How long until governments with access to required backdoors just start openly blackmailing citizens of “hostile” countries?
Without a doubt it’s already happening. Resist all back doors.
Almost certainly the USA used that equipment and grabbed those transcripts to give to close ally Saudi Arabia, who used them to turn states against Qatar.
The first world war was caused by the killing of a duke, the third world war will be caused by a clumsily worded text message from a president to his wife, misinterpreted by another powerful nation state.
Unfortunately I'm not sure that our politicians self-preservation instincts, strong as they may be, trump their egos (sorry for the pun.)
As soon as you launch that many weapons, and kill such a high percentage of people, you eliminate the possibility of manufacturing new weapons, so the war would be instantly over.
And I believe that despite others simulations to the contrary, there will be small groups of people who will stay underground for years, surviving on tinned etc. food. After 5-10 years, radiation levels will still very high, but most dust will have settled, and the skies clear enough to start to grow crops and rebuild.
Humans, as well as many other creatures, will become more radiation hardened over generations, and given the bountiful supplies of tech and resources left over from our civilization, will be able to quickly repopulate the world.
I said civilization would collapse in a dire nuclear war scenario, which is not the same thing. Advanced civilization itself may actually be quite fragile - we see glimmers of that fragility now and again when government / order / utilities break down for prolonged periods.
https://www".dailymotion.com/video/x4e30ki
The punchline is at 29minutes
Not that the intercept abilities in Alcatel/Lucent/Nokia/Ericsson equipment is much less robust, it's just not as commonly used in these environments.
Here's a really old but reasonably well documented instance of the same type of event:
https://spectrum.ieee.org/telecom/security/the-athens-affair
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_wiretapping_case_2004%E2...
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/06/greek_wiretap...
In the case originally referenced, I would be totally unsurprised that some other nation-state has inserted an advanced persistent threat into the SMS core infrastructure of Qatar's telecoms. One of the reasons why proper end to end crypto (Signal, etc) is so important. At least if you can be reasonably assured of the security and OS of the endpoint devices, you don't have to trust the network in between them.