area into small states by the dissolution of all existing Arab states. Small here will depend on the ethnic or sectarian composition of each state. Consequently, the Zionist hope is that sectarian-based states become Israel’s satellites and, ironically, its source of moral legitimation…  This is not a new idea, nor does it surface for the first time in Zionist strategic thinking. Indeed, fragmenting all Arab states into smaller units has been a recurrent theme.” (Yinon Plan, see below)

Viewed in this context, the war on Syria and Iraq is part of the process of Israeli territorial expansion. Israeli intelligence working hand in glove with the US, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and NATO is directly supportive of the crusade directed against the so-called Islamic State (ISIS), which ultimately seeks to destroy both Syria and Iraq as nation states. 

Michel Chossudovsky, Global Research, September 06, 2015