leaders referring to B-52 sorties as "nuclear strikes", by the increased use of encrypted diplomatic channels between the US and UK, and by the nuclear attack false alarm in September. In response, Soviet nuclear capable aircraft were fueled and armed ready to launch on the runway, and ICBMs were brought up to alert. Soviet leaders believed the exercise was a ruse to cover NATO preparations for a nuclear first strike and frantically sent a telegram to its residencies seeking information on NATO preparations for an attack. The exercise closely aligned with Soviet timeline estimations that a NATO first strike would take 7 to 10 days to execute from the political decision being made. Soviet forces stood down after 11 November when the exercise ended and NATO was not aware of the complete Soviet response until British intelligence asset Oleg Gordievsky passed on the information. 1990s 1991 During the Persian Gulf War, Ba'athist Iraq launched Scud missiles at Saudi Arabia and Israel and possessed a large cache of weapons of mass destruction. This, along with Saddam Hussein's previous threat to "burn half of Israel" with chemical weapons, led to fears that Saddam Hussein would order the use of the chemical weapons against the U.S.-led coalition or against Israel (see Iraq–Israel relations#Until the 2003 Iraq War). Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir and Israeli Air Force Commander-in-Chief Avihu Ben-Nun both warned that an Iraqi chemical attack would trigger "massive retaliation", implying that Israel would retaliate with nuclear weapons. At the same time U.S. Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney, General Norman Schwarzkopf Jr., and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher all emphasized that the use of WMD against Coalition forces would lead to a nuclear attack on Iraq. U.S. Secretary of State James Baker directly warned his counterpart Tariq Aziz that the United States had "the means to exact vengeance" in the event of an Iraqi resort to WMD. After the war, the Defense Intelligence Agency credited these threats with deterring Iraq from launching chemical attacks on Coalition forces. Nevertheless, Saddam Hussein did have a contingency plan to launch WMD-armed warheads at Tel Aviv in the event that he became cut off from the Iraqi Armed Forces leadership or if the Iraqi government was about to collapse, which almost certainly would have triggered a retaliatory nuclear response from Israel. Saddam ultimately never deemed this option necessary because he never felt as if his government was